An NBC News investigation uncovered a troubling trend in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas region. The story aired in September; the proof against a prominent medical school identified as the University of North Texas was irrefutable: dead people who left this world had their bodies taken under questionable circumstances from different facilities like nursing homes, hospitals, and homeless camps. Then, these same bodies were used for research/educational purposes. Shockingly, none of the deceased’s surviving relatives gave permission for the ghoulish deeds to happen.
The investigation reported that at least 12 states paid for body parts from the University of North Texas between 2021 and 2023. The institution ended the scheme after NBC’s blockbusting exposé, despite the facility’s initial statement that unclaimed bodies served as an important teaching tool for medical training.
Reporters were stunned to discover how easy it was to use their location sources to easily find the same relatives the medical facility had claimed they weren’t able to contact to make a death notification.
Mike Hixenbaugh, reported the eye-opening story for NBC News. Hixenbaugh 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 surgical tools.
A medical education company spent $900 to send Honey’s torso to Pittsburgh, so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. Thereafter, the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from Honey’s 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 said 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.
Body Parts Broker
“What we found was the program itself 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
Body parts used for studies harken back to a dark period in America.”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 bodies 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.’”
Hixenbaugh expressed lingering uncertainties regarding how easily he contacted the decedent’s next of kin, particularly in light of the county officials’ reported failures to duplicate the same.
“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.”