Corey seems to have spent much of his childhood locked away — in mental hospitals, in principals' offices and in his mother's home in Louisville, Kentucky.
He claims his mother started beating him when he was very young. He was born on February 6, 1989, to a woman who'd had a fling with a much older man named Ernest Black. She kept custody, and Corey rarely saw his father, who died in 2006.
Mike Giglio
Corey spends most of his time at the downtown library, playing video games or checking his MySpace.
Mike Giglio
Corey Black did his own follow-up blood pressure work after testing too high during his evaluation at St. Luke's Hospital. He considered lying about the results.
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Judy Wooden, who lives in Louisville, didn't even know six-year-old Corey existed until her uncle Ernest brought him by one day. Wooden, who was a mother of two, remembers reaching over to pat Corey on the back. He jerked away. Beneath his shirt she found a line of scabs running down his spine. Soon afterward she filed for custody.
Corey brought in $800 a month from his father's workers' compensation, so his mother fought to keep him, Wooden says. According to both Corey and Wooden, his mother, who is white, identified only with black people. All of her other children were biracial. She resented Corey. He was seldom allowed to leave his room.
Corey says he began hitting his mother back when he was six. Her response was always more pills.
"The doctors, the only thing they would do was listen to his mother and give him more medicine," Wooden says. "He was on so much Zoloft he was just a zombie. He would just go to sleep."
When Wooden finally won custody, about a year after meeting Corey, she set him up with his own room — a nice bed, a TV. The first night, she bent down to tuck him in, holding a few coat hangers in her hand.
"Please don't," Corey said.
Corey terrified people. He would vow to kill himself. He climbed onto Wooden's lap, put his fingers to her throat and threatened to choke her. Her children had never seen anything like it.
"But he never applied any pressure, and I just held him really tight and sat in the chair with him and told him I loved him," Wooden says. "He needed that, you know? He had to put up that front to see who really cared."
Wooden's husband was verbally abusive to Corey. Corey would go to school and describe in gruesome detail how he had murdered him and Wooden's two children. Wooden was once called in from work to find Corey locked in the beleaguered principal's office, tearing up a textbook under the desk.
Wooden's work schedule and Corey's trouble with her husband forced her to give him up to the state after three years. It was a succession of hospitals and boys' homes from there.
Shortly after his 19th birthday, Corey went to stay with his mother. He says he found her smoking marijuana rolled in papers laced with crystal meth. He left after only a week to begin the trip that would eventually bring him to Houston.
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By Wednesday evening the deal is off. Kalas's relative already has his new kidney. When Marta Zeledon, the donor coordinator at St. Luke's, walked in to address the medical review board, she learned that the relative was preparing for surgery. Luck had struck. A matching cadaver had arrived.
Kidneys from living donors are far superior to kidneys from cadavers. Transplants have better success rates, and they last longer too. But the Kalas family decided to go with the cadaver.
Mary is catatonic. She stares blankly into her lap, her crew-cut head lolling from side to side, mumbling about things that are too good to be true. Corey is growing frantic. He tries to call Kalas, over and over, but gets no answer. He even tries Kalas at home. He leaves a panicked message for Gilbert. He wonders if the cadaver's kidney might fail, and he might still get paid.
But a written report of Corey's assessment by the donor team at St. Luke's, which was obtained through his medical records, shows that he was very unlikely to make it past the review board. Corey hadn't been as persuasive as he'd thought.
Aside from his blood pressure, Corey was physically fine. But his unstable mental and social background did him in. Both the nephrologist and the social worker state that he is not a suitable donor.
In her report, Paula Waller, the social worker, politely notes the obvious — that Corey smells, spends time in homeless shelters and has none of the support network he would need to recover from serious surgery. Waller writes that Corey "made a number of odd, irrelevant remarks" during his interview. Among other things, he told her that Mary had recently lit his hand on fire to see how much pain he can handle.
Corey volunteered his mental history, but he was dismissive of it — he particularly dislikes the "schizotypal" label. Waller found it accurate. "[T]he patient's general presentation fit the definition of a schizotypal personality disorder quite well," she writes. "The disorder is characterized by a need for social isolation, odd behavior and thinking, and unconventional beliefs."
The situation was very obviously wrong.
Even so, neither Waller nor anyone else suggests anything unsavory is afoot. In her conclusion, Waller writes that, while Corey should not be permitted to donate, "his intentions are admirable."
