BELFAST (AP) – The widow of a Waldo County man has filed a lawsuit alleging a Bucksport man persuaded the state medical examiner’s office to release her late husband’s brain to a research lab without her consent.

Alice Geary, 57, of Freedom, the widow of Raymond Geary, who died in a car crash on April 27, 2000, has become the second Maine woman to sue the Bethesda, Md.-based Stanley Medical Research Institute and other parties.

Efforts to retrieve brains at the state medical examiner’s office for the Stanley Institute are now the subject of federal and state investigations.

Geary said she recalls getting two phone calls about organ donation after her husband suffered a heart attack and crashed his truck.

She said she told the callers that she was not interested in donating her husband’s organs. When a caller persisted and asked about “small sample,” her response was unequivocal. “I said I wasn’t interested and hung up,” she said.

But a written account of that phone call is just as unequivocal. The consent form, which was signed by a former state employee who was paid to collect brains for Stanley Institute, said that Geary did agree to make a donation.

The lawsuit names the Stanley Medical Research Institute; Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, the lab’s founder; Matthew Cyr, the Bucksport man who filled out the consent form; and Lorie Stevens, Cyr’s associate who also signed the document.

Byrne Decker, a Portland lawyer who represents the Stanley Institute, declined to comment on the lawsuit Monday, saying he had not seen it.

The Stanley Institute needs entire brains – both normal and diseased ones – for its research on the roots of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The lab said in a recent statement that the removal of brains and other organs is routine during autopsies.

The lawsuit contends the institute paid Cyr and others around the country $1.9 million in 2002 for brain collection. Cyr, who used to answer phones for the state medical examiner’s office after hours, was paid $1,000 to $2,000 for each brain he sent for a total of about $150,000, according to the Maine Sunday Telegram.

Cyr is now an officer with the Bucksport Police Department.

The claims in Geary’s lawsuit largely mirror the earlier case, which was settled this month for $52,500. That case was brought by a Gorham woman.

Alice Geary is the fourth person in Maine to publicly allege that she was confused, misled or worse, during a request for a brain donation.

Maine lawyers also have said they are planning to sue on behalf of at least three other people.

Only in the last couple of months, Geary said, did she learn that her husband’s brain was sent to Maryland. This discovery, she said, followed a phone inquiry by a detective at the Maine attorney general’s office.

By reading the autopsy report, Geary learned on Dec. 8, more than four years after the funeral, that her late husband’s “brain, dura, pineal, spleen, pituitary, blood and portions of other organs” were sent to Maryland.