The use of unclaimed bodies for medical study is examined in the series Dealing the Dead, which includes this article.
Arelis Coromoto Villegas prayed the same thing every day for two months that seemed to go on forever: From her tiny, cinder-block Venezuelan home, she prayed to God to keep her 21-year-old daughter safe as she traveled thousands of miles through dangerous jungle and desert landscapes to reach the southern border of America.
Aurimar Iturriago Villegas’s hopes were fulfilled in September 2022 when she entered the country securely and proceeded north, hoping to find employment and eventually save enough cash to assist her mother in building a new home.
However, two months after arriving in Texas, Aurimar was shot and killed while sitting in the backseat of a car in a road rage incident close to Dallas.
Then the unthinkable suddenly turned into the unimaginable for her mother.
Unbeknownst to her family, county officials transferred Aurimar’s body to a nearby medical school, where they dissected it and gave financial amounts to the areas that weren’t harmed by the bullet that hit her head: $900 for her chest and $703 for her legs.
In a Dallas cemetery, Aurimar’s remains were burned and interred in a field with strangers while her mother frantically tried to get her dead daughter sent back to Venezuela, not realizing that her body had been transformed into a commodity for scientific purposes.
Two years after her death, Arelis discovered her daughter had been used for research when the names of hundreds of people whose unclaimed bodies were sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth were published by NBC News and Noticias Telemundo as part of a larger investigation into the U.S. body industry.
Speaking in Spanish during an interview from her home in a small hamlet in western Venezuela, Arelis described the situation as extremely unpleasant. She is not a small animal that should be killed or dismembered.
Aurimar’s situation was financial in nature and was a component of a trend that NBC News had discovered over the previous two years: As local officials struggle with the growing number of unclaimed deaths amid widespread opioid addiction, increased homelessness, and increasingly broken families, the remains of vulnerable people are frequently mishandled and their families’ wishes are disregarded across the United States. Reporters discovered that before declaring bodies unclaimed, county coroners, hospitals, and other organizations sometimes neglected to get in touch with reachable family members.
Some persons were buried in poor people’s fields after their loved ones looked for them after reporting them missing. In others, corporations were transferred without permission to biotech firms, medical colleges, and for-profit body brokers.
According to financial records, Aurimar was one of approximately 2,350 individuals whose bodies were sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with two nearby counties. This helped the center generate approximately $2.5 million annually and assisted the counties in saving hundreds of thousands of dollars on burial and cremation expenses.
Numerous corpses were utilized for research or training by students. Others were leased to medical technology firms that need human remains to train physicians and build goods. Some were used for both, such as Aurimar’s.
Donated corpses are essential to the biotechnology sector and medical education because they help researchers create potentially life-saving therapies and surgeons hone their craft. Although it is still legal in many states, including Texas, to use unclaimed bodies for this reason, it is generally considered unethical due to the lack of consent and the suffering that survivors may endure.
Two dozen such examples have been reported by reporters, where families discovered that a relative’s remains had been given to the Health Science Center weeks, months, or even years later. Eleven of those families only learned what happened from NBC News and Noticias Telemundo including five, in addition to Aurimar s loved ones, who were horrified to find their relative s names on thelist of unclaimed bodiespublished by the news outlets this fall.
The Health Science Center paused its body donation program, dismissed its administrators, and promised to cease using unclaimed bodies in reaction to NBC News’ discoveries. Spokesperson Andy North did not answer questions about Aurimar s case, but said in a statement to reporters that the center extends apologies to all the individuals and families impacted and has taken multiple corrective actions.
The persons whose remains remained unclaimed in numerous cases that NBC News investigated were either homeless, battling drug addiction, or separated from their relatives.
None of these applied to Aurimar. She spoke to her mother just hours before she passed away and was in continuous communication with her. Her family immediately scrambled to scrape together thethousands of dollars it would have costto have her body repatriated to Venezuela, believing falsely month after month that her remains were preserved in a Dallas morgue.
Instead, what followed were a cascade of bureaucratic breakdowns and communication failures. The Dallas County Medical Examiner s Office had Arelis cellphone number on file, but there s no record in documents obtained by NBC News that the agency attempted to call her before declaring Aurimar s body abandoned. The agency declined to comment.
Throughout this ordeal, Arelis has struggled from a home with no internet, in a country with no diplomatic ties to the U.S. to reclaim her daughter s body.
Until then, she said, she can t truly begin to mourn.
Every night I say, My God, why did you take my daughter? she said. I don t accept my daughter s death. Not yet.
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