Page 13 - IAV Digital Magazine #483

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Man Suing Body Donation Company After Mother's Corpse Was Used For Bomb Testing
By Caitlin O’Kane
An Arizona man is suing a body- donation compa- ny for selling his mother's body to the military for blast testing. Jim Stauffer believed his mother's body would be used for medical research. Instead, it was used to test bomb impact.
More than five years ago, Stauffer's mother, Doris, died in hospice care after suffering from Alzheimer's. Stauffer donated
his mother's body to Biological Resource Center (BRC), hoping it could be used for Alzheimer's research, accord- ing to Reuters.
Years later, a reporter fro Reuters contact- ed Stauffer with some shocking news. In 2016, Reuters
found that more than 20 dead bodies donated to an Arizona broker were actually used in U.S. Army blast experi- ments. This was without the con- sent of the
deceased or next of kin – and for some, it was done against fam- ilies' objections.
Some families did not learn about these experi- ments from the Army, but rather, Reuters. Such was the case for Stauffer, who has since joined 32 other people in suing BRC.
Stauffer learned from Reuters that his mother's body was used in an Army experiment measuring the damage caused by roadside
bombs. Doing this without permis- sion of donors or relatives is a vio- lation of U.S. Army
policy, Reuters reports.
BRC sold donat- ed bodies like Doris Stauffer's for $5,893 each. BRC is no longer in business – but over a decade, they were able to sell more than 20,000 parts from about 5,000 human bodies, according to Reuters.
This is just one part of a multi- part investiga- tive series by Reuters called "The Body Trade."
"When a body is donated, few states provide rules governing dismemberment or use, or offer any rights to a donor's next of kin," Reuters explains in part one of the series, published in 2017. "Bodies and parts can be
bought, sold and leased, again and again. As a result, it can be difficult to track what becomes of the bodies of donors, let alone ensure that they are han- dled with dignity."
Now, Stauffer is one of many suing BRC and its owner Stephen Gore, who plead- ed guilty to illegal control of an enterprise. He was sentenced to one year of dif- fered jail time and four years proba- tion, according to KTVK.
The civil suit, filed this week, revealed disturb- ing new details about a 2014 FBI raid at the facility. During the BRC raid, which was part of a multi- state investiga- tion, the FBI found buckets of body parts and the bodies of dif- ferent people sewn together at the facility, KTVK reports.
One FBI agent testified that he
found a "cooler filled with male genitalia," "a bucket of heads, arms and legs," "infected heads" and a small woman's head sewn onto a large male torso "like Frankenstein" hanging up on the wall.
Stauffer spoke
to ABC affiliate KNXV about the suit. "I don't see a pathway of ever getting past this," he said.
"Every time there's a memory, every time there's a photograph you look at, there's this ugly thing that happened just right there staring right at you."
"[Stephen Gore] didn't care about the families, he didn't care about the people and he didn't care about the memories," Stauffer said. "If I can be a little small part of his personal financial destruction, I don't care."
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine