Lady meets the man with her brother's transplanted face

Footage from Channel 9's 60 Minutes program in Australia demonstrates the minute Rebekah Aversano sees - and touches - the substance of her dead sibling.

The beneficiary, Richard Norris, from Virginia, US, was gravely deformed in a shotgun episode 15 years back.

Until the operation he had seldom gone outside and lived as a loner.


Transplant beneficiaries don't typically meet the groups of their benefactors.

Be that as it may, in what is thought to be one of the first experiences of its kind, Ms Aversano, from Maryland, candidly encountered the man who got some of her sibling's facial tissues and structures.

She touched his face and said: "This is the face I grew up with."

Her sibling, Joshua Aversano, had been murdered in a street car crash, at 21 years old.

The choice to give his face had been troublesome, yet would have been what he needed, said his mom Gwen Aversano in a different meeting with CTV News.

She said: "Knowing our child he would have needed another person to go ahead with their lives in the event that he found himself unable to."

"In the wake of meeting Mr Norris, seeing him and addressing him we can most likely see our child in him.

"We were just so satisfied we had the capacity to help Mr Norris despite the fact that we had such an awful misfortune," she included.

The broad transplant surgery occurred at the University of Maryland three years prior. It kept going over 36 hours.

Mr Norris had lost his lips and nose in a shotgun mishap and had constrained development of his mouth.



James Partridge, the organizer of Changing Faces - a philanthropy which backings individuals with facial deformations - told the BBC he didn't know of another situation where the group of the giver had met the individual who had gotten the face.

Also, Mr Barry Jones, previous president of the British Association of Esthetic Plastic Surgeons, said there were numerous issues to consider.

"It must be somewhat troublesome for any in respect to meet a beneficiary however it must be especially troublesome for confronts," he told the BBC.

"On this event it appears to have been a glad result. In any case, that may not generally be the situation."

Mr Jones said a family would need to consider how they would feel about the identity of the individual with the new face.

"I am not against recipients meeting donor families if both parties want too, but I hope they have been counselled properly before their meeting," he said.