I'm wondering whether HLC members have "report interesting cases to the Society" as part of their duties.
There is a typical JW chain email going around right now about a blood doctrine victim in Kansas named Shay Brooks. The email is written in such Borg Writing Department style that I suspect it wasn't started by an actual friend of the victim's family but rather by writers at Bethel, who then leak the story out into the email grapevine of JWs, letting it take on a life of its own.
A little digging confirms that a 13 year old boy by the name of Shay Brooks died in January in Wichita, KS, USA, and the online Obituary comments show that he was indeed a JW kid who "died faithful" to the Borg.
But there are comments in the circulating email that make me suspicious about the veracity of the details surrounding this poor kid's experience.
One thing it says is that he went to the hospital with a nosebleed and was diagnosed with "the kind of leukemia that only gives you a matter of days." My BS meter instantly went off and I've been googling about Leukemia every free moment this morning to find out if such a thing really exists. So far, I haven't found anything to support the concept that there is a form of leukemia that only gives a patient a matter of days. If anyone knows more about this disease, please post it.
Another thing the email said is, "He went into the hospital and immediately they wanted to give him blood." Really? Immediately? For a nosebleed? More likely, it was after he was diagnosed with leukemia that they admitted him to the hospital and wanted to give transfusions to save his life, but the email doesn't specify that it was a second, later hospital admission, leaving the reader to think hospitals react with blood transfusions to treat pretty much everything, even when they're not needed [the Borg is wise, the medical establishment is reactionary, dangerous, and foolish]. The lack of a specific timeline of events or any solid evidence about any of it is suspicious to me.
It goes on to lay out how they went to court and fought for this poor kid's right to be a Borg victim, how he wanted to get baptized before he died, so they let him, managing to dip him just three days before he died, how the funeral went, and what a great witness it was to others.
In short, it made me sick reading it.
But back to the original question, do these stories get back to the Society via the HLC? If so, isn't it likely that people at Bethel release these into the grapevine to "encourage the friends" rather than publishing a PR-damaging Awake! article like they did in the 1990s? The tone of this thing, coming on the heels of the "How To Let Your Kids Die For Us" letter given to the elders last fall, just makes me think it all falls together too nicely.
Sometimes coincidences DO have a cause. This one makes me wonder.