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UCPD officers take Henry Reid, director of the UCLA Willed Body Program, into custody Saturday on

University police made a second arrest Sunday in an ongoing investigation of UCLA’s willed body program, the director of which was taken into custody Saturday for allegedly selling body parts from cadavers donated to the university.

Ernest Nelson, 46, who is not a UCLA employee, was arrested in Rancho Cucamonga shortly after 7 a.m. Sunday on charges of knowingly receiving stolen property. Nelson is scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday and is being held on $30,000 bail.

The director of the willed body program, Henry Reid, 54, was released around 2:30 a.m. Sunday after he posted $20,000 bail. Reid was arrested by university police at his home in Anaheim on Saturday afternoon. He is charged with felony grand theft.

Reid and another unidentified UCLA employee have been put on leave by the university, and police are investigating whether the two falsified documents to sell cadaver parts for their own profit over a five-year period. University police would not comment on whether the unidentified employee will be arrested anytime in the near future.

“We are cooperating fully with the police department, and will share more information as soon as police assure us it will not jeopardize their investigation,” said J. Thomas Rosenthal, associate vice chancellor and chief medical officer of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, in a statement Saturday.

“At this stage, we must do nothing to undermine the integrity of the investigation,” Rosenthal said.

University police searched Reid’s house and a nearby shed after the arrest Saturday and reportedly left with several boxes.

Nancy Greenstein, UCPD director of police community services, said police are just beginning their investigation.

UCPD became aware of the theft nearly two weeks ago after the medical center conducted an internal investigation.

UCLA’s willed body program, the first in the nation, was founded in 1950. The institute receives around 175 bodies each year and has a waiting list of 11,000 people who are willing to provide their bodies for medical research and education.

While one of the most prestigious institutions of its kind, the program has come under fire in recent years amid accusations of unethical and illegal practices.

The program was first investigated in 1993 when a medical waste container broke apart in the Santa Monica Bay. The container had a combination of ashes and other hospital materials inside.

In 1996, attorneys representing the families of nearly 18,000 participants in the willed body program sued UCLA for handling the cadavers “without dignity.”

The attorneys in that case said UCLA stuffed some corpses with medical byproducts in a process called “canoeing.” The lawsuit, which is still pending, said the university often cremated the cadavers in groups, dumping the ashes in garbage drums along with syringes and scalpels. The remains were sometimes dumped in the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Bay.

“The families were promised when the bodies came in that the remains would be disposed of in a dignified and humane manner,” said James Terwilleger, then-vice provost for administration at the School of Medicine in a 1996 interview with the Daily Bruin. “It was clear that the remains would be cremated unless the family wanted them back, and that the remains would be treated with dignity upon disposal.”

Attorneys filed suit against UCLA in 1996, and a year later, Reid was hired as director and was thought to have cleaned up the department.

Court Commissioner Bruce Mitchell tentatively ruled as recently as Feb. 10 that UCLA had proven the program was working well under Reid, according to a Los Angeles Times article published Sunday.

“We were very proud of the steps that Henry Reid convinced everyone he had taken, and we frankly are devastated,” Louis Marlin, a university lawyer, told the Times.

Former Gov. George Deukmejian has agreed to head reform of the willed body program, and the medical school’s associate vice chancellor, J. Thomas Rosenthal, is temporarily taking care of its day-to-day operations.

“We want to assure the public that we will do everything in our power to eliminate whatever inadequacies that existed to ensure that the UCLA willed body program is one that is worthy of the trust given by those who generously donate their remains for the benefit of medical education and research,” Rosenthal said in a statement.

Pharmaceutical companies and medical instrument firms are just a few of the organizations that use cadavers in their products.

It is against the law to sell body parts for profit, but middlemen are allowed to charge “reasonable” fees to cover their costs, according to the Times article. The line of what is reasonable and what isn’t has become blurred.

Also according to the Times, dozens of cadavers had been sold from UCLA, and the overall demand for bodies’ parts has increased, driving market prices upward.

Other universities have dealt with similar problems, though none seem to shadow UCLA’s.

In 1999, the director of the willed body program at UC Irvine was fired because of accusations surrounding the selling of body parts, and in 2002 an employee at the University of Texas medical branch was fired for similar charges.

With reports from Bruin wire services.