UPDATED: Family of murder victim claim county staff threatened to harvest his organs.

When 29-year-old Daniel Sosa Rodriguez was hospitalized on Feb. 20, he didn’t think he was going to die. He had been shot during daylight hours on South Hebbron Avenue, just a half block from a bustling stretch of East Alisal Street.

Police barely had any information from witnesses, who reported the driver of a silverish compact car fired the shots. To date, no suspects have been identified. Rodriguez himself would have had the best intel, but he refused to provide any information. “He was just uncooperative with us,” Salinas Police Cmdr. Vince Maiorana says. “He wanted to handle it himself.”

Rodriguez died at 10:32am on Feb. 27. After it became clear Rodriguez wasn’t going to make it, Maiorana recalls a conversation at Natividad Medical Center about organ donation. It struck him as odd, since crime victims’ bodies become the property of the county coroner.

Delta Sosa Rodriguez, Rodriguez’s mom, also remembers multiple conversations about organ donation. In a $3-million claim filed April 22 against Monterey County, she alleges medical staff pressured her to authorize harvesting her son’s organs against her will.

“Persistent demands turned to threats including, but not limited [to], threats of disconnecting my son Daniel Rodriguez from life support,” her claim states. “Again and again… [medical staff] demanded signature of organ harvest of my son.”

Monterey County Sheriff’s Sgt. Archie Warren, a detective in charge of the coroner’s office, is well-versed in the morbid business of harvesting organs, or “anatomical gifts,” under California law.

“The body is evidence after a death in a homicide case,” Warren says. “In essence, it’s like exploratory surgery when [donor harvesters] go in and try to find the items that weren’t injured. We want to know the trajectory, and where [a bullet] entered the body. When you let someone come in there, you don’t have real, true information as evidence.”

Warren says the more frequent scenario is that family members want to donate the organs of their loved one, but the coroner wants to preserve the body as evidence. It’s up to them to decide if certain body parts are available to donate.

Warren declined to release details about Daniel Rodriguez’s death because the case is under investigation. The County Board of Supervisors is expected to consider his mother’s claim “in the near future,” according to County Counsel Charles McKee.

McKee declined to comment on the specific allegations. Delta Rodriguez did not respond to requests for comment.

UPDATE: The County Board of Supervisors announced June 23 that they decided in closed session to deny Delta Rodriguez's claim.