This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
Some knew their loved one had died, but not what had been done with the body. Others spent years searching, only to discover that their relatives had spent their final hours alone, with no family called to their side. Nearly all said they would have honored the dead with funerals, if only they had known.
Instead, these mothers, fathers, sons and daughters were outraged to learn weeks, months or even years later that their relatives’ bodies had been given to a Texas medical school to be studied and dissected, NBC News found in a yearlong investigation. Some of the corpses were injected with preservatives and assigned to medical students. Others were frozen and cut up, their torsos, skull bones, legs and arms leased out to for-profit companies and the military. No one had consented to this treatment.
Nearly a dozen of these families received the grim and grisly truth not from a medical examiner, hospital or police officer — but from NBC News and Noticias Telemundo, including six who found their relative’s name on a list of unclaimed bodies published by the news outlets in October.
“We didn’t know she was dead or what happened to her,” said Abigail Willson, whose mother died at a Fort Worth hospice last year, and then was given without her consent to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center. “We have searched everywhere, all over Texas. If you wouldn’t have put out that list of names, we never would have known.”
For more on this story, watch
How an NBC News investigation helped families find answers
