"Williams' friend appalled by conditions of cryogenics lab"

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/sports/5211027.htm

Posted on Tue, Feb. 18, 2003

Williams' friend appalled by conditions of cryogenics lab

By BILL MADDEN
New York Daily News

TAMPA - For 4 1/2 years, Buzz Hamon was Ted Williams' constant companion. As
director of Williams' museum in Hernando, Fla., Hamon arranged all of the
hitting legend's travels - to Cooperstown every summer, the All-Star Game
and various other baseball events - and served as his aide-de-camp as well
as an "adopted son."

That was the problem as far as Williams' real son, John Henry, was
concerned. Hamon was too close to Williams and gradually he was eased out as
director of the museum as John Henry assumed total control of Williams'
life.

The culmination of that total control, as has been well-documented in the
months since Williams' death last July 5, was John Henry Williams arranging
to have his father's body frozen and moved to the Alcor Life Extension
Foundation, a cryogenics lab in Scottsdale, Ariz. It all happened so fast,
all of Williams' friends - and most notably his daughter, Bobby Jo Ferrell
and her husband, Mark, who live a few miles away from the hospital in
Hernando where Williams died alone - were denied any form of closure.

According to sources familiar with what took place that day, the minute
Williams took his last breath, hospital officials filled his body with blood
thinner and stuffed it into a bag filled with dry ice for transportation to
the airport in Ocala, Fla., where a plane chartered by Alcor was waiting on
the tarmac to whisk it off to Arizona. In the months that followed, Bobby Jo
Ferrell spent more than $50,000 in a vain effort to convince a judge to have
the body released from Alcor so that it could be cremated according to
Williams' wishes.

Meanwhile, no one with close ties to Williams was allowed access to the
Alcor lab, presumably on John Henry's orders, as Williams' body lay
suspended in a giant cylinder under a veil of secrecy.

All of this was finally too much to accept for Buzz Hamon, who two weeks ago
embarked on a cross-country journey from his home in Greenville, S.C., to
Scottsdale, where he was determined to see for himself Williams' final
resting place.

It was with the help of a friend of his, Bobbie Sgrillo, a former mortician
who lives in Phoenix, that Hamon was able to get inside the Alcor lab.
Sgrillo's knowledge of the mortuary business enabled her to gain the
confidence of overly protective Alcor officials, who - after interviewing
her for a half-hour - agreed to give her a tour of the facility. She then
asked if she could bring along Hamon, whom she introduced to them as "my
friend, Art, a public-relations man."

"After what I saw and experienced, I just can't contain myself any longer,"
Hamon told me by phone Tuesday. "I want the whole world to know what they've
done to Ted. This was absolutely horrifying."

Hamon said he was "appalled" by the conditions inside the facility (which is
part of a small strip mall in an industrial area of Scottsdale). "The
operating room didn't even have stainless steel tables and the building was
cluttered with boxes and junk. It made me sick."

But not as sick as he became when he entered the containment room where
Williams' body is stored along with 54 others (according to what Alcor CEO
Jerry Lemler told him).

"There were six huge cylinders along the wall, one of which was filled with
liquid nitrogen to supply the other five," Hamon said. "I was stunned when
Lemler told me they had 55 `patients,' as he called them. How could they
have so many? Then he told me there were four full bodies and five heads in
each of the cylinders. In addition, there were two short cylinders with just
heads in them."

Although it had been reported that Williams was in a separate cylinder,
Hamon said he "was horrified" to hear differently. "All I could think of was
Ted and what he would have thought if he'd known what John Henry had done to
him," Hamon said. "It was bad enough knowing that somewhere in one of these
cylinders, Ted was hanging suspended, upside down, with his head in a
bucket. But he was in there with four or five other bodies and assorted
heads. For all the money this supposedly cost John Henry, he wouldn't even
see to it that Ted was alone."

"I was a little taken aback at the sanitary conditions because of my
experience in the mortuary business," said Sgrillo, when I reached her for
corroboration in Phoenix. "But what really concerned me were the dangerously
low levels of nitrogen in each of the tanks. It was when I asked (Lemler)
about that he said: `Tour's over!'

"When I asked them about this whole process, they said: `We don't promise
anything. We don't know what's on the other end.' "

Lemler said Tuesday he does not recall the visit by Hamon and Sgrillo. He
denied that there are problems with nitrogen levels in the Alcor facility
and said "no comment" when asked about its sanitary conditions.

"I just can't believe people believe in this," said Sgrillo, "that their
loved ones can be brought back to life. Are they really that stupid?"

Of course, Hamon, the Ferrells and all the other enraged and disgusted
people who were closest to Williams don't for a minute think John Henry was
stupid - or that he really believed his father could one day be brought back
to life through cryogenics. It is their contention that after squeezing
every last autograph out of the feeble, critically ill old man, John Henry
attained his final payday by selling Williams' body to Alcor - which, in
turn, profited enormously by the publicity. (John Henry, Williams' other
daughter Claudia and Bobby Jo Ferrell are under a gag order as a result of
the settlement of Ferrell's lawsuit over Williams' will.)

`In my last phone conversation with Ted, two weeks after I left the museum,
he told me he wanted to write a story on his last 20 years," Hamon said.
"Then he said: `Buzz, I need a lawyer.' I said: `Why?' and Ted said,
`Because I've made a mistake.' At that point, someone apparently walked in
the room where he was and yanked the phone out of his hand.

"That was the last time I ever talked to him, and when I got into that room
with those cylinders, I at least felt that Ted knew I was there. I said a
prayer in front of all five of the cylinders because I didn't know which one
he was in."

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Received on Wed Feb 19 16:09:33 2003