© Getty ImagesThe story surrounding the late Steve Jobs and his liver transplant is getting murkier as a report emerges that his surgeon, Dr. James Eason, moved into the Jobs-owned Memphis mansion just months after the operation.
Dr. James Eason, who performed the March 2009 liver transplant, moved into the palatial house Jobs bought for his recovery just a few months after the operation, according to a report.
It isn't the first time questions have been raised over whether Jobs, a California resident, received an unfair advantage in landing the Memphis transplant.
Eason lived in the house in midtown Memphis for two years before buying it outright in May 2011, a few months before Jobs died.
Eason bought the house for $850,000 - the same amount Jobs paid for it, through a nondescript LLC, in March 2009, according to the report. It was unclear if Eason paid rent while he lived in the two-story, 13-bedroom house at 36 Morningside Place. A man who answered the phone there on Monday evening said Eason was unavailable to talk before abruptly hanging up.
During the two years he lived there, bills from Memphis Light, Gas and Water were paid for by Jobs' San Francisco lawyer, George Riley, according to the report in The Commercial Appeal, Memphis's largest daily paper.
Between May 2010 and 2011, Riley used his credit card to cover $8,770 in utility bills for the home.
Riley also wrote personal checks to the tune of $23,585 to cover the property taxes between 2009 and May 2011, when Eason bought the house outright.
"It strikes me as a potential conflict of interest," said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist for New York University.
Shortly after it emerged that Jobs had the surgery in 2009, Eason issued a statement saying that Jobs received the transplant "because he was ... the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available," based on a scoring system known as the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease, or MELD.
But the questions didn't stop, particularly after Eason bought the two-story house in 2011.
Eason's ownership prompted questions from local officials during a June 2012 hearing before the Shelby County Commission to discuss an unrelated matter.
"It's a fair question," Eason told the panel about how exactly he came to buy the house - before explaining that he came to know it while visiting Jobs during his recuperation.
"When I learned that it was going to be going on the market, I asked the administrator of the LLC if I could purchase it," he said.
Eason never told the panel he lived there years before buying it.
Hank Gray of Houston told The Post that he sold the house to the state of Tennessee for $1.3 million in 2005 because it was needed for the new chancellor of the University of Tennessee's Health Science Center, who has since left the school.
Eason performed the Jobs surgery at UT's Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute.
UT then sold the home to Jobs' LLC through what's known as a Quitclaim Deed, which is often used to transfer property between family members, records show.
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