Shocking details have been revealed in a lawsuit against a body donation facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Biological Resource Center (BRC) was raided by the FBI back in 2014 as part of a human body parts trafficking investigation.
“This is a horror story. It’s just unbelievable. This story is unbelievable,” said Troy Harp, who donated his mother and grandmother to the facility back in 2012 and 2013.
Harp is but one of over 30 people suing the BRC after having donated bodies to the facility under the belief that the corpses would be used for scientific purposes such as cancer research.
“Cancer and leukemia, and whatever else, using sample cells, that’s what I was told,” Harp said.
Testimony from one of the FBI agents involved in the 2014 investigation has been released to the public for the first time.
The agent reportedly 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 body “like Frankenstein” that was then hung up on the wall, and referred to as a “morbid joke” in the lawsuit.
“Who in their right mind? It’s absolutely gross,” said Harp.
The bodies were said to have been chopped up using chainsaws and other “tools that are not appropriate for dismembering scientific bodies,” Harp also mentioned.
According to the lawsuit, “pools of human blood and bodily fluids were found on the floor of the freezer,” as well as bodies without id tags.
Harp said a box allegedly containing his mother’s ashes showed up on his doorstep, Harp however, has doubts that the ashes are even hers.
When asked if he feels he has gotten any closure from the incident, Harp replied “No, this is open, and I don’t think I ever will.”
According to legal documents, the owner of the BRC, Stephen Gore, received one year of deferred jail time and four years of probation after pleading guilty to illegal control of an enterprise.
The lawsuit against the BRC is ongoing.
Another Case
In another bizarre case, an Illinois father and son were charged in April for allegedly selling body parts infected with HIV, sepsis, and hepatitis to unwitting dentists and medics on the black market.They both were associated with the now-closed Biological Resource Centre of Rosemont, Illinois, which sold and leased bodies and body parts.
Another man is already serving nine years for the scheme, which involved collecting bodies from people who thought they were donating to science, dismembering them, and selling them to researchers and educators for large sums of money.
The federal charges state the goal of the scheme was to “profit from payments made by customers who were unaware that they either received remains that had tested positive for serious infectious diseases or were unable to be tested for these diseases.”
The scheme allegedly ran from 2008 to 2014 in and around Illinois.
