Prominent Texas Medical School Sold Bodies Without Consent, Families Outraged

The University of North, Texas Ceased Selling Unclaimed Body Parts Following NBC TV InvestigationPhoto byOlga GuryanovaonUnsplash

An investigation conducted by NBC News has discovered a disturbing practice taking place in the Dallas-Fort Worth Texas area. Evidence has revealed that the remains of the destitute deceased who passed away are routinely retrieved from various facilities such as hospitals, nursing homes, and homeless encampments.

These same bodies are then utilized for educational or research purposes without the prior consent of the deceased individuals. Shockingly, this happens without the consent of any living relatives of the deceased.

At least 12 states received body parts from the University of North Texas between 2021-2023 the NBC investigation showed. Following NBC's eye-opening report, the school ceased the program after initially saying unclaimed bodies served as a valuable tool for medical training.

Mike Hixenbaugh, who reported on this story for NBC News, said Dallas and Tarrant counties partnered with the University of North Texas Health Science Center to deal with unclaimed bodies.

“Normally when a county has an unclaimed body, they have to bear the cost of either cremating them or burying them,” Hixenbaugh said. “Officials struck this deal and called it a ‘win-win.’ The counties could save money on burial and the medical school would get what one official called ‘valuable material.’

Body harvesting is a multi-billion dollar business. For example, A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Victor Carl Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool.

A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. Then next the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.

Coroners and Medical Examiners Should Post the Names of Unclaimed Bodies into Government Database

In the process, if Dallas/Tarrant County encountered a decedent with no known family or the family was unable to cover the funeral costs, the body was transferred to the University of North Texas (UNT). At UNT, these bodies were allocated for educational purposes, such as training medical students, or they were sold for research and academic use.

According to the NBC Investigative report, death investigation experts say these mistakes are preventable. Coroners and medical examiners, they say, should adopt detailed written protocols for identifying and contacting next of kin. And when exhaustive efforts to find families fall short, experts say officials should post the names of the unclaimed dead to a government database where families can search for loved ones.

Should Unclaimed Bodies Be Sold for Cash?Photo byYouTube

Body Broker

“What we found was the program itself was acting as a body broker,” Hixenbaugh said. “Dissecting some of these bodies and parting them out and leasing them or selling them to other entities that would then use them to train doctors or to help test a new back pain treatment, for example.”

The medical use of unclaimed bodies in medical research is legal nationwide including in Texas.

Robbing Graves of Deceased Slaves

“It dates back to a kind of a grisly, dark history when medical schools would turn to grave robbing, often robbing the graves of formerly enslaved people and using those to train students or to do research,” Hixenbaugh said.

“Across the country, states like Texas passed laws to stop that. And their solution was you can use unclaimed bodies, you can use the bodies of the poor, you can use the bodies of prisoners. And those laws have stayed on the books for a century."

Hixenbaugh continues.

"The practice has fallen out of favor, though, as modern medical ethics calls for consent and autonomy. What we found in North Texas, though, was that as other medical schools were ending this practice, the University of North Texas leaned into it, ramping this up in the last five years and seeing it as a way of driving revenue into their program.”

Despite the classification of the decedents by authorities as "unclaimed," Hixenbaugh noted that he and his colleagues often succeeded in tracing the families of the deceased. This effort resulted in instances where family members were unaware of their relative's passing and their unclaimed status until they received a notification from a TV reporter.

“Those were hard calls. We found repeated failures by both the counties and the Health Science Center to do a thorough search to find the family before declaring a body unclaimed. And in a couple of cases, there were active missing person reports that had been filed with police as families searched for their loved ones, not knowing that they were dead and had been given to the school to do training on,” Hixenbaugh said.

“Those families feel violated. They feel like maybe they were estranged from their loved one (but just because the) person was homeless or struggled with drug addiction or was mentally ill, they were treated like they were nobody.

"And these families say ‘we did care about them, even though it was hard to stay in touch with them. We loved them. And we deserve to have a say in what happened to their body.’”

The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort WorthPhoto byWikimedia Commons

Hixenbaugh expressed his lingering uncertainties regarding the ease with which he reached out to the next of kin, especially in light of the county officials' reported failures.

“We used publicly available resources: People finder websites, social media, and in some cases we were able to take a name off of this list of unclaimed persons and be on the phone with their loved one that afternoon,” he said.

“I think that in North Texas, both counties and the medical school are taking a hard look at what happened in these cases and are looking to take steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening again in the future.”

Reporter CJ Walker can be reached at newsjournalist360@gmail.com