As families searched, a Texas medical school cut up their loved ones (original) (raw)

A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it — part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.

Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.

An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties — and by the center — to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.

Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.

In one case, a man learned of his stepmother’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man’s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.

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Before the Health Science Center announced it was suspending the program, officials in the two counties had already told NBC News they were reconsidering their unclaimed body agreements in light of the reporters’ findings.

Commissioners in Dallas County recently postponed a vote on whether to extend their contract. The top elected official in Tarrant County, Judge Tim O’Hare — who voted to renew the county’s agreement with the center in January — said he planned to explore legal options “to end any and all immoral, unethical, and irresponsible practices stemming from this program.”

“No individual’s remains should be used for medical research, nor sold for profit, without their pre-death consent, or the consent of their next of kin,” O’Hare’s office said. “The idea that families may be unaware that their loved ones’ remains are being used for research without consent is disturbing, to say the least.”

NBC News also shared its findings with dozens of companies, teaching hospitals and medical schools that have relied on the Health Science Center to supply human specimens. Ten said they did not know the center had provided them with unclaimed bodies. Some, including Medtronic, said they had internal policies requiring consent from the deceased or their legal surrogate.

DePuy Synthes, a Johnson & Johnson company, said it had paused its relationship with the center after learning from a reporter that it had received body parts from four unclaimed people. And Boston Scientific, whose company Relievant Medsystems used the torsos of more than two dozen unclaimed bodies for training on a surgical tool, said it was reviewing its transactions with the center, adding that it had believed the program obtained consent from donors or families.

“We empathize with the families who were not reached as part of this process,” the company said.

The Army said it, too, was examining its reliance on the center and planned to review and clarify internal policies on the use of unclaimed bodies. Under federal contracts totaling about $345,000, the center has provided the Army with dozens of whole bodies, heads and skull bones since 2021 — including at least 21 unclaimed bodies. An Army spokesperson said officials had not considered the possibility that the program hadn’t gotten consent from donors or their families.

The Texas Funeral Service Commission, which regulates body donation programs in the state, is conducting a review of its own. In April, the agency issued a moratorium on out-of-state shipments while it studies a range of issues, including the use of unclaimed bodies by the Health Science Center.

In the case of Victor Honey, it shouldn’t have been hard for Dallas County investigators to find survivors: His son shares his father’s first and last name and lives in the Dallas area. Family members are outraged that no one from the county or the Health Science Center informed them of Honey’s death, much less sought permission to dissect his body and distribute it for training.

It wasn’t until a year and a half after he died that his relatives finally learned that news — from a chance encounter with a stranger struck by the similarity of the father’s and son’s names, followed by a phone call from NBC News.

“It’s like a hole in your soul that can never be filled,” said Brenda Cloud, one of Honey’s sisters. “We feel violated.”

Brenda Cloud was devastated to learn what happened to her older brother. Maddie McGarvey for NBC News

Two years before Honey’s death, Oscar Fitzgerald died of a drug overdose outside a Fort Worth convenience store. County officials failed to reach his siblings or adult children, so they had no voice in deciding whether to donate his body. It was taken to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, pumped with preservatives and assigned to a first-year medical student to study over the coming year.

Five months passed before his family learned from a friend in September 2020 that he was dead. ​​When his brother rushed to Fort Worth to claim the remains, he said he was told by the Health Science Center that he’d have to wait — the program was not done using the body.

Patrick Fitzgerald, who had last seen his 57-year-old brother the previous Thanksgiving, was aghast.

“Now that the family has come forward,” he said, “you mean to tell me we can’t have him?”

Instead, Fitzgerald said he was told his family must fill out donation consent forms to eventually receive his brother’s ashes. A year and a half later — after the body had been leased out a second time, to a Texas dental school — the center billed the family $54.50 in shipping costs for the box that arrived at Fitzgerald’s Arkansas home containing his brother’s remains. He also received a letter from Claudia Yellott, then the manager of UNT’s body donation program.

“UNT Health Science Center and our students value the selfless sacrifice made by your family,” Yellott wrote.

As of Friday, Yellott’s photo and bio were missing from the Health Science Center website, along with those of Rustin Reeves, the longtime director of the center’s anatomy program. Yellott confirmed to NBC News that she had been terminated and declined to comment further. Reeves did not respond to messages. The center declined to specify who was fired.

The Fitzgeralds’ ordeal was the scenario one Tarrant County commissioner had feared in 2018, when Yellott and Reeves pitched their plan to receive the county’s unclaimed dead.

They described it as a win for everyone: The county would save on burial costs and the center would, as Yellott phrased it, obtain “valuable material” needed to educate future physicians.

The commissioners were elated at the prospect of saving up to a half-million dollars a year. But one, Andy Nguyen, questioned the morality of dissecting bodies of people with no family to consent and raised the possibility of survivors coming forward later, horrified to learn how their relatives were treated.

“Just because they don’t have any next of kin doesn’t mean they have no voice,” Nguyen said.

After the Health Science Center pledged to handle each body with dignity, all five commissioners voted to approve the agreement. A little over a year later, Dallas County struck a similar deal, with one major difference: While Tarrant County families who couldn’t afford to make funeral arrangements were given an option to donate their relatives’ bodies to the center, Dallas County gave survivors no choice.

Soon, a steady stream of bodies began to flow to the center. The program went from receiving 439 bodies in the 2019 fiscal year to nearly 1,400 in 2021 — about a third of them unclaimed dead from Dallas and Tarrant counties. This coincided with a multimillion-dollar expansion and renovation of the Health Science Center’s body storage facilities and laboratories.

The supply of unclaimed dead helped bring in about $2.5 million a year from outside groups, according to financial records. Many of those payments came from medical device makers that spent tens of thousands of dollars to use the center-run laboratory space, BioSkills of North Texas, to train clinicians on how to use their products — a revenue stream made possible by the school’s robust supply of “cadaveric specimens.”

That economic engine has now stalled; the center announced it was permanently closing the BioSkills lab in response to NBC News’ findings. In its statement, the center said it “is committed to addressing all issues and taking corrective actions to maintain public trust.”

The partnerships with Dallas and Tarrant counties, which drew little attention when they were adopted, quietly rippled through the community of professionals who work with the dead and dying in North Texas.

Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington, was volunteering with a Tarrant County hospice provider in late 2021 when a chaplain made a comment that rocked her.

“Oh, poor Mr. Smith,” Shupe recalled the chaplain saying. “He doesn’t have long, and then it’s off to the medical school.”

Bioethicist Eli Shupe has tried for years to persuade Tarrant County to stop giving unclaimed bodies to the University of North Texas Health Science Center.Zerb Mellish for NBC News

Her shock led Shupe to spend months studying the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas. As she investigated, she pondered a philosophical question: People have the right to make decisions about their bodies while they’re alive, but should that right die with them?

No, she ultimately concluded, it should not.

Shupe herself has signed up to give her body to the Health Science Center when she dies, in part to underscore that she doesn’t oppose body donation. But she emphasized that it was her choice.

“What they’re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,” she said.

Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to “resurrectionists,” or “body snatchers,” who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.

Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that “programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.”

Experts said the Health Science Center appeared to be an outlier in terms of the number of unclaimed bodies it used. No national data exists on this issue, so NBC News surveyed more than 50 major U.S. medical schools. Each of the 44 that answered said they don’t use unclaimed bodies — and some condemned doing so.

Joy Balta, an anatomist who runs a body donation program at Point Loma Nazarene University, chaired the committee that wrote the anatomy association’s new guidelines. He said using unclaimed bodies violates basic principles of dignity and consent now embraced by most experts in his field.

One reason that bodies should come only from consenting donors, Balta and others note: Some religions have strict views about how the dead should be treated.

“We don’t know if the individual is completely against their body being donated, and we can’t just disregard that,” Balta said.