Nearly 28 years into his career with the Richmond Police Department, Officer Tommy Obenrader has made a habit of giving pieces of himself away to people he's never met. First it was a kidney, donated to a stranger in November 2021. Then, earlier this year, it was a portion of his liver, given to a young girl he'd never seen before her surgery.
A Rescue That Foreshadowed a Pattern of Giving
Obenrader's willingness to put his body on the line for strangers isn't new. As reported by UVA Health, the officer made local news back in September 2014 when he swam across the James River Canal to pull an unconscious woman off railroad tracks, an act that left him suffering from heat exhaustion before he returned to full duty. Obenrader's path toward organ donation began years later, after he watched a local news broadcast about a Richmond firefighter who needed a kidney transplant, according to the same account. That story pushed him to get tested at VCU Health, a process that culminated in an anonymous non-directed kidney donation in November 2021, meaning he gave his kidney to a stranger without choosing who would receive it.
Obenrader's decision to give organs to complete strangers ultimately made him a rare double organ donor.
A Second Surgery, and a Complication, in Charlottesville
Obenrader's second donation required a trip north. UVA Health in Charlottesville was the only hospital system in Virginia capable of facilitating his second living donation, and it was there that he gave a portion of his liver to a pediatric recipient — a young girl he had never met. The surgery was performed by Dr. J. Francisco Guerra, and the same account notes that Obenrader later developed an infected fluid collection as a postoperative complication before eventually returning to full duty on the police force. Living liver donation carries a more demanding recovery than kidney donation, since surgeons remove a portion of the donor's liver and rely on it regrowing over time.
Obenrader's dual sacrifice places him in an extraordinarily small group. Sequential living donors are very few.
Why Living Donors Like Obenrader Matter Now
The timing of Obenrader's second donation lands amid a shifting national picture for organ transplantation. The U.S. set a national record in 2025 with 49,064 organ transplants, supported by 7,237 living donors — a 3% annual increase in living organ donations, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Even so, more than 109,000 Americans remain on the national organ transplant waiting list, and roughly 12 people die every day waiting for a donor organ, per federal data published in August by organdonor.gov.
According to the Health Resources and Services Administration's SRTR Data Visualization, 1,714 people were on Georgia's transplant waiting list as of December 2025. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, a total of 7,030 people became living donors in 2024.
Living donors like Obenrader remain the exception rather than the rule. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network figures published by Cleveland Clinic show living donors accounted for only 23% of kidney transplants and 6% of liver transplants performed nationwide in 2023. That scarcity is especially pronounced for children. UVA Health Children's has a pediatric living-donor liver program, according to the University of Virginia.
The Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients now displays living-donor transplant counts alongside deceased-donor counts for kidney and liver programs, providing more visibility into living donation.
The need for donors like Obenrader has grown more urgent as another source of organs shrinks. The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations reported that U.S. deceased organ donations declined in 2025 for the first time in 14 years, a drop driven primarily by fewer deceased kidney donations. For a Richmond officer who has now given both a kidney and a piece of his liver to strangers he'll likely never meet, that shortfall is precisely the gap his two surgeries helped narrow.
