Note: This deals with a gruesome subject that may be too intense or graphic for some.
Just two months after 21-year-old migrant Aurimar Iturriago Villegas came to the United States, she was killed in a road rage incident near Dallas. But her family’s grief back in Venezuela would soon be compounded.
Without their consent, county authorities donated Aurimar’s body to The University of North Texas Health Science Center medical school where, according to a new report, they cut up her body and sold off parts for scientific research.
This reporting is done by the investigative team at NBC News lead by Mike Hixenbaugh as part of the series “Dealing the Dead.”
Hixenbaugh spoke with Texas Standard on how this all happened and the many similar stories. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Aurimar’s family is one of several families who found what happened to the bodies of loved ones as the result of your reporting. But first, I want to go to the facts of Aurimar’s case. How did her body end up at the medical school after she was killed?
Mike Hixenbaugh: Her body ended up at the medical school because of contracts that Dallas County had entered into with the University of North Texas.
Across the country, when someone dies and there isn’t family who’s immediately able to be reached, the bodies are deemed unclaimed, and local officials have to figure out what to do with them. They either will cremate them or hold on to them or bury them in pauper’s graves.
In the case of Dallas and Tarrant counties, they automatically gave them to the medical school for student training and research.
And in the case of Aurimar, like we found in several other cases, what went wrong was there was family who was reachable. Her mother in Venezuela had been trying to, from afar, figure out how to repatriate her body, but without ever speaking directly to her, Dallas County deemed Aurimar’s body to be unclaimed and sent it to the medical school.
You spoke with Aurimar’s family, her mother?
Yeah, I teamed up with a colleague at Telemundo named Anagilmara Vílchez. And because the family only speaks Spanish, she handled the interviews and she spoke extensively with Aurimar’s mother and her siblings in Venezuela. And they were devastated.
They were already devastated because, you know, her daughter was was killed in a foreign country and she was far away. But then to learn from our reporting that after she died, that her body was sold off, not just given to the medical school, but then leased out to for-profit companies, and that she would never be able to reclaim her daughter’s remains, it really devastated her.
What is really striking is you report that there are dollar figures that are assigned to different body parts. $900 for a torso, $703 for her legs. How common is this trade in body parts?
This is very common. Human specimens, bodies and body parts are needed to train medical students. They’re needed to train doctors on new surgical techniques or to test out new medical devices.
What people don’t realize is that when they donate their body to science, what they’re really doing is providing their body to a system that treats those bodies and body parts as commodities. And so, yeah, there’s dollar figures that are assigned to the parts.
What’s unusual in this case is that the University of North Texas, one, was taking unclaimed bodies – meaning bodies for whom they had no consent, nobody donated. It was just decided by government officials. And two, we haven’t found other instances where a government, state medical school was getting involved in the body trade itself.
Who has been profiting from this? The university? Doctors? Who?
Well, the University of North Texas really grew what was called it’s BioSkills Lab, which is this lab at the University of Texas in Fort Worth where outside groups could pay literally tens of thousands of dollars to rent space and access to bodies and body parts to train physicians, to do research, to practice different procedures… And so this was seen as a new revenue stream.
I take it this is all legal?
It is all legal.
However, following our reporting, Texas Sen. Tan Parker, a Republican in North Texas, has pledged to introduce legislation this session banning the use of unclaimed bodies without consent in any way.
And then a separate bill he plans to file would impose new regulations over the body trade, broadly requiring consent and informed consent, where if someone willingly donates their body to a medical school or to any other group, that they’ll be notified of how the body will be used.
If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.
