Lisa Reich studied hard to become a forensic accountant. She worked in the field for eight years, and enjoyed interacting with her clients. But the divorce cases she often dealt with were becoming depressing.
Related Articles
$600M renovation nears completion at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
The Kahlo family opens the doors of their house, inviting visitors to Frida’s beloved basement
Colorado’s best mountain towns for live music fans
These historic San Francisco Bay area sites offer a reset for mind and body
Visit a national park for free on Saturday, Sept. 27
One day, she wandered into a local travel agency looking to book a trip and got chatting — they offered her a role as an independent contractor that day.
“I’m working half the hours and making quadruple my salary,” said Reich, 42, who started her own agency in 2021 and said her annual sales have been around $3 million to $3.5 million for the past three years.
“When I was moving fields, my mother said to me ‘You’ve got a master’s in accounting, what am I going to tell the family?’” said Reich. “She’s eating her words now.”
Reich is one of a growing number of professionals who’ve left the security of jobs in finance, law and other white-collar industries to join the rapidly swelling ranks of travel advisers — a line of work that once seemed destined to disappear as travel planning moved online.
Over the past three years, the number of people describing themselves as travel agents or advisers on LinkedIn increased by more than 50%, making it the fifth-fastest growing profession over that time.
For now, the demand is there, too. Travel booked through advisers — which includes accommodation, flights and activities — is expected to hit $141.3 billion next year in the U.S., equal to 26% of the total market, the American Society of Travel Advisors estimates.
“Curation and support are the main selling points,” that distinguish in-person advice from online services or AI booking options, said Eric Hrubant, founder of New York City-based CIRE Travel, in an interview. Hrubant, 48, said he gets about three emails each week from people asking what it’s like to be a travel agent, and whether there are entry-level jobs available at CIRE.
“I’m thinking about developing my own coaching business,” he joked.
Hrubant said some of his ultra-high net worth clients easily spend in excess of six figures on personal travel annually, while the average couple he books for spends around $40,000 per year on two weeklong vacations.
For Amira Bixby, 58, the catalyst for switching careers came during the pandemic. After almost three decades on Wall Street as an equity sales trader, Bixby realized while working from home that it was the first time in years that she’d been in the house when her children woke up. When her employer called everyone back into the office five days a week, she knew it was time to make a change.
Travel was an obvious choice. “I was a luxury travel adviser before I was a luxury travel adviser,” said Bixby, who said she would regularly help friends and clients plan trips, and organized for her daughter’s travel lacrosse team to stay at a Four Seasons hotel each season.
She values her newfound flexibility above everything else.
“When you can work from anywhere your life changes drastically for the better,” she said. “My son just graduated from UVA and you can imagine all the parties. I was in UVA four out of six weekends. Before that, I was skiing in the Dolomites,” the mountain range in Italy.
Almost anyone can set themselves up as a travel adviser, though some U.S. states do require agents to register and apply for accreditation. Many new agents will take online courses to boost their credentials, and can join established travel networks to get access to insider deals at top hotels, airlines and tour operators.
While some agents charge a fee, the majority of their earnings come through commissions from hotels or tour operators on services booked for customers. Commissions can fluctuate depending on the service, but for some of the biggest brands advisers usually get around 10% of the value of the booking.
The amount that vacationers spend with travel agents also varies widely by agency. A survey of ASTA advisers from 2024 found that the biggest proportion of clients spent between $100 and $400 per person, per night with their travel planners. At those rates, a weeklong trip for a couple would range from $1,400 to $5,600.
Lisa Tucker, a law professor in Philadelphia, started working with a travel agent about a year ago to plan vacations for her and her four children. In April, a getaway to Rome was disrupted by an overzealous party in the boutique hotel where they were staying, and the front desk insisted no other rooms were available. Then her travel agent intervened.
“He made one phone call and suddenly they moved us into the presidential suite,” Tucker, 57, said.
Not everyone who makes the switch to a career in travel planning increases their earnings — at least not at first. Julia Flood, a former litigation lawyer in Toronto, knew she’d be making less when she stepped away from her job to become a travel agent. The flexibility and freedom she gained from the switch were worth it.
“I don’t necessarily work fewer hours,” Flood, 34, said. “I do what I want and where I want — I might be booking someone’s trip while I’m sitting in a café in the South of France.”
Booming growth across the travel industry means that companies like Expedia Group Inc. and Booking Holdings Inc., which are integrating artificial intelligence into their online booking services, have avoided any notable financial impact from the revival in travel advisers. This year, travel is forecast to contribute $11.7 trillion to the global economy, accounting for 10.3% of total output, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. By the end of the decade, that figure is expected to climb to $16.5 trillion.
At the same time, new agencies are making the most of the resurgent interest in travel careers. Fora Travel Inc. was founded in 2021 to give wannabe travel advisers easy access to training and technology, as well as a network of mentors and events. In April it announced it had raised $60 million in a Series B and C fundraising, led by Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital and Insight Partners.
Co-founder Henley Vazquez said about 97% of the company’s agents are new to the travel industry, and 86% are women — many of them parents who appreciate the flexibility of the job. For some recent entrants, it doesn’t take long to start making decent money.
“In the past three years, we’ve had 35 advisers who have hit $1 million in sales in their first year joining,” Vazquez said in an interview.
Flood was introduced to Vazquez through a mutual friend in 2021. At the time, she was still working as a lawyer but feeling increasingly disillusioned with her job. She knew she wanted to do something linked to travel, and Vazquez was just getting Fora off the ground. What did she have to lose, her new friend asked.
“I didn’t have a mortgage, I didn’t have children, I don’t have any of those things that affect your thought process when making a big financial decision,” Flood said. “So it was a great time in my life to make that transition and to make the leap and, of course, I’ve never looked back.”
For Bixby, coming from a business background — especially one involving close client relationships and money management in New York’s lucrative finance industry — has been a boon. The first three trips she planned were for a former coworker, a mutual fund client and a close friend. Recently, a hedge fund manager she’d worked with called her up to help him plan a vacation.
“They know I will protect their investment, and it’s not just money, it’s time,” she said.
The 29-year-old finished work in Plymouth and drove about 30 miles south to Lakeville, closer to his home in Scott County. He looped around to Burnsville and Eagan, before getting on Interstate 35E north and making his way to Shepard Road along the Mississippi River in St. Paul and then to Lowertown.
Carrie Shobe Kwok (Courtesy of Julie Shobe)
Surveillance video of the Sept. 25, 2024, killing of Carrie Shobe Kwok, 66, showed no confrontation or attempted robbery, police say. Other people were in the area, and it was still light out.
Police closed the case in December. They said they’d followed the evidence and it all pointed to Murdock, with no one else being involved.
Why Murdock did it and why he went to St. Paul will likely never be known. Just over 13 hours after the killing, as police tried to arrest Murdock, officers reported he raised a gun and they fatally shot him.
In a search for answers, the Pioneer Press reviewed hundreds of pages of law enforcement reports and interviewed investigators and people who knew Kwok and Murdock. They revealed more details of Murdock’s comings and goings before and after the homicide and how police quickly identified him.
Court filings in 2023 civil commitment proceedings say Murdock had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. When he was admitted to the hospital then, he reported experiencing paranoia and hallucinations, a court document said.
His mental health condition is the only reason that police can find for a potential explanation.
“We found zero link to the victim, why she was chosen, why he ended up in downtown St. Paul,” said St. Paul Police Senior Cmdr. Wes Denning, who’s in charge of the homicide unit.
“None of it made sense,” said Sgt. Natalie Davis, lead investigator on the case with Sgt. Jeff Thissen.
“The randomness of it was super sad,” Thissen added. It was also unusual because most homicides are carried out by someone the victim knows.
Murdock’s mother, April Murdock, doesn’t believe he did it.
“My son wasn’t a killer,” she said recently. “My son wasn’t like that. He had mental problems, but he would never kill anyone.”
Kwok moved into the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative earlier in 2024. She worked with vintage clothing, textile art and handmade jewelry and enjoyed sewing, home design and remodeling.
“I think about her every day and miss her every day,” her sister, Julie Shobe, said recently.
She was a mother of two and a grandmother, and the glue who brought everyone together for family gatherings and holidays, Shobe said.
In one of son Bill Kwok’s last conversations with his mom, he complained he was thanklessly working toward the goals and happiness of everyone else and not his own.
“With a smile and a twinkling eye, she responded, ‘That’s what life is all about,’” Carrie Kwok’s grandson read from his father’s eulogy at her celebration of life last October.
“She was a patient and loving ear and a best friend to many, always ready to put her own projects aside and roll up her sleeves to get yours done,” according to Bill Kwok. “A lifelong artist, her life itself was an expression of this belief.”
Friend Pam Tucker remembered Carrie Kwok’s faith as “core and unconditional.”
Rosemary Williams and Kwok both went to Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis and later connected through a moms’ group and Bible study at their church.
“She was shabby chic before shabby chic was a thing,” Williams said.
She loved to restyle every home she lived in. She’d make cabinets and whittle holes for the knobs. She had an eye for fabrics and became a collector of rare and beautiful textiles.
Kwok had been working on vintage tablecloth shirts and wooden bead earrings, getting ready for the St. Paul Art Crawl.
Shooting at 5:16 p.m.
A small plaque adorns a mural that Carrie Kwok was painting in the alley behind the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative in St. Paul. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
Also in preparation for Art Crawl, the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative was creating a public art piece in the building’s surface parking lot. Co-op members were painting it.
The co-op’s front door opens to an alley behind Kellogg Boulevard between Wacouta and Wall streets.
Surveillance footage showed the suspect parked on Sept. 25, 2024, at 5:15 p.m. He walked past Kwok. She looked in that direction, then back to her mural and continued painting.
He walked toward Kwok, reached into his front sweatshirt pocket, turned to Kwok and fired one shot and then multiple shots. It was 5:16 p.m., 24 seconds from when he’d first walked past her, according to timestamps from a video.
“It doesn’t appear there was any exchange between them whatsoever,” Denning said.
The man ran back to his vehicle and drove away, 24 seconds after the shooting.
People who lived in Kwok’s building were parking in the lot at the same time. They reported hearing shots and at least one ducked down for safety. They and other people rushed to try to help Kwok.
A man who lived nearby took off his shirt and held it on a gunshot wound on the back of Kwok’s head. Bystanders began chest compressions on Kwok. Officers and St. Paul Fire Department paramedics took over CPR, but Kwok could not be revived.
16 minutes after shooting, heading to church
Police and K-9s took up the search. Quickly, officers began pulling surveillance video from the area and saw the suspect had left in a silver Chevrolet Malibu. They identified the license plate, police reports say, and determined the car was registered to Seantrell Murdock, who lived about 45 minutes southwest in Belle Plaine.
Seantrell Tyreese Murdock is seen in a 2019 mugshot. (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)
Police viewed more videos and saw the Chevrolet was heading toward Minneapolis. The car had been westbound on Ford Parkway in St. Paul, going toward the Ford Bridge, at 5:32 p.m., a law enforcement database with information about the locations of license plates showed.
A Minneapolis officer informed a St. Paul sergeant that another automated license plate reader spotted the Chevrolet on 36th Street near Chicago Avenue 10 minutes before they talked. The officer checked, but the car was gone.
The area is where Murdock went to church. Richard Lee, a minister at Worldwide Outreach for Christ, said Murdock stopped in and they talked “for a little bit.”
Murdock was pacing and Lee asked him, “Is everything OK?”
“He just seemed like he wasn’t himself,” said Lee, who’d met him at the church about a year earlier.
Lee asked Murdock how his family was and Murdock then “looked like he snapped back into reality,” the minister said.
After Murdock left, Lee called him to check if he was alright. Murdock told Lee he probably needed to get on medication, and Lee said he was there to talk whenever he needed.
The next day, when Lee found out that Murdock had been shot by police and was suspected in the St. Paul homicide, he was shocked.
“He was really trying to give his life over to Christ,” Lee said. “He was fighting on the inside, demons or whatever he was fighting, but he just wanted help.”
1 hour and 20 minutes after shooting, in hometown
Meanwhile, St. Paul police were told that a license plate reader in Belle Plaine had picked up the car there.
At 6:36 p.m., Murdock went into the Coborn’s Liquor in Belle Plaine and walked out with a $16 bottle of vodka, an employee later told police. He said he was familiar with Murdock from previous purchases, figured he forgot to pay and planned to bring it up when he saw him next.
Officers researching Murdock found records of his civil commitment proceedings, filed in Scott County District Court in 2023. When he was admitted to the hospital in January 2023, he reported “experiencing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations,” a court document said.
Related Articles
Former Customs officer from Minnetonka pleads guilty to possessing child pornography
Maplewood man arrested in fatal hit-and-run
Inver Grove Heights man gets 20 years for ‘coercing and manipulating’ girls to send nude photos
Judge finds Current DJ’s stalker violated restraining order but not guilty due to mental illness
New Richmond, Wis., man dies in crash in Oak Park Heights
A St. Paul officer wrote in a report: “Based upon this information and the apparent random nature of the crime, we believe Murdock may have been in a mental health crisis and experiencing a psychotic episode. … We were attempting efforts to quickly locate him.”
Police identified Murdock’s cellphone number and obtained information that showed where his phone pinged off cellphone towers. That’s how they tracked his phone’s path from Belle Plaine that morning to his work in Plymouth until 3:20 p.m. and then into Dakota County before pinging in downtown St. Paul at the time of the homicide.
Also, a search at the scene turned up yellow markings, possibly footprints, in the alley. Surveillance footage showed Kwok had been using yellow paint and it seemed the suspect stepped onto the colored walkway. Law enforcement later saw Murdock’s shoes appeared to have paint on the bottom.
Officers head to Belle Plaine
That evening, St. Paul police began heading to Belle Plaine. They set up surveillance around Murdock’s residence and developed plans for various scenarios.
“It was decided to not make contact with Murdock at the listed address due to his recent violent acts and possibility of being armed,” a Belle Plaine officer wrote in a report.
A regional SWAT team would not serve a warrant that evening due to children being in the home, but would in the morning when the kids left for school, a Belle Plaine sergeant wrote.
Seantrell Murdock seemed his normal self that night, April Murdock said. He and his family were cooking and listening to music.
April Murdock left for work about 6:15 a.m. on Sept. 26, 2024, and saw two vehicles in the area.
She called Seantrell Murdock, who was due to head to work soon, and told him a vehicle they’d seen outside the home the previous night was still there and she didn’t know why.
13 hours after shooting, a confrontation
Police on Oct. 1, 2024, released body worn camera footage showing the fatal shooting by St. Paul officers of homicide suspect Seantrell Tyreese Murdock in Belle Plaine on Sept. 26, 2024. (Courtesy of the St. Paul Police Department)
When Seantrell Murdock walked out of the home, two arrest teams pulled up in unmarked vehicles and activated their emergency lights at 6:42 a.m., body camera footage shows. The officers were wearing shirts that identified them as police.
Murdock pulled a handgun and began lifting it up as he walked toward St. Paul officer Aaron Bohlen, and the officer feared Murdock was going to shoot him and his partners, Bohlen wrote in a statement to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
Murdock said loudly, “Do it!” Bohlen added.
Bohlen said he fired three to four times and officer Lance Christianson reported he shot once. Murdock fell to the ground and Bohlen said he saw the handgun fall from his hand. It was still within reach of Murdock, and Christianson kicked the gun away.
A Belle Plaine sergeant radioed for an ambulance and an air ambulance helicopter.
Officers cleared in shooting
An autopsy found Murdock had a gunshot wound to the right chest, the back and the right arm. A BCA agent wrote that toxicology showed Murdock had alcohol and THC, which is in cannabis or marijuana, in his system. The amounts are not publicly known because the toxicology report was redacted.
Murdock’s DNA was found on the gun that police say he had in Belle Plaine. Testing ruled it out as the gun used in the homicide in St. Paul, Denning said. Officials have not found the gun used in the shooting.
The gun did not have a serial number, according to a report in the BCA file. Murdock was banned from possessing guns because of a 2013 felony burglary conviction.
Scott County Attorney Ron Hocevar announced in February that he determined the officers’ use of force was “necessary to protect these officers from death or great bodily harm” and they acted within the law.
April Murdock said she doesn’t believe the police statements that Seantrell Murdock was holding a gun. Body camera footage shows a handgun on the ground immediately after Murdock was shot; the view of what happened between him and the officers is not visible on video.
As for Seantrell Murdock’s innocence or guilt, “he can’t even speak for himself now,” his mother said.
Needed medication, mom says
Seantrell Murdock graduated from Shakopee High School. He had four children and was always “a provider for his kids,” his mother said in an interview with the Pioneer Press. He’d moved to Belle Plaine about nine years earlier because he wanted a safe place to raise his children.
They were living in a rental home, with April Murdock and her husband on one floor, and Seantrell Murdock on the other.
At the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, Seantrell Murdock tried LSD, April Murdock told the BCA. “People say that it opens you up for demons, I guess?” she said. “… That medicine just made him go overboard.”
Seantrell Murdock asked his mom to take him to the hospital in January 2023, telling her he was hearing voices.
“He went in freely at first,” her BCA statement said, but then he started fighting people. “I told them to keep him.”
Murdock put his hands around a nurse’s neck, threatened to kill hospital staff, and punched a security guard in the head and neck area, a court document said.
He “indicated he was scared of himself and he’d say he didn’t want to harm anyone and then shortly thereafter would state he wanted to kill others,” the document continued. It also said his mother told hospital staff he “had access to a firearm and she was fearful for her son’s safety.”
After Murdock began taking medications during his hospitalization, he was calm and cooperative with staff and willing to participate in out-patient chemical dependency treatment, medication and therapy, the document continued.
A petition for civil commitment was filed, but commitment was stayed for six months, concluding in August 2023, on various conditions — including that Murdock take prescribed medication and cooperate with Scott County Adult Mental Health case management.
Out of the hospital, Murdock did well, his mother said. He completed training to become an electrician. He was working as a crane operator in Plymouth.
But a couple of months before September 2024, “he was kinda feeling off,” April Murdock said. He asked for one of his mother’s prescription pills for anxiety. She told him, “Look, you need to go to your doctor and get medicine,” according to her BCA statement.
“They would not give him medicine,” April Murdock said. That was because Seantrell Murdock was told he needed to stop smoking marijuana. He said he would stop when he was prescribed medication.
“He basically tried to self-medicate himself” by smoking marijuana, April Murdock said.
‘I miss her joy’
At Kwok’s celebration of life last year, Pam Tucker said she worried for her friend: “Did she know? Was she afraid? Where did she go?”
Tucker said she believed, if Kwok could speak to them, she would say, “I am now with my Creator. … I am at peace. … Everywhere you’ve known me, I am there. Every corner you look for me, I am there.”
Kwok and Tucker were walking partners and Tucker said she imagined asking her friend on their next walk: “‘Carrie, so what is the meaning of it all?’ She would pause, pivot, catch my eye, a twinkle in hers, burst into laughter. I miss her joy.”
In Bill Kwok’s eulogy, he said the term “senseless” had been used over and over again about his mother’s death.
“How could something so horrific happen to such a kind and loving servant of God?” he asked.
Related Articles
Former Customs officer from Minnetonka pleads guilty to possessing child pornography
Train stabbing spurs outcry over Black-on-white violence, but data shows such occurrences are rare
Tennessee governor says more federal agents to join fight against crime in Memphis next week
Maplewood man arrested in fatal hit-and-run
Inver Grove Heights man gets 20 years for ‘coercing and manipulating’ girls to send nude photos
ST. LOUIS — Lying on top of an operating room table with his chest exposed, Larry Black Jr. was moments away from having his organs harvested when a doctor ran breathlessly into the room.
Related Articles
Ticks are migrating, raising disease risks if they can’t be tracked quickly enough
Essentia exits talks with UMN, Fairview on ‘All-Minnesota’ health solution
Listeria found in Walmart meatball meals may be linked to deadly fettuccine outbreak
As the Trump administration and states push health data sharing, familiar challenges surface
States are cutting Medicaid provider payments long before Trump cuts hit
“Get him off the table,” the doctor recalled telling the surgical team at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital as the team cleaned Black’s chest and abdomen. “This is my patient. Get him off the table.”
At first, no one recognized Zohny Zohny in his surgical mask. Then he told the surgical team he was the neurosurgeon assigned to Black’s case. Stunned by his orders, the team members pushed back, Zohny said, explaining that they had consent from the family to remove Black’s organs.
“I don’t care if we have consent,” Zohny recalled telling them. “I haven’t spoken to the family, and I don’t agree with this. Get him off the table.”
Black, his 22-year-old patient, had arrived at the hospital after getting shot in the head on March 24, 2019. A week later, he was taken to surgery to have his organs removed for donation — even though his heart was beating and he hadn’t been declared brain-dead, Zohny said.
Black’s sister Molly Watts said the family had doubts after agreeing to donate Black’s organs but felt unheard until the 34-year-old doctor, in his first year as a neurosurgeon, intervened.
Today, Black, now 28, is a musician and the father of three children. He still needs regular physical therapy for lingering health issues from the gun injury. And Black said he is haunted by what he remembers from those days while he was lying in a medically induced coma.
“I heard my mama yelling,” he recalled. “Everybody was there yelling my name, crying, playing my favorite songs, sending prayers up.”
He said he had tried to show everyone in his hospital room that he heard them. He recalled knocking on the side of the bed, blinking his eyes, trying to show that he was fighting for his life.
Organ transplants save a growing number of lives in the U.S. every year, with more than 48,000 transplants performed in 2024, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which oversees the nation’s transplant system. And thousands die awaiting donations that never come.
But organ donation has also faced ongoingcriticism, including reports of patients showing alertness before planned organ harvesting. The results of a federal investigation into a Kentucky organ donation nonprofit, first disclosed by The New York Times in June, found that during a four-year period, medical providers had planned to harvest the organs of 73 patients despite signs of neurological activity. Those procedures ultimately didn’t take place, but federal officials vowed in July to overhaul the nation’s organ donation system.
“Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. “The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.”
Even before this latest investigation, Black’s case showed Zohny that the organ donation system needed to improve. He was initially hesitant to talk to KFF Health News when contacted in July about Black. But Zohny said his patient’s story had stuck with him for years, highlighting that while organ donation must continue, little is understood about human consciousness. And determining when someone is dead is the critical but confusing question at play.
“There was no bad guy in this. It was a bad setup. There’s a problem in the system,” he said. “We need to look at the policies and make some adjustments to them to make sure that we’re doing organ donation for the right person at the right time in the right place, with the right specialists involved.”
LJ Punch, a former trauma surgeon who was not involved with the case but reviewed Black’s medical records for KFF Health News, questioned whether Black’s injury — from gunfire — possibly contributed to how he was treated. Young Black men like Larry Black are disproportionately victims of gun trauma in the United States, and research on such violence is scant. His experience exemplifies “the general neglect” of Black men’s bodies, Punch said.
“That’s what comes up for me,” Punch said. “Structurally, not individually. Not any one doctor, not any one nurse, not any one team. It’s a structural reality.”
The hospital declined to comment on the details of Black’s case. SSM Health’s Kim Henrichsen, president of Saint Louis University Hospital and St. Mary’s Hospital-St. Louis, said the hospital system approaches “all situations involving critical illness or end-of-life care with deep compassion and respect.”
Mid-America Transplant, the federally designated organ procurement organization serving the St. Louis region, does not comment on individual donor cases, according to Lindsey Speir, executive vice president for organ procurement. She did tell KFF Health News that her organization has walked away from cases when patients’ conditions change — though not as late as when they are in the operating room for harvesting.
“Let me be clear about that. It happens way before then,” she said. “It definitely happens multiple times a year where we get consent. The family has made the decision, we approach, we get consent, it’s all appropriate, and then a day or so later they improve and we’re like, ‘Whoa.’”
Larry Black Jr. and his sister Molly Watts are still trying to process everything that happened to him while he was hospitalized in 2019 at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital. (Judd Demaline/KFF Health News/TNS)
Lawrence Black Sr. says he refused to believe that his son, Larry Black Jr., was dead in 2019 when he heard a rumor that his son’ s body was being taken to the SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital morgue. He says he prayed for his son to live. Today, his son is walking, talking, and the father of three children. (Cara Anthony/KFF Health News/TNS)
Macquel Payne was among the family members at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital when her brother Larry Black Jr. was being prepped to have his organs harvested in 2019.. (Cara Anthony/KFF Health News/TNS)
He also will be joining the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute in October. (Lee Photographie/KFF Health News/TNS)
1 of 4
Larry Black Jr. and his sister Molly Watts are still trying to process everything that happened to him while he was hospitalized in 2019 at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital. (Judd Demaline/KFF Health News/TNS)
But Speir said the recent media stories about the nation’s donation system are prompting a lot of questions about a process that also does a lot of good.
“We’re losing public trust right now,” Speir said of the industry. “And we’re going to have to regain that.”
Blink Twice for a Chance at Life
It was a Sunday afternoon when gunshots rang out in downtown St. Louis. Black had been on his way to his sister’s apartment.
“I didn’t know I was shot at first,” Black said, sitting in his living room six years later. “I literally ran like a block or two away.”
He collapsed moments later, he said, crawling to the back door of a woman’s home, where he asked for help. He said he asked the woman to give him two large towels, one covered in rubbing alcohol and another soaked with hydrogen peroxide. He wrapped those towels around the back of his head.
When his sister Macquel Payne found him, he was lying on the ground near the leasing office of her apartment complex, a crowd gathered around him.
Before an ambulance took him to the hospital, Black told his sister not to worry about him.
Black said he went in and out of consciousness on the way to the hospital and once he was there.
“I got to hitting my hand on the side of the ICU bed,” Black said. “They was like: ‘That’s just the reaction, the side effects of the medicine. Ask him some questions.’”
Payne said she asked her brother to blink twice if he could remember his first pet, a dog named “Little Black” that looked like the Chihuahua from the Taco Bell commercials.
Black said he remembers blinking twice. His sisters remember the same.
Payne asked him another question. This time she wanted to know whether her brother recognized their family. Black said he blinked twice when he saw his mom and sister standing nearby.
Black said his sister then asked him “the main question” that everyone needed him to answer.
“She’s like, ‘If you want them to pull a plug, if you tired and you giving up, blink once,’” Black recalled. “‘If you still got some fight in you, blink more than once.’”
Black said he started blinking and hit the bed to let his family know that he was still with them.
The sisters said hospital staffers told them the movements were involuntary.
‘Not Right Now’
In a waiting room steps away from the hospital’s intensive care unit, a woman carrying brochures explained to Payne and the rest of the family that Black had identified himself as a possible organ donor on his ID.
The woman wanted to know whether the family wished to move forward with the process if Black died, Payne said.
“I remember my mom saying, ‘Not right now,’” Black’s sister recalled. “‘It’s kind of too soon.’”
Payne said the woman persisted.
“She was like, ‘Well, can I at least leave you some brochures or something?’” Payne recalled. “Then my mom got a little agitated because it felt like she was being, like, pushy.”
The family was already acquainted with the organ donation process. In 2007, Black’s teenage brother Miguel Payne drowned at a local lake. His organs were donated, Macquel Payne said, noting the family was told that his body parts and tissues helped multiple people.
“I believe in saving lives,” Payne said. “But don’t be pushy about it.”
Mid-America Transplant handles the organ transplant process for 84 counties in parts of Illinois, Arkansas, and Missouri, including St. Louis. Like the Kentucky organization, it is one of 55 federally designated nonprofits that facilitate organ donations throughout the country.
The nonprofit has never pressured a family into organ donation, Speir said. Registering to be an organ donor is legally binding, she said, but Mid-America has walked away from cases when families didn’t want to move forward.
She said her staff tries to dispel myths about organ donation and alleviate concerns. “We want to have the families leave with a positive experience,” Speir said.
Despite the family’s initial ambivalence, they ultimately consented to moving forward with donating Black’s organs. Watts said members of her brother’s care team had told the family that her brother was at “the end of the road.”
The family was told to prepare for Black’s “last walk of life,” Payne said. Also known as an honor or hero’s walk, the tradition honors the life of an organ donor before the harvesting process begins.
At the time, Payne said, she thought her brother still had a fighting chance. She asked the hospital staffers to take another look at him before he was wheeled down the hall.
“I’m like, ‘My brother’s in there tapping on the bed,’” Payne said. “They said, ‘That’s just his nerves.’ But I’m like, ‘No, something’s not right.’ It’s like he was too alert. He was letting us know: ‘Please don’t let them do this to me. I’m here. I can fight this.’ They were saying that’s what the medicine will do, it affects his nerves.”
After the family had agreed to move forward with the organ donation process, the two sisters said, an especially helpful member of Black’s medical team no longer treated them the same way. She became standoffish, they said.
“You could tell the dynamics had changed,” Watts said.
‘#RIPMyBrother’
The family put on blue jumpers for the walk of life. “We just walked around the floor, and everybody was, like, acknowledging him,” Payne said. “We just thought this was the end.”
A friend Black went to high school with filmed part of the ritual. In a short clip, Black is seen being wheeled on a stretcher down a hallway in the hospital. His eyes are half-open. People are crying.
False rumors then started to swirl outside the hospital.
Brianna Floyd said she went into shock when she heard that her friend was dead. She knew that Black had been shot in the head. But a few days earlier, a local newspaper had reported that he was in stable condition.
Floyd checked Facebook to see whether the news of his death was true. Her timeline was flooded with farewell posts for Black, so she decided to write one, too.
“I Love You So Much Brother,” Floyd wrote. “#RIPMyBrother. Never Thought I Would Say That.”
Black’s father rushed to the hospital when he heard a rumor that his son was being wheeled to the morgue.
“‘He’s gone,’” Lawrence Black Sr. recalled being told. “‘He’s going to the freezer now.’”
Black Sr. said he refused to believe that his son was dead. The thought was devastating. He had already experienced that kind of loss to gun violence.
“You wake up and nothing’s the same,” Black Sr. said. “The spirit is lingering for about a week, and you can feel it, you know?”
Overwhelmed with emotion, he prayed for his son to live.
‘I Can’t Kill Your Son’
Zohny, the neurosurgeon, said he heard an announcement about a “hero’s walk” over a loudspeaker in the hospital. He wasn’t familiar with the term, so he asked about it. Medical residents in the hospital explained and told Zohny that the walk was possibly for his patient Larry Black.
“No, that can’t be my patient,” Zohny said he told them. “I didn’t agree.”
That’s when Zohny called the ICU to check on Black’s status. A person who answered the phone told him that Black was being wheeled to an operating room, he said.
“This is my first year,” Zohny said. “Your first year out as a neurosurgeon is the riskiest time for you. Any mistakes, anything small, basically derails your career. So the moment this happened, my legs went weak and I was very nervous because, at the end of the day, your job as a doctor is to be perfect.”
KFF Health News, Zohny, and Punch all reviewed the medical files given to Black from his hospitalization. It’s not clear from the records what led to that moment.
“In every case, the patient must be declared legally dead by the hospital’s medical team before organ procurement begins. This is not negotiable,” Mid-America Transplant’s CEO and president, Kevin Lee, wrote in an Aug. 21 blog post on the nonprofit’s website, responding to the news and federal comments about the investigation centered in Kentucky. “Mid-America Transplant strictly follows all laws, regulations, and hospital protocols throughout the process.”
He said in a statement to KFF Health News that a person can be pronounced dead in two ways. A person is legally dead if their heart stops beating and they stop breathing, which is when donation after cardiac death can occur. A person can also become an organ donor if their brain, including the brain stem, has irreversibly ceased functioning, which is when brain death donation can occur.
“Every hospital has their own process in declaring both types of death,” Speir said in a statement. “Mid-America Transplant ensures hospitals follow their policies.”
But Black didn’t fall into either category, Zohny said. And, he said, Black hadn’t had what is known as a brain death exam.
Zohny said he immediately informed his chairman about the situation, then started running to the operating room. Black’s family was waiting in the hallway, unaware of the drama happening behind a set of closed silver doors.
Then Zohny emerged, pulling Black’s family into an empty operating room that was nearby.
“I remember he told my mama, ‘I can’t kill your son,’” Payne recalled. “She said, ‘Excuse me?’”
Zohny put an image of Black’s brain on a screen. Then he circled the part of his brain that was damaged. He explained that Black’s gunshot wound was something that he could possibly recover from, though he might need therapy. He asked the family whether they were willing to give Black more time to heal from the injury, instead of withdrawing care.
“In my opinion, no family would ever consent to organ donation unless they were given an impression that their family member had a very poor prognosis,” Zohny said. “I never had a conversation with the family about the prognosis, because it was too early to have that discussion.”
Zohny knew that he was taking a professional risk when he ran into the operating room.
“The worst-case scenario for me is that I lose my job,” he recalled thinking. “Worst-case scenario for him, he wrongfully loses his life.”
Later, Zohny said, a hospital worker who transported Black from the ICU to the operating room told Zohny that something had seemed off.
“I remember him looking at me and saying, ‘I’m so glad you stopped that,’” Zohny recalled. “And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said: ‘I don’t know. His eyes were open the whole time, and I just felt like he was looking at me. His eyes didn’t move, but it felt like he was looking at me.’”
‘Back From the Dead’
After Zohny’s intervention, Black was wheeled back to the ICU. Zohny said the medical team held back all medications that caused his sedation.
Black woke up two days later, Zohny said, and started speaking. Within a week, the neurosurgeon said, he was standing.
“I had to learn how to walk, how to spell, read,” Black said. “I had to learn my name again, my Social, birthday, everything.”
Zohny continued to care for Black during what remained of his 21 days in the hospital. During a follow-up appointment, he posed for a photo with Black and his older sister, Watts. Next to Zohny, Black is standing up, a brace on his leg.
“It’s a miracle that despite flawed policy we were able to save his life,” Zohny said. “It was an absolute miracle.”
Zohny, who was working as a fellow and assistant professor at the time, left Saint Louis University Hospital for another job later that year when his fellowship ended. He said Black’s story made him question what we know about consciousness.
He’s now working on a new method that quantifies consciousness. Zohny said it could possibly be used to help measure consciousness from brain signals, such as with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, a test that measures electrical activity in the brain. Zohny said his method still needs rigorous validation, so he recently started a medical research company called Zeta Analytica, separate from his work at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, which he’ll begin in October.
“We don’t understand the brain to the level that we should, especially with all of the technology we have now,” Zohny said.
Today, Black is trying to move forward. He said he has seizures if the bullet fragments in his head move around too much. He said he easily overheats because of the injury.
He doesn’t blame his family for their decision. But he questions the organ transplantation process. “It’s like they choose people’s destiny for them just because they have an organ donor ribbon on their ID,” Black said. “And that’s not cool.”
To help him process everything that happened to him in 2019, he makes music under the name BeamNavyLooney. “I am back from the dead,” he recently wrote in a song about his experience.
Earlier this year, Black celebrated the birth of another son, who was sleeping peacefully at home as Black recounted his story.
“He doesn’t really cry,” Black said. “He just makes noises.”
Black sat with a firearm within reach. He said he keeps the gun close to protect his family. It’s still hard for him to sleep at night. Nightmares about what happened — both on the street and in the hospital — keep him awake.
He said he no longer wants to be on the organ donor registry.
This project was supported by a fellowship from the Association of Health Care Journalists, with funding from The Joyce Foundation.
The fraud ran so deep that even Somali parents who might not have even entertained aspirations of scammed wealth were enticed to offer their children up for autism care in exchange for getting paid. A woman named Asha Farha Hassan has been charged with defrauding the Minnesota’s autism program for $14 million.
There is a temptation to call the $14 million a personal record, the 56-game hitting streak of fraud. She probably got a fist bump when she walked down the street. But Hassan is only the first person charged in the autism fraud. Her record could be broken. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson, said there will be others, not yet charged.
If you don’t feel betrayed yet, consider that Thompson said that fraud cases are a wholesale attack on Minnesota programs to the point where fraud has overtaken legitimate services.
Hassan, 28, whipped up a business called Smart Therapy, according to the charges. More than 300 of these businesses sprang up, most of them fake, we’re told. Hassan and her untrained young relatives recruited parents. No autism. Not a problem. According to the charges, Hassan paid parents a kickback of $300 to $1,200 if they agreed to participate. Hassan then billed the state and the cash rolled in. Some parents, catching the drift, threatened to take their kids to other “treatment” centers if they didn’t get a bigger kickback.
Autism fraud, food fraud, day care fraud, housing stabilization fraud. Billions of dollars in fraud – Thompson’s words, billions – and basically, he has just begun.
By the way, Hassan is allegedly a double-dipper fraudster. In 2021, Hassan claimed to be feeding 1,200 kids a day seven days a week and allegedly received $465,000 from the state. That might not have been enough to fatten her real estate portfolio in Kenya. She apparently didn’t even spend our stolen money in our state.
We have been more profoundly betrayed than at any time since the founding of the state. We work, we pay our bills and our taxes, we follow the law, maybe go to church on Sunday. And Minnesota government has betrayed us. There is no reason to have trust in the state or in any of the state agencies that we presumed were acting on our behalf. It’s crushing to lose that trust, and according to Thompson and his team, we are in line for more betrayal, maybe even a stolen amount that will break the 56-game fraud record.
Which brings us to our governor, Tim Walz. He is running for a third term. Why? Anybody with a sense of shame or embarrassment could not possibly look Minnesotans in the eye and claim he cares about what he calls working families. Why, it’s preposterous. These are his agencies that have broken the trust, his agency heads, his watch on deck. This is all on Walz and yet, absurdly, he wants a third term. His dereliction of duty could be considered malfeasance and disqualification from running.
Perhaps it isn’t that hard to figure out. He has been written off by the king makers who realize he doesn’t stand a chance on the national stage. He is a career politician. He’s too young to retire and live off his multiple pensions.
Related Articles
Real World Economics: How bad is it going to get?
Letters: If Hamas cared about civilians at all it would release the hostages
Skywatch: Saturn: such a beauty
Working Strategies: Lessons from building walls, watching movies and riding bikes
Joe Soucheray: The fraud continues, but Walz thinks he’s earned another term
What to do? I know. I’ll run against the president! He is cleverly taking advantage of how polarizing Donald Trump has been for the nation. In Minnesota, particularly, the Walz voter could not possibly turn against him for his incompetence that led to fraud and a broken trust. That would be tantamount to endorsing Trump.
Trump is a poorly matured fellow and wanders about with steamer trunks full of problems, but he has had absolutely nothing to do with fraud in Minnesota. If Walz fools you with his stump talk of Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s billionaire golfing pals, ask yourself what that has do with the financial ruin of this state.
Walz owns the betrayal and the broken trust. It’s ridiculous that he’s running for another term.
