This article is part of Dealing the Dead, a series exploring the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
Every day for two seemingly endless months, Aleris Kolomoto Villegas repeated the same prayer. From her small concrete block home in Venezuela, she prayed to God to protect her 21-year-old daughter as she walked thousands of miles through dangerous jungles and deserts. Terrain reaching the southern border of the United States.
In September 2022, Aulimar Iturriago Villegas traveled north with his own prayers that he would make it safely to the United States, find a job, and eventually earn enough money for his mother to build a new home. I proceeded to That’s when her prayers were answered.
But less than two months after arriving in Texas, Aurimar was shot and killed in a road rage incident while sitting in the back seat of a car near Dallas.
And for her mother, the unimaginable somehow became the unimaginable.
Without the family’s knowledge, county authorities donated Mr. Orrimer’s body to a local medical college, where authorities dismembered it and assigned a dollar figure to the parts undamaged by the bullet that struck him in the head. – $900 for her torso and $703 for her legs.
The remains of Aurimar’s body were cremated and buried in a field surrounded by strangers in a Dallas cemetery, while his mother complained that her body was being turned into a commodity in the name of science. Unbeknownst to her, she desperately wanted her murdered daughter returned to Venezuela.
Aleris learned that her daughter was being used for research two years after her death, when NBC News and Noticias Telemundo reported that unclaimed bodies were being held in a fort as part of a broader investigation into the U.S. mortuary industry. It was then that the names of the hundreds of people sent were made public. Worth-based University of North Texas Health Sciences Center.
“It’s very difficult,” Aleris said in an interview from his home in a small town in western Venezuela, speaking in Spanish. “She is not a small animal to be slaughtered or chopped up.”
What happened to Orrimer was all about money and part of a pattern that NBC News has uncovered over the past two years. Across the United States, the bodies of vulnerable people are often abused and the wishes of their families ignored, as local authorities are overwhelmed with the growing number of unclaimed bodies. His death comes amid an epidemic of opioid addiction, a surge in homelessness and the breakdown of families. Reporters found that the county coroner, medical authorities and others repeatedly failed to contact possible family members before declaring the body unclaimed.
Some were buried in poor people’s fields as their loved ones reported them missing and they were searched. In other cases, bodies were sent to medical schools, biotech companies, and commercial body brokers without consent.
Orrimer is one of about 2,350 people whose bodies have been sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under an agreement with two local counties that saves the center about $2.5 million a year. It generated revenue and saved the county hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical costs. Cremation and burial costs, according to financial records.
Hundreds of bodies were used for student training and research. Others were loaned to medical technology companies that needed bodies to develop products or train doctors. Some, including Aurimar’s, were used for both.
Donated remains play an important role in medical education and the biotechnology industry, helping surgeons improve their skills and researchers develop potentially life-saving treatments. Although using unclaimed bodies for this purpose remains legal in many parts of the country, including Texas, it is widely considered unethical due to the lack of consent and the pain it causes survivors. .
Reporters identified 24 other cases in which families learned weeks, months, or even years later that their relatives’ bodies had been donated to health science centers. The families of 11 of them learned what happened only from NBC News and Noticias Telemundo. Five people, along with Orrimer’s loved ones, were horrified to find their relatives’ names on a list of unclaimed bodies published by news organizations this fall.
As a result of NBC News’ findings, the Health Sciences Center suspended its body donation program, fired the staff who ran it, and pledged to stop using unclaimed bodies. Spokesperson Andy North did not respond to questions about Orrimer’s case, but in a statement to reporters, the center apologized to all “affected individuals and families” and said it had “taken multiple corrective steps.” ” he said.
In many of the cases uncovered by NBC News, the people whose bodies were not recovered were homeless, struggling with drug addiction, or estranged from their families.
Aurimar was none of those things. She was in constant contact with her mother and had spoken to her just hours before her death. Her family, mistakenly believing month after month that her body was being kept in a morgue in Dallas, quickly scrambled to scrape together the thousands of dollars it would cost to repatriate her body to Venezuela. I worked hard to.
Instead, a cascade of bureaucratic dysfunction and communication failures ensued. The Dallas County Coroner’s Office had Aleris’ cell phone number on file, but documents obtained by NBC News show the department tried to call her before declaring Orrimer’s body abandoned. There isn’t. The agency declined to comment.
Throughout the ordeal, Aleris has struggled to recover her daughter’s body from a home without internet and a country with no diplomatic relations with the United States.
Until then, she says, she can’t really begin to grieve.
“Every night I think, ‘God, why did you take my daughter?'” she said. “I can’t accept my daughter’s death. Not yet.”
