A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed corpses, and it’s still legal in most parts of the country, including Texas. But in recent years, many programs have stopped the practice, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota, and Vermont, have banned it outright. It’s part of an evolving medical ethics that calls for anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity as living patients.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center stormed in the opposite direction.
Through a public records request, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the center’s collection, dissections and distribution of unclaimed bodies over a five-year period.
An analysis of the documents revealed that death investigators and centers in Dallas and Tarrant counties repeatedly failed to contact available family members before declaring bodies unclaimed. Reporters investigated dozens of cases and identified 12 instances in which families learned weeks, months or years later that their relatives had been offered to medical schools, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.
Five of the families learned about what had happened through NBC News, and although county and center officials said they hadn’t been able to find any survivors, reporters used public records databases, genealogy websites and social media searches to locate and contact them within just a few days.
In one case, a man learned of his mother-in-law’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called him wanting to sell her house. In another case, Dallas County recorded a man’s body as unclaimed and turned it over to the Health Sciences Center even though his family had filed a missing person’s report and were actively searching for him.
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Before the Health Sciences Center announced it was halting the program, officials in both counties had already told NBC News they were reconsidering their agreements regarding unclaimed bodies in light of the reporter’s findings.
Dallas County commissioners recently postponed a vote on whether to extend the contract, and Tarrant County’s top elected official, Judge Tim O’Hare, who voted to extend the contract with the center in January, said he plans to explore legal options “to put an end to any immoral, unethical and irresponsible conduct that has resulted from this program.”
“An individual’s body may not be used for medical research or sold for profit without the individual’s consent while alive or the consent of their next of kin,” O’Hare’s office said. “The idea that families may not know that their loved ones’ bodies are being used for research without their consent is disturbing to say the least.”
NBC News shared its findings with dozens of companies, teaching hospitals and medical schools that have relied on the Health Sciences Center for human specimens. Ten of the companies said they were unaware that the center had provided unclaimed bodies. Several, including Medtronic, said their company policies required them to get consent from the deceased or their legal representatives.
DePuy Synthes, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, said it had suspended its relationship with the center after learning from a reporter that it had received four unclaimed body parts, and that Boston Scientific’s Relivant MedSystems, which used more than two dozen unclaimed torsos to train its surgical tools, was reviewing its relationship with the center, adding that it believed the program had been consented to by donors and families.
“We empathize with the families who have not been able to be reached through this process,” the company said.
The Army also said it was reviewing its reliance on the center and plans to review and clarify its internal policies on the use of unclaimed bodies. The center has provided dozens of bodies, heads and skulls, including at least 21 unclaimed bodies, to the Army under a federal contract worth about $345,000 since 2021. An Army spokesman said officials have not considered the possibility that the program may not have received consent from donors or their families.
The Texas Funeral Services Board, which regulates the state’s body donation program, is conducting its own review. In April, it issued an order suspending the shipment of bodies out of state while it investigated a range of issues, including the Health Sciences Center’s use of unclaimed bodies.
In the case of Victor Haney, it shouldn’t have been hard for Dallas County investigators to find a survivor: His son has the same last name as his father and lives in the Dallas area. The family is outraged that no one from the county or the Health Sciences Center informed them of Haney’s death, much less asked for permission to dissect his body and distribute it for training purposes.
His family finally found out a year and a half after his death, following a chance encounter with a stranger who was struck by the similarity in the father and son’s names, followed by a phone call from NBC News.
“It’s like a hole in our souls that can never be filled,” said Brenda Cloud, one of Honey’s sisters. “We feel violated.”
Two years before Honey’s death, Oscar Fitzgerald died of a drug overdose outside a Fort Worth convenience store. County officials were unable to contact his siblings or adult children, so they had no say in the decision to donate his body. The body was transported to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, embalmed, and assigned to a first-year medical student for a year of study.
Five months passed before his family learned of his death from a friend in September 2020. When his siblings rushed to Fort Worth to claim his body, they say they were told by the Health Sciences Center that they would have to wait because their program using the remains hadn’t yet finished.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who last saw his 57-year-old brother at Thanksgiving the previous year, was stunned.
“Now that his family has come forward, are you saying we can’t keep him?” he said.
Instead, Fitzgerald said, they were told that the family would have to fill out a body donation consent form to receive the ashes.A year and a half later, after the body had been loaned a second time to a dental school in Texas, the center charged the family $54.50 for shipping the box containing the body to Fitzgerald’s Arkansas home.Fitzgerald also received a letter from Claudia Yelott, then manager of UNT’s body donation program.
“The UNT Health Sciences Center and our students greatly appreciate the selfless sacrifice your family has made,” Yelott wrote.
As of Friday, Yellott’s photo and biography had disappeared from the Health Sciences Center’s website, along with a photo of Rustin Reeves, the center’s longtime director of the anatomy program. Yellott confirmed to NBC News that he had been fired but declined further comment. Reeves did not respond to messages. The center did not disclose who had been fired.
The Fitzgeralds’ plight was the scenario one Tarrant County commissioner feared in 2018 when Yellott and Reeves proposed a plan to house the county’s unclaimed dead.
It’s a win for everyone, they explained: The county saves on burial costs, and the center gets, in Yelott’s words, “valuable material” needed to educate future physicians.
The committee members were ecstatic about the potential savings of up to $500,000 a year, but committee member Andy Nguyen questioned the morality of performing autopsies without the families’ consent, and warned that horrified survivors might later come forward after learning how their relatives had been treated.
“Just because you don’t have any next of kin doesn’t mean you don’t have a say,” Nguyen said.
All five commissioners approved the agreement after the Health Sciences Center pledged to treat each body with care. A little over a year later, Dallas County reached a similar agreement, with one big difference: Tarrant County families who couldn’t make funeral arrangements were given the option to donate their relatives’ bodies to the center, but in Dallas County, families had no choice.
Soon, bodies were pouring in to the center: The program went from accepting 439 bodies in fiscal year 2019 to about 1,400 in 2021, about a third of them unclaimed bodies from Dallas and Tarrant counties. This coincided with a multimillion-dollar expansion and renovation of the Health Sciences Center’s body storage and lab facilities.
The supply of unclaimed cadavers helped bring in about $2.5 million a year in revenue from outside groups, according to financial records, much of which came from medical device manufacturers spending tens of thousands of dollars to use the center’s lab, BioSkills of North Texas, to train clinicians how to use their products, a revenue source made possible by the school’s abundant supply of “cadaveric specimens.”
With its economic engine now stalled, the center announced it was permanently closing the BioSkills Institute in response to the NBC News findings. In a statement, the center said it was “committed to addressing all issues and taking corrective measures to maintain the public trust.”
The partnership with Dallas and Tarrant counties went largely unnoticed when it was adopted, but it has quietly sent ripples through the community of professionals who serve the dead and dying in North Texas.
Eli Shoop, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington, was volunteering with a hospice provider in Tarrant County in late 2021 when he received a shocking remark from a pastor.
“Oh, poor Mr. Smith,” Shoop recalled the pastor saying, “he doesn’t have much time left and then he’s going to medical school.”
Shocked, Shoop spent months studying Texas’s handling of unclaimed bodies, and her research led her to ask a philosophical question: People have the right to make decisions about their bodies while they’re alive, but should that right end with death?
No, she ultimately concluded, she shouldn’t.
Shoop herself has offered to donate her body to the Health Sciences Center when she dies, to underscore that she is not opposed to donating her body, but she stresses that it is her choice.
“What they’re doing is akin to grave robbery,” she said.
Shoop was alluding to the dark history of American medical schools, long before voluntary body donation programs began, when they relied on “resuscitators” and “body snatchers” to dig up the graves of the poor and former slaves. To curb this gruesome 19th-century practice, states passed laws giving schools the authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.
Many of these laws are still in place, but the medical community has largely transcended them: Last year, the American Association of Anatomists published guidelines on human donation, saying that “in the interest of justice, volunteer or unidentified individuals should not be accepted into donation programs.”
Experts said the Health Sciences Center appears to be an outlier when it comes to the number of unclaimed bodies it uses. Because there is no national data on the issue, NBC News surveyed more than 50 major U.S. medical schools. All 44 that responded said they don’t use unclaimed bodies, and some have criticized them for doing so.
Joy Barta, an anatomist who runs the body donation program at Point Loma Nazarene University and chaired the committee that wrote the anatomical society’s new guidelines, said using unclaimed bodies violates basic principles of dignity and consent that most experts in the field now accept.
Barta and his colleagues say one reason bodies should only come from consenting donors is that some religions have strict views on how the dead should be treated.
“You don’t know if a person is completely opposed to donating their body, and you can’t ignore that,” Barta said.
