What happens to our bodies after we die? Usually that’s something for our families and loved ones to decide. But in North Texas, that hasn’t always been the case.
According to an investigation by NBC News, the bodies of people who died destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research. This apparently happens without the prior consent of the deceased and often without the approval of any surviving next of kin.
Mike Hixenbaugh, who reported on this story for NBC News, said Dallas and Tarrant counties have struck partnerships with the University of North Texas Health Science Center to deal with the issue of unclaimed bodies.
“Normally when a county has an unclaimed body, they have to bear the cost of either cremating them or burying them,” Hixenbaugh said. “Officials struck this deal and called it a ‘win-win.’ The counties could save money on burial and the medical school would get what one official called ‘valuable material.’
So the way it worked is when Dallas/Tarrant County had a body and they couldn’t find family or the family couldn’t afford to pay for a funeral, the body would go to UNT.”
At UNT, the bodies would be used to either train their medical students or sold.
“What we found was the program itself was acting as a body broker,” Hixenbaugh said. “Dissecting some of these bodies and parting them out and leasing them or selling them to other entities that would then use them to train doctors or to help test a new back pain treatment, for example.”
The use of unclaimed bodies in medical research is legal in most of the country, including Texas.
“It dates back to a kind of a really grisly, dark history when medical schools would turn to grave robbing, often robbing the graves of formerly enslaved people and using those to train students or to do research,” Hixenbaugh said. “Across the country, states like Texas passed laws to stop that. And their solution was you can use unclaimed bodies, you can use the bodies of the poor, you can use the bodies of prisoners. And those laws have stayed on the books for a century.
The practice has fallen out of favor, though, as modern medical ethics calls for consent and autonomy. What we found in North Texas, though, was that as other medical schools were ending this practice, the University of North Texas leaned into it, ramping this up in the last five years and seeing it as a way of driving revenue into their program.”
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Despite these bodies being labeled as “unclaimed” by officials, Hixenbaugh said he and his fellow reporters were sometimes able to locate the families of the deceased. Sometimes, those family members did not know their loved one had died and gone unclaimed until they got a call from a reporter.
“Those were hard calls. We found repeated failures by both the counties and the Health Science Center to do a thorough search to find the family before declaring a body unclaimed. And in a couple of cases, there were active missing person reports that had been filed with police as families searched for their loved ones, not knowing that they were dead and had been given to the school to do training on,” Hixenbaugh said.
“Those families feel violated. They feel like maybe they were estranged from their loved one (but just because the) person was homeless or struggled with drug addiction or they were mentally ill, that they were treated like they were nobody. And these families say ‘we did care about them, even though it was hard to stay in touch with them. We loved them. And we deserve to have a say in what happened to their body.’”
Hixenbaugh said he still has questions about how he was so easily able to contact next of kin when county officials failed to do so.
“We used publicly available resources: People finder websites, social media, and in some cases we were able to take a name off of this list of unclaimed persons and be on the phone with their loved one that afternoon,” he said.
“I think that in North Texas, both counties and the medical school are are taking a hard look at what happened in these cases and are looking to take steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening again in the future.”
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