As families searched, a Texas medical school cut up their loved ones
Posted on 09/17/2024
DALLAS ? Long before his bleak final years, when he struggled with mental illness and lived mostly on the streets, Victor Carl Honey joined the Army, serving honorably for nearly a decade. And so, when his heart gave out and he died alone 30 years later, he was entitled to a burial with military honors.
Instead, without his consent or his family?s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner?s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country.
A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey?s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.
In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the 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 without their consent ? and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.
Honey, who died in September 2022, is one of about 2,350 people whose unclaimed bodies have been given to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. Among these, more than 830 bodies were selected by the center for dissection and study. After the medical school and other groups were finished, the bodies were cremated and, in most cases, interred at area cemeteries or scattered at sea. Some had families who were looking for them.
For months as NBC News reported this article, Health Science Center officials defended their practices, arguing that using unclaimed bodies was essential for training future doctors. But on Friday, after reporters shared detailed findings of this investigation, the center announced it was immediately suspending its body donation program and firing the officials who led it. The center said it was also hiring a consulting firm to investigate the program?s operations.
?As a result of the information brought to light through your inquiries, it has become clear that failures existed in the management and oversight of The University of North Texas Health Science Center?s Willed Body Program,? the statement said. ?The program has fallen short of the standards of respect, care and professionalism that we demand.?
Last year, NBC News revealed in its ?Lost Rites? investigation that coroners and medical examiners in Mississippi and nationally had repeatedly failed to notify families of their loved ones? deaths before burying them in pauper?s graveyards. That investigation led reporters to North Texas, where officials had come to view the unclaimed dead not as a costly burden, but as a free resource.
Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center?s body business flourished.
On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey?s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies ? including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic ? that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of ?the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.?
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Proponents say using unclaimed bodies transforms a tragic situation into one of hope and service, providing a steady supply of human specimens needed to educate doctors and advance medical research. But for families who later discover their missing relatives were dissected and studied, the news is haunting, compounding their grief and depriving them of the opportunity to mourn.
?The county and the medical school are doing this because it saves them money, but that doesn?t make it right,? said Thomas Champney, an anatomy professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who researches the ethical use of human bodies. ?Since these individuals did not consent, they should not be used in any form or fashion.?
A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it ? part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.
Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.
An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties ? and by the center ? to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.
Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.
In one case, a man learned of his stepmother?s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man?s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.
Before the Health Science Center announced it was suspending the program, officials in the two counties had already told NBC News they were reconsidering their unclaimed body agreements in light of the reporters? findings.
Commissioners in Dallas County recently postponed a vote on whether to extend their contract. The top elected official in Tarrant County, Judge Tim O?Hare ? who voted to renew the county?s agreement with the center in January ? said he planned to explore legal options ?to end any and all immoral, unethical, and irresponsible practices stemming from this program.?
?No individual?s remains should be used for medical research, nor sold for profit, without their pre-death consent, or the consent of their next of kin,? O?Hare?s office said. ?The idea that families may be unaware that their loved ones? remains are being used for research without consent is disturbing, to say the least.?
NBC News also shared its findings with dozens of companies, teaching hospitals and medical schools that have relied on the Health Science Center to supply human specimens. Ten said they did not know the center had provided them with unclaimed bodies. Some, including Medtronic, said they had internal policies requiring consent from the deceased or their legal surrogate.
DePuy Synthes, a Johnson & Johnson company, said it had paused its relationship with the center after learning from a reporter that it had received body parts from four unclaimed people. And Boston Scientific, whose company Relievant Medsystems used the torsos of more than two dozen unclaimed bodies for training on a surgical tool, said it was reviewing its transactions with the center, adding that it had believed the program obtained consent from donors or families.
?We empathize with the families who were not reached as part of this process,? the company said.
The Army said it, too, was examining its reliance on the center and planned to review and clarify internal policies on the use of unclaimed bodies. Under federal contracts totaling about $345,000, the center has provided the Army with dozens of whole bodies, heads and skull bones since 2021 ? including at least 21 unclaimed bodies. An Army spokesperson said officials had not considered the possibility that the program hadn?t gotten consent from donors or their families.
The Texas Funeral Service Commission, which regulates body donation programs in the state, is conducting a review of its own. In April, the agency issued a moratorium on out-of-state shipments while it studies a range of issues, including the use of unclaimed bodies by the Health Science Center.
In the case of Victor Honey, it shouldn?t have been hard for Dallas County investigators to find survivors: His son shares his father?s first and last name and lives in the Dallas area. Family members are outraged that no one from the county or the Health Science Center informed them of Honey?s death, much less sought permission to dissect his body and distribute it for training.
It wasn?t until a year and a half after he died that his relatives finally learned that news ? from a chance encounter with a stranger struck by the similarity of the father?s and son?s names, followed by a phone call from NBC News.
?It?s like a hole in your soul 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 failed to reach his siblings or adult children, so they had no voice in deciding whether to donate his body. It was taken to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, pumped with preservatives and assigned to a first-year medical student to study over the coming year.
Five months passed before his family learned from a friend in September 2020 that he was dead. ??When his brother rushed to Fort Worth to claim the remains, he said he was told by the Health Science Center that he?d have to wait ? the program was not done using the body.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who had last seen his 57-year-old brother the previous Thanksgiving, was aghast.
?Now that the family has come forward,? he said, ?you mean to tell me we can?t have him??
Instead, Fitzgerald said he was told his family must fill out donation consent forms to eventually receive his brother?s ashes. A year and a half later ? after the body had been leased out a second time, to a Texas dental school ? the center billed the family $54.50 in shipping costs for the box that arrived at Fitzgerald?s Arkansas home containing his brother?s remains. He also received a letter from Claudia Yellott, then the manager of UNT?s body donation program.
?UNT Health Science Center and our students value the selfless sacrifice made by your family,? Yellott wrote.
As of Friday, Yellott?s photo and bio were missing from the Health Science Center website, along with those of Rustin Reeves, the longtime director of the center?s anatomy program. Yellott confirmed to NBC News that she had been terminated and declined to comment further. Reeves did not respond to messages. The center declined to specify who was fired.
The Fitzgeralds? ordeal was the scenario one Tarrant County commissioner had feared in 2018, when Yellott and Reeves pitched their plan to receive the county?s unclaimed dead.
They described it as a win for everyone: The county would save on burial costs and the center would, as Yellott phrased it, obtain ?valuable material? needed to educate future physicians.
The commissioners were elated at the prospect of saving up to a half-million dollars a year. But one, Andy Nguyen, questioned the morality of dissecting bodies of people with no family to consent and raised the possibility of survivors coming forward later, horrified to learn how their relatives were treated.
?Just because they don?t have any next of kin doesn?t mean they have no voice,? Nguyen said.
After the Health Science Center pledged to handle each body with dignity, all five commissioners voted to approve the agreement. A little over a year later, Dallas County struck a similar deal, with one major difference: While Tarrant County families who couldn?t afford to make funeral arrangements were given an option to donate their relatives? bodies to the center, Dallas County gave survivors no choice.
Soon, a steady stream of bodies began to flow to the center. The program went from receiving 439 bodies in the 2019 fiscal year to nearly 1,400 in 2021 ? about a third of them unclaimed dead from Dallas and Tarrant counties. This coincided with a multimillion-dollar expansion and renovation of the Health Science Center?s body storage facilities and laboratories.
The supply of unclaimed dead helped bring in about $2.5 million a year from outside groups, according to financial records. Many of those payments came from medical device makers that spent tens of thousands of dollars to use the center-run laboratory space, BioSkills of North Texas, to train clinicians on how to use their products ? a revenue stream made possible by the school?s robust supply of ?cadaveric specimens.?
That economic engine has now stalled; the center announced it was permanently closing the BioSkills lab in response to NBC News? findings. In its statement, the center said it ?is committed to addressing all issues and taking corrective actions to maintain public trust.?
The partnerships with Dallas and Tarrant counties, which drew little attention when they were adopted, quietly rippled through the community of professionals who work with the dead and dying in North Texas.
Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington, was volunteering with a Tarrant County hospice provider in late 2021 when a chaplain made a comment that rocked her.
?Oh, poor Mr. Smith,? Shupe recalled the chaplain saying. ?He doesn?t have long, and then it?s off to the medical school.?
Her shock led Shupe to spend months studying the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas. As she investigated, she pondered a philosophical question: People have the right to make decisions about their bodies while they?re alive, but should that right die with them?
No, she ultimately concluded, it should not.
Shupe herself has signed up to give her body to the Health Science Center when she dies, in part to underscore that she doesn?t oppose body donation. But she emphasized that it was her choice.
?What they?re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,? she said.
Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to ?resurrectionists,? or ?body snatchers,? who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.
Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that ?programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.?
Experts said the Health Science Center appeared to be an outlier in terms of the number of unclaimed bodies it used. No national data exists on this issue, so NBC News surveyed more than 50 major U.S. medical schools. Each of the 44 that answered said they don?t use unclaimed bodies ? and some condemned doing so.
Joy Balta, an anatomist who runs a body donation program at Point Loma Nazarene University, chaired the committee that wrote the anatomy association?s new guidelines. He said using unclaimed bodies violates basic principles of dignity and consent now embraced by most experts in his field.
One reason that bodies should come only from consenting donors, Balta and others note: Some religions have strict views about how the dead should be treated.
?We don?t know if the individual is completely against their body being donated, and we can?t just disregard that,? Balta said.
Since 2021, dozens of entities have received unclaimed bodies from the Health Science Center ? including some, like the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, that explicitly prohibit the practice on ethical grounds.
The Little Rock-based school received shipments of skull bones and heads in 2023 and 2024 that included parts harvested from unclaimed bodies, records show. Leslie Taylor, a University of Arkansas medical school spokesperson, said because the UNT office that provided specimens is called the Willed Body Program, officials ?believed they came from donors who willed their remains for education and study.?
Taylor said the school would adopt procedures to ensure it receives bodies only from people who have given explicit permission.
Before abruptly suspending the program last week, the Health Science Center had vigorously defended its practices.
?An unclaimed individual is incapable of consenting to any process after death, which includes burial, donation, cremation, eco-burials or any other use of the body,? the center had said in a statement on Aug. 16. ?If a relative is not located or does not claim the remains, a decision must still be made.?
Shupe argued that it?s problematic for a public medical school to benefit from the deaths of the ?very poor? in its community. She has now embarked on a campaign to end the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas and nationally.
After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color.
?How does it look,? she said, ?when a Black body is dissected with nobody?s permission at all, simply because they died poor??
All Victor Honey?s family has to go by are faded memories, a handful of keepsakes, online snapshots and a trail of court records spanning eight states and Washington, D.C. These clues tell a disjointed story of an Army veteran tormented by paranoid delusions who repeatedly rejected help as he slid into homelessness and whose body went unclaimed, despite having a family who cared deeply for him.
His two sisters remember Honey teaching them math, making them laugh, shielding them from bullies and helping raise them when their parents divorced and moved the family from Mississippi to Cleveland in the 1970s. He was meticulous, hardworking, well-dressed ? and in search of a calling.
After starting college, Honey joined the Army in late 1984 and reported to Texas? Fort Hood, where he trained as a medic and, at a military club, danced with a soon-to-be Air Force enlistee named Kimberly. They married not long after and had a daughter. A son followed.
The young family lived at the base until 1988, when Honey?s enlistment ended. He then joined the Army Reserves in Dallas and was called up to support the first Gulf War. Though he didn?t want to go, he spent four months in Germany, so upset about the deployment that he rarely left his base. He remained angry after he returned home.
Kimberly Patman said Honey had multiple affairs, leading them to separate in 1992, which threw him into a deep depression. He sought mental health services from a local Department of Veterans Affairs facility and was given antipsychotic medication that he quit after a month, saying he was allergic.
From there, his life unraveled.
In 1995, Honey was arrested in Dallas for trespassing. A doctor at the jail called Patman and said he?d had some kind of breakdown. She called his father in Cleveland, who brought him home.
He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but refused to take the medication that eased his delusional thoughts. He was convinced people were coming after him, barricaded himself in his room and became a compulsive hoarder, filing papers in a leather satchel.
He was off his medications in early 1997 when he stole a car from a dealership and robbed three banks in three states ? each time handing a teller a note demanding money. He had no weapon. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
After he was released, Honey tried living in Cleveland, but abruptly left.
?He just disappeared,? Patman said. ?They didn?t know where he was. We didn?t know where he was. And it was like that for years.?
He eventually drifted to Washington, where he wound up on the streets. He filed more than a dozen lawsuits, claiming an array of grievances. He posted a video to YouTube in which he showed his broken teeth and suggested the police were responsible. ?This is a horrendous, horrendous life here in Washington,? he told the camera.
He landed in Dallas again in late 2018. He was arrested multiple times for fare evasion and filing a false police report, and appeared at city council meetings claiming he?d been wrongfully charged. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting an emergency room nurse who was attempting to provide him care.
And then came the phone call that brought the family together again.
In early 2022, a caseworker at a Dallas-area hospital contacted Honey?s daughter, Victoria, in Montgomery, Alabama, to say he was in intensive care and might not survive, the family said. Patman and Victoria rushed to his side and were told his kidneys were failing.
?We?re here, the kids are here, we love you,? Patman told Honey. In response, he opened his eyes and asked, ?Why did you divorce me?? They ended up laughing about it.
Brenda Cloud, his sister, called from Cleveland. ?I would just talk to him and remind him of growing up and of his children, and he had a lot to fight for,? she said.
Honey?s condition improved, but he ignored advice to go to a nursing home and instead checked himself out. Several weeks later, he got on the phone with his namesake son. They?d often gone years without talking, but the son said he knew his father loved him.
That was Victor Carl Honey?s last contact with his family.
On Sept. 19, 2022, Honey was discovered semiconscious in a wheelchair at a downtown Dallas light rail station and taken to Baylor University Medical Center. He died early the next morning. He was 58.
After a Baylor social worker was unable to find his family, Honey?s body was transported to the Dallas County Medical Examiner?s Office, where an investigator was assigned to find next of kin.
The county investigator sought information from police and area hospitals but was unable to locate relatives. She then turned to the internet, where she found numbers for Patman, Honey?s brother in Ohio, his stepmother and his late father, but she reported they were disconnected. On Oct. 17, 2022, the investigator wrote that her search was complete and no family was found. The medical examiner?s office deemed Honey?s body unclaimed.
That same day, Honey was delivered to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where he was placed in a freezer, awaiting assignment.
One of the most solemn duties of local government is notifying families when someone dies. Though the world, in so many ways, has never been more connected, finding survivors still can be difficult in an era of growing homelessness and increasingly fractured families.
Death investigators at the Dallas County Medical Examiner?s Office follow a detailed checklist: They reach out to area hospitals to seek emergency contact information, search missing person reports, and comb public records databases for possible phone numbers. They also call neighbors and homeless shelters. If no family is found, they must sign an affidavit stating they did all they could.
In Tarrant County, officials delegated the primary responsibility for contacting next of kin to the Health Science Center, which said it takes similar steps.
But these efforts repeatedly fell short.
For two and a half years, Fran Moore of Lodi, New York, didn?t know what happened to her 79-year-old father, Carl Yenner. She cried when an NBC News reporter notified her in February that he had died at a Dallas hospital in May 2021 and his body had been sent to the Health Science Center.
Moore said she and her brother had struggled to stay in touch with their father across the miles. After not hearing from him, her brother filed a missing person report in Wichita Falls, about two hours from Dallas, where Yenner had lived. They still don?t know how he wound up in Dallas, how he died or why nobody contacted them. A Dallas County worker signed a form in June 2021 stating she had completed an exhaustive search for possible relatives.
But after spotting Yenner?s name on a list of unclaimed bodies provided by Dallas County, NBC News quickly identified Moore and her brother as Yenner?s children and found working phone numbers for each of them.
?If you could find us,? Moore said, ?why didn?t they??
Another question left unanswered: Given that Yenner was an Army veteran and entitled to federal burial benefits, what was the economic argument for Dallas County to send his body to the Health Science Center? At least 32 unclaimed veterans, including Honey, have been given to the program since 2020, records show.
After the center was done with Yenner?s body, it was cremated and interred among fellow service members at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. Moore said she?s heartbroken she couldn?t bury him with the rest of his family in New Jersey.
?To not have any kind of funeral for him,? she said, ?for his family to come see him to say goodbye??
Without commenting on specific cases, Dallas County Administrator Darryl Martin offered condolences to families whose relatives were used by the program. He said his staff works hard to locate family members and treats bodies with dignity. He didn?t address the use of unclaimed veterans.
In January, in an attempt to improve its efforts to find survivors in Tarrant County, the Health Science Center hired a company called The Voice After Life, whose mission is to help governments locate families of the unclaimed. The center said it has found families in about 80% of cases since then; officials did not know the previous success rate.
In a statement issued weeks before announcing it was suspending the program, the center said it ?seeks to understand and honor the wishes of the family and deceased.?
It did not, however, honor the wishes of Michael Dewayne Coleman?s relatives.
Coleman, 43, died alone on Oct. 21, 2023, in a Dallas hospital after possibly being hit by a car. An investigator for the medical examiner signed off on his case file, saying ?all reasonable efforts? had been made to find next of kin.
But his relatives should have been easy to reach. More than a week before his death, his fiancée, Louisa Harvey, had filed a missing person report with the Dallas Police Department after he failed to return from a night out with friends, not knowing he was already languishing in a hospital. She spent months searching for him, alongside two of Coleman?s sisters. She printed missing person posters and canvassed neighborhoods near their home.
She said she called the detective assigned to the missing person case almost every day, eventually suspecting that finding Coleman wasn?t a priority because of his criminal record, which included illegal drug use and two domestic violence convictions.
Harvey finally learned of his death in March, after the Dallas County medical examiner listed him as an unclaimed body in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, a free federal database meant to connect missing person reports with reports of unclaimed bodies. By the time Harvey found the posting online, the medical examiner had sent Coleman?s body to the Health Science Center.
His family could have learned of his death months earlier if the police detective assigned to find Coleman had listed him as a missing person in NamUs, but records show he never did. In response to questions from NBC News, a Dallas Police spokesperson said the department had opened an internal investigation into the detective?s handling of the case and would implement a policy change to prevent similar mistakes.
Harvey couldn?t believe Coleman?s body had been donated without the family?s consent ? or his. Last year, while filling out an application for a state ID, she said, Coleman had made clear he didn?t want his organs donated because of his distrust of the medical system; she doubts he would have wanted to donate his whole body.
But when Harvey and one of Coleman?s sisters, Shea Coleman, repeatedly asked the medical examiner and the Health Science Center to release his body ? or at least to let them view it ? they were told no. In June, a worker at the medical examiner?s office wrote in case notes that she spoke to Yellott, the manager of UNT?s body donation program, who told her Coleman was slated to be used in a longer-term course and that his family could receive his remains when the center was finished with him.
In 12 to 24 months.
In August, after NBC News inquired about his case, a Health Science Center official told reporters that Coleman?s body would be cremated and returned to the family much sooner ? an abrupt reversal that the center attributed to the Texas Funeral Service Commission?s temporary ban on out-of-state body shipments. Ten days later, the medical examiner called Harvey to let her know Coleman?s ashes were ready to be picked up.
The center?s refusal to let her see her fiancé?s body has made it harder to grieve, Harvey said.
?I?m lying awake every night thinking, ?Is that my Michael??? she said. ??Did he actually die???
After Victor Honey?s body arrived at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, the harvesting began.
Depending on how they were to be used, bodies were either frozen or embalmed. Some were left whole and set aside to train students. Others, like Honey?s, were dissected with scalpels and bone saws, to be distributed on the open market.
In November 2022, Honey?s right leg was used in a training at the center paid for by Getinge, a Swedish medical technology company that makes instruments for use in a surgical procedure called endoscopic vein harvest.
In January 2023, a week after the medical examiner?s office reported that Honey was eligible for a veteran?s burial, bones from his skull were shipped to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston ? where Honey had been ordered to report before his Gulf War deployment more than three decades earlier.
In May 2023, the Health Science Center shipped Honey?s torso to Pittsburgh, where the training company National Bioskills Laboratories provided it to a medical product company renting its facilities to teach doctors a pain-relief procedure called spinal cord stimulation.
NBC News informed Getinge, the Army and National Bioskills about the center?s regular use of unclaimed bodies and Honey?s family not providing consent.
Dr. Douglas Hampers, National Bioskills? CEO and an orthopedic surgeon, said he was disturbed to learn his company has received unclaimed bodies and expressed sympathy for Honey?s family.
While human specimens are crucial for medical advances, Hampers said bodies should not be used without consent. He said his company would ensure that it no longer accepted unclaimed bodies and would adopt policies to make certain future specimens were donated with families? permission.
?I don?t think you have to violate a family?s rights in order to train physicians,? he said.
A Getinge spokesperson emailed a statement saying only that the company regularly reviews its policies and operations, ?including what we expect from our suppliers.?
In a statement, the Army said that if Honey?s remains were procured legally, the use of his body complied with the service?s current policies.
In July 2023, after Honey?s torso had been returned to the Health Science Center, his remains were cremated and later his ashes were brought to the Dallas County medical examiner.
And there they sat, with no one to claim them. Months passed.
In late April, Honey?s son, Victor, was boxing cans at the Dallas food bank where he volunteered when a woman approached him. She?d overheard someone calling out his name. ?Do you know someone else named Victor Honey?? she asked him.
The woman said she knew his father when they both stayed at a downtown homeless shelter and had heard he died. Victor didn?t want to believe it. He tried to put it out of his mind. But the next morning, he called his mother and told her what he?d heard. She cried out and burst into tears.
An internet search led Victor to the medical examiner?s office, which confirmed the details of his father?s death and later told him the remains were available to be picked up.
About the same time, NBC News had found Honey?s name on a list of people whose unclaimed bodies were obtained by the Health Science Center. Using public records, a reporter tracked down Patman, Honey?s ex-wife, and sent her a message on Facebook. She responded immediately.
On a call, the reporter broke the news of how Honey?s body was used.
His family was appalled. Patman said she would have argued against Honey being cut apart and studied, noting that he once told her that he didn?t want to be an organ donor. Victor, though, said he might have been open to donating his father?s body for medical research.
?But y?all should have asked us about it,? he said. ?They just sent his body parts away.?
When the family gathered in early June to finally lay Honey to rest, many expressed remorse about not being able to help him. They were frustrated to have no say in what happened to his body. And they said they hoped sharing his story would help spare others from similar anguish.
?Victor had a big, strong family,? Patman told family members. ?And now we are going to speak for him.?
On a muggy Monday morning, a couple dozen of Honey?s relatives ? nieces and nephews, siblings and cousins, Patman and their children ? gathered in a pavilion at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery for the farewell they had long been denied.
A recording of taps played. A soldier knelt in front of Honey?s daughter, Victoria, and handed her a folded U.S. flag ?as a symbol of our appreciation of your loved one?s honorable and faithful service.?
After the funeral, Honey?s relatives made their way to Section 40, Grave No. 464, where a crew dug a hole and placed the urn in the ground. They installed a temporary marker that soon would be replaced by a white granite headstone standing among rows of thousands.
Brenda Cloud, Honey?s sister, is furious over what transpired in the 622 days between her brother?s death and his burial. And she wants answers for the others whose bodies were cut up and studied without consent.
?Whether they had family or not,? she said, ?every person deserves to have that dignity.?
Instead, without his consent or his family?s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner?s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country.
A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey?s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.
In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the 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 without their consent ? and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.
Honey, who died in September 2022, is one of about 2,350 people whose unclaimed bodies have been given to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with Dallas and Tarrant counties. Among these, more than 830 bodies were selected by the center for dissection and study. After the medical school and other groups were finished, the bodies were cremated and, in most cases, interred at area cemeteries or scattered at sea. Some had families who were looking for them.
For months as NBC News reported this article, Health Science Center officials defended their practices, arguing that using unclaimed bodies was essential for training future doctors. But on Friday, after reporters shared detailed findings of this investigation, the center announced it was immediately suspending its body donation program and firing the officials who led it. The center said it was also hiring a consulting firm to investigate the program?s operations.
?As a result of the information brought to light through your inquiries, it has become clear that failures existed in the management and oversight of The University of North Texas Health Science Center?s Willed Body Program,? the statement said. ?The program has fallen short of the standards of respect, care and professionalism that we demand.?
Last year, NBC News revealed in its ?Lost Rites? investigation that coroners and medical examiners in Mississippi and nationally had repeatedly failed to notify families of their loved ones? deaths before burying them in pauper?s graveyards. That investigation led reporters to North Texas, where officials had come to view the unclaimed dead not as a costly burden, but as a free resource.
Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center?s body business flourished.
On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey?s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies ? including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic ? that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of ?the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.?
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Proponents say using unclaimed bodies transforms a tragic situation into one of hope and service, providing a steady supply of human specimens needed to educate doctors and advance medical research. But for families who later discover their missing relatives were dissected and studied, the news is haunting, compounding their grief and depriving them of the opportunity to mourn.
?The county and the medical school are doing this because it saves them money, but that doesn?t make it right,? said Thomas Champney, an anatomy professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who researches the ethical use of human bodies. ?Since these individuals did not consent, they should not be used in any form or fashion.?
A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it ? part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.
Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.
An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties ? and by the center ? to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.
Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.
In one case, a man learned of his stepmother?s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man?s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.
Before the Health Science Center announced it was suspending the program, officials in the two counties had already told NBC News they were reconsidering their unclaimed body agreements in light of the reporters? findings.
Commissioners in Dallas County recently postponed a vote on whether to extend their contract. The top elected official in Tarrant County, Judge Tim O?Hare ? who voted to renew the county?s agreement with the center in January ? said he planned to explore legal options ?to end any and all immoral, unethical, and irresponsible practices stemming from this program.?
?No individual?s remains should be used for medical research, nor sold for profit, without their pre-death consent, or the consent of their next of kin,? O?Hare?s office said. ?The idea that families may be unaware that their loved ones? remains are being used for research without consent is disturbing, to say the least.?
NBC News also shared its findings with dozens of companies, teaching hospitals and medical schools that have relied on the Health Science Center to supply human specimens. Ten said they did not know the center had provided them with unclaimed bodies. Some, including Medtronic, said they had internal policies requiring consent from the deceased or their legal surrogate.
DePuy Synthes, a Johnson & Johnson company, said it had paused its relationship with the center after learning from a reporter that it had received body parts from four unclaimed people. And Boston Scientific, whose company Relievant Medsystems used the torsos of more than two dozen unclaimed bodies for training on a surgical tool, said it was reviewing its transactions with the center, adding that it had believed the program obtained consent from donors or families.
?We empathize with the families who were not reached as part of this process,? the company said.
The Army said it, too, was examining its reliance on the center and planned to review and clarify internal policies on the use of unclaimed bodies. Under federal contracts totaling about $345,000, the center has provided the Army with dozens of whole bodies, heads and skull bones since 2021 ? including at least 21 unclaimed bodies. An Army spokesperson said officials had not considered the possibility that the program hadn?t gotten consent from donors or their families.
The Texas Funeral Service Commission, which regulates body donation programs in the state, is conducting a review of its own. In April, the agency issued a moratorium on out-of-state shipments while it studies a range of issues, including the use of unclaimed bodies by the Health Science Center.
In the case of Victor Honey, it shouldn?t have been hard for Dallas County investigators to find survivors: His son shares his father?s first and last name and lives in the Dallas area. Family members are outraged that no one from the county or the Health Science Center informed them of Honey?s death, much less sought permission to dissect his body and distribute it for training.
It wasn?t until a year and a half after he died that his relatives finally learned that news ? from a chance encounter with a stranger struck by the similarity of the father?s and son?s names, followed by a phone call from NBC News.
?It?s like a hole in your soul 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 failed to reach his siblings or adult children, so they had no voice in deciding whether to donate his body. It was taken to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, pumped with preservatives and assigned to a first-year medical student to study over the coming year.
Five months passed before his family learned from a friend in September 2020 that he was dead. ??When his brother rushed to Fort Worth to claim the remains, he said he was told by the Health Science Center that he?d have to wait ? the program was not done using the body.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who had last seen his 57-year-old brother the previous Thanksgiving, was aghast.
?Now that the family has come forward,? he said, ?you mean to tell me we can?t have him??
Instead, Fitzgerald said he was told his family must fill out donation consent forms to eventually receive his brother?s ashes. A year and a half later ? after the body had been leased out a second time, to a Texas dental school ? the center billed the family $54.50 in shipping costs for the box that arrived at Fitzgerald?s Arkansas home containing his brother?s remains. He also received a letter from Claudia Yellott, then the manager of UNT?s body donation program.
?UNT Health Science Center and our students value the selfless sacrifice made by your family,? Yellott wrote.
As of Friday, Yellott?s photo and bio were missing from the Health Science Center website, along with those of Rustin Reeves, the longtime director of the center?s anatomy program. Yellott confirmed to NBC News that she had been terminated and declined to comment further. Reeves did not respond to messages. The center declined to specify who was fired.
The Fitzgeralds? ordeal was the scenario one Tarrant County commissioner had feared in 2018, when Yellott and Reeves pitched their plan to receive the county?s unclaimed dead.
They described it as a win for everyone: The county would save on burial costs and the center would, as Yellott phrased it, obtain ?valuable material? needed to educate future physicians.
The commissioners were elated at the prospect of saving up to a half-million dollars a year. But one, Andy Nguyen, questioned the morality of dissecting bodies of people with no family to consent and raised the possibility of survivors coming forward later, horrified to learn how their relatives were treated.
?Just because they don?t have any next of kin doesn?t mean they have no voice,? Nguyen said.
After the Health Science Center pledged to handle each body with dignity, all five commissioners voted to approve the agreement. A little over a year later, Dallas County struck a similar deal, with one major difference: While Tarrant County families who couldn?t afford to make funeral arrangements were given an option to donate their relatives? bodies to the center, Dallas County gave survivors no choice.
Soon, a steady stream of bodies began to flow to the center. The program went from receiving 439 bodies in the 2019 fiscal year to nearly 1,400 in 2021 ? about a third of them unclaimed dead from Dallas and Tarrant counties. This coincided with a multimillion-dollar expansion and renovation of the Health Science Center?s body storage facilities and laboratories.
The supply of unclaimed dead helped bring in about $2.5 million a year from outside groups, according to financial records. Many of those payments came from medical device makers that spent tens of thousands of dollars to use the center-run laboratory space, BioSkills of North Texas, to train clinicians on how to use their products ? a revenue stream made possible by the school?s robust supply of ?cadaveric specimens.?
That economic engine has now stalled; the center announced it was permanently closing the BioSkills lab in response to NBC News? findings. In its statement, the center said it ?is committed to addressing all issues and taking corrective actions to maintain public trust.?
The partnerships with Dallas and Tarrant counties, which drew little attention when they were adopted, quietly rippled through the community of professionals who work with the dead and dying in North Texas.
Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington, was volunteering with a Tarrant County hospice provider in late 2021 when a chaplain made a comment that rocked her.
?Oh, poor Mr. Smith,? Shupe recalled the chaplain saying. ?He doesn?t have long, and then it?s off to the medical school.?
Her shock led Shupe to spend months studying the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas. As she investigated, she pondered a philosophical question: People have the right to make decisions about their bodies while they?re alive, but should that right die with them?
No, she ultimately concluded, it should not.
Shupe herself has signed up to give her body to the Health Science Center when she dies, in part to underscore that she doesn?t oppose body donation. But she emphasized that it was her choice.
?What they?re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,? she said.
Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to ?resurrectionists,? or ?body snatchers,? who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.
Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that ?programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.?
Experts said the Health Science Center appeared to be an outlier in terms of the number of unclaimed bodies it used. No national data exists on this issue, so NBC News surveyed more than 50 major U.S. medical schools. Each of the 44 that answered said they don?t use unclaimed bodies ? and some condemned doing so.
Joy Balta, an anatomist who runs a body donation program at Point Loma Nazarene University, chaired the committee that wrote the anatomy association?s new guidelines. He said using unclaimed bodies violates basic principles of dignity and consent now embraced by most experts in his field.
One reason that bodies should come only from consenting donors, Balta and others note: Some religions have strict views about how the dead should be treated.
?We don?t know if the individual is completely against their body being donated, and we can?t just disregard that,? Balta said.
Since 2021, dozens of entities have received unclaimed bodies from the Health Science Center ? including some, like the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, that explicitly prohibit the practice on ethical grounds.
The Little Rock-based school received shipments of skull bones and heads in 2023 and 2024 that included parts harvested from unclaimed bodies, records show. Leslie Taylor, a University of Arkansas medical school spokesperson, said because the UNT office that provided specimens is called the Willed Body Program, officials ?believed they came from donors who willed their remains for education and study.?
Taylor said the school would adopt procedures to ensure it receives bodies only from people who have given explicit permission.
Before abruptly suspending the program last week, the Health Science Center had vigorously defended its practices.
?An unclaimed individual is incapable of consenting to any process after death, which includes burial, donation, cremation, eco-burials or any other use of the body,? the center had said in a statement on Aug. 16. ?If a relative is not located or does not claim the remains, a decision must still be made.?
Shupe argued that it?s problematic for a public medical school to benefit from the deaths of the ?very poor? in its community. She has now embarked on a campaign to end the use of unclaimed bodies in Texas and nationally.
After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color.
?How does it look,? she said, ?when a Black body is dissected with nobody?s permission at all, simply because they died poor??
All Victor Honey?s family has to go by are faded memories, a handful of keepsakes, online snapshots and a trail of court records spanning eight states and Washington, D.C. These clues tell a disjointed story of an Army veteran tormented by paranoid delusions who repeatedly rejected help as he slid into homelessness and whose body went unclaimed, despite having a family who cared deeply for him.
His two sisters remember Honey teaching them math, making them laugh, shielding them from bullies and helping raise them when their parents divorced and moved the family from Mississippi to Cleveland in the 1970s. He was meticulous, hardworking, well-dressed ? and in search of a calling.
After starting college, Honey joined the Army in late 1984 and reported to Texas? Fort Hood, where he trained as a medic and, at a military club, danced with a soon-to-be Air Force enlistee named Kimberly. They married not long after and had a daughter. A son followed.
The young family lived at the base until 1988, when Honey?s enlistment ended. He then joined the Army Reserves in Dallas and was called up to support the first Gulf War. Though he didn?t want to go, he spent four months in Germany, so upset about the deployment that he rarely left his base. He remained angry after he returned home.
Kimberly Patman said Honey had multiple affairs, leading them to separate in 1992, which threw him into a deep depression. He sought mental health services from a local Department of Veterans Affairs facility and was given antipsychotic medication that he quit after a month, saying he was allergic.
From there, his life unraveled.
In 1995, Honey was arrested in Dallas for trespassing. A doctor at the jail called Patman and said he?d had some kind of breakdown. She called his father in Cleveland, who brought him home.
He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia but refused to take the medication that eased his delusional thoughts. He was convinced people were coming after him, barricaded himself in his room and became a compulsive hoarder, filing papers in a leather satchel.
He was off his medications in early 1997 when he stole a car from a dealership and robbed three banks in three states ? each time handing a teller a note demanding money. He had no weapon. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
After he was released, Honey tried living in Cleveland, but abruptly left.
?He just disappeared,? Patman said. ?They didn?t know where he was. We didn?t know where he was. And it was like that for years.?
He eventually drifted to Washington, where he wound up on the streets. He filed more than a dozen lawsuits, claiming an array of grievances. He posted a video to YouTube in which he showed his broken teeth and suggested the police were responsible. ?This is a horrendous, horrendous life here in Washington,? he told the camera.
He landed in Dallas again in late 2018. He was arrested multiple times for fare evasion and filing a false police report, and appeared at city council meetings claiming he?d been wrongfully charged. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting an emergency room nurse who was attempting to provide him care.
And then came the phone call that brought the family together again.
In early 2022, a caseworker at a Dallas-area hospital contacted Honey?s daughter, Victoria, in Montgomery, Alabama, to say he was in intensive care and might not survive, the family said. Patman and Victoria rushed to his side and were told his kidneys were failing.
?We?re here, the kids are here, we love you,? Patman told Honey. In response, he opened his eyes and asked, ?Why did you divorce me?? They ended up laughing about it.
Brenda Cloud, his sister, called from Cleveland. ?I would just talk to him and remind him of growing up and of his children, and he had a lot to fight for,? she said.
Honey?s condition improved, but he ignored advice to go to a nursing home and instead checked himself out. Several weeks later, he got on the phone with his namesake son. They?d often gone years without talking, but the son said he knew his father loved him.
That was Victor Carl Honey?s last contact with his family.
On Sept. 19, 2022, Honey was discovered semiconscious in a wheelchair at a downtown Dallas light rail station and taken to Baylor University Medical Center. He died early the next morning. He was 58.
After a Baylor social worker was unable to find his family, Honey?s body was transported to the Dallas County Medical Examiner?s Office, where an investigator was assigned to find next of kin.
The county investigator sought information from police and area hospitals but was unable to locate relatives. She then turned to the internet, where she found numbers for Patman, Honey?s brother in Ohio, his stepmother and his late father, but she reported they were disconnected. On Oct. 17, 2022, the investigator wrote that her search was complete and no family was found. The medical examiner?s office deemed Honey?s body unclaimed.
That same day, Honey was delivered to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where he was placed in a freezer, awaiting assignment.
One of the most solemn duties of local government is notifying families when someone dies. Though the world, in so many ways, has never been more connected, finding survivors still can be difficult in an era of growing homelessness and increasingly fractured families.
Death investigators at the Dallas County Medical Examiner?s Office follow a detailed checklist: They reach out to area hospitals to seek emergency contact information, search missing person reports, and comb public records databases for possible phone numbers. They also call neighbors and homeless shelters. If no family is found, they must sign an affidavit stating they did all they could.
In Tarrant County, officials delegated the primary responsibility for contacting next of kin to the Health Science Center, which said it takes similar steps.
But these efforts repeatedly fell short.
For two and a half years, Fran Moore of Lodi, New York, didn?t know what happened to her 79-year-old father, Carl Yenner. She cried when an NBC News reporter notified her in February that he had died at a Dallas hospital in May 2021 and his body had been sent to the Health Science Center.
Moore said she and her brother had struggled to stay in touch with their father across the miles. After not hearing from him, her brother filed a missing person report in Wichita Falls, about two hours from Dallas, where Yenner had lived. They still don?t know how he wound up in Dallas, how he died or why nobody contacted them. A Dallas County worker signed a form in June 2021 stating she had completed an exhaustive search for possible relatives.
But after spotting Yenner?s name on a list of unclaimed bodies provided by Dallas County, NBC News quickly identified Moore and her brother as Yenner?s children and found working phone numbers for each of them.
?If you could find us,? Moore said, ?why didn?t they??
Another question left unanswered: Given that Yenner was an Army veteran and entitled to federal burial benefits, what was the economic argument for Dallas County to send his body to the Health Science Center? At least 32 unclaimed veterans, including Honey, have been given to the program since 2020, records show.
After the center was done with Yenner?s body, it was cremated and interred among fellow service members at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. Moore said she?s heartbroken she couldn?t bury him with the rest of his family in New Jersey.
?To not have any kind of funeral for him,? she said, ?for his family to come see him to say goodbye??
Without commenting on specific cases, Dallas County Administrator Darryl Martin offered condolences to families whose relatives were used by the program. He said his staff works hard to locate family members and treats bodies with dignity. He didn?t address the use of unclaimed veterans.
In January, in an attempt to improve its efforts to find survivors in Tarrant County, the Health Science Center hired a company called The Voice After Life, whose mission is to help governments locate families of the unclaimed. The center said it has found families in about 80% of cases since then; officials did not know the previous success rate.
In a statement issued weeks before announcing it was suspending the program, the center said it ?seeks to understand and honor the wishes of the family and deceased.?
It did not, however, honor the wishes of Michael Dewayne Coleman?s relatives.
Coleman, 43, died alone on Oct. 21, 2023, in a Dallas hospital after possibly being hit by a car. An investigator for the medical examiner signed off on his case file, saying ?all reasonable efforts? had been made to find next of kin.
But his relatives should have been easy to reach. More than a week before his death, his fiancée, Louisa Harvey, had filed a missing person report with the Dallas Police Department after he failed to return from a night out with friends, not knowing he was already languishing in a hospital. She spent months searching for him, alongside two of Coleman?s sisters. She printed missing person posters and canvassed neighborhoods near their home.
She said she called the detective assigned to the missing person case almost every day, eventually suspecting that finding Coleman wasn?t a priority because of his criminal record, which included illegal drug use and two domestic violence convictions.
Harvey finally learned of his death in March, after the Dallas County medical examiner listed him as an unclaimed body in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, a free federal database meant to connect missing person reports with reports of unclaimed bodies. By the time Harvey found the posting online, the medical examiner had sent Coleman?s body to the Health Science Center.
His family could have learned of his death months earlier if the police detective assigned to find Coleman had listed him as a missing person in NamUs, but records show he never did. In response to questions from NBC News, a Dallas Police spokesperson said the department had opened an internal investigation into the detective?s handling of the case and would implement a policy change to prevent similar mistakes.
Harvey couldn?t believe Coleman?s body had been donated without the family?s consent ? or his. Last year, while filling out an application for a state ID, she said, Coleman had made clear he didn?t want his organs donated because of his distrust of the medical system; she doubts he would have wanted to donate his whole body.
But when Harvey and one of Coleman?s sisters, Shea Coleman, repeatedly asked the medical examiner and the Health Science Center to release his body ? or at least to let them view it ? they were told no. In June, a worker at the medical examiner?s office wrote in case notes that she spoke to Yellott, the manager of UNT?s body donation program, who told her Coleman was slated to be used in a longer-term course and that his family could receive his remains when the center was finished with him.
In 12 to 24 months.
In August, after NBC News inquired about his case, a Health Science Center official told reporters that Coleman?s body would be cremated and returned to the family much sooner ? an abrupt reversal that the center attributed to the Texas Funeral Service Commission?s temporary ban on out-of-state body shipments. Ten days later, the medical examiner called Harvey to let her know Coleman?s ashes were ready to be picked up.
The center?s refusal to let her see her fiancé?s body has made it harder to grieve, Harvey said.
?I?m lying awake every night thinking, ?Is that my Michael??? she said. ??Did he actually die???
After Victor Honey?s body arrived at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, the harvesting began.
Depending on how they were to be used, bodies were either frozen or embalmed. Some were left whole and set aside to train students. Others, like Honey?s, were dissected with scalpels and bone saws, to be distributed on the open market.
In November 2022, Honey?s right leg was used in a training at the center paid for by Getinge, a Swedish medical technology company that makes instruments for use in a surgical procedure called endoscopic vein harvest.
In January 2023, a week after the medical examiner?s office reported that Honey was eligible for a veteran?s burial, bones from his skull were shipped to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston ? where Honey had been ordered to report before his Gulf War deployment more than three decades earlier.
In May 2023, the Health Science Center shipped Honey?s torso to Pittsburgh, where the training company National Bioskills Laboratories provided it to a medical product company renting its facilities to teach doctors a pain-relief procedure called spinal cord stimulation.
NBC News informed Getinge, the Army and National Bioskills about the center?s regular use of unclaimed bodies and Honey?s family not providing consent.
Dr. Douglas Hampers, National Bioskills? CEO and an orthopedic surgeon, said he was disturbed to learn his company has received unclaimed bodies and expressed sympathy for Honey?s family.
While human specimens are crucial for medical advances, Hampers said bodies should not be used without consent. He said his company would ensure that it no longer accepted unclaimed bodies and would adopt policies to make certain future specimens were donated with families? permission.
?I don?t think you have to violate a family?s rights in order to train physicians,? he said.
A Getinge spokesperson emailed a statement saying only that the company regularly reviews its policies and operations, ?including what we expect from our suppliers.?
In a statement, the Army said that if Honey?s remains were procured legally, the use of his body complied with the service?s current policies.
In July 2023, after Honey?s torso had been returned to the Health Science Center, his remains were cremated and later his ashes were brought to the Dallas County medical examiner.
And there they sat, with no one to claim them. Months passed.
In late April, Honey?s son, Victor, was boxing cans at the Dallas food bank where he volunteered when a woman approached him. She?d overheard someone calling out his name. ?Do you know someone else named Victor Honey?? she asked him.
The woman said she knew his father when they both stayed at a downtown homeless shelter and had heard he died. Victor didn?t want to believe it. He tried to put it out of his mind. But the next morning, he called his mother and told her what he?d heard. She cried out and burst into tears.
An internet search led Victor to the medical examiner?s office, which confirmed the details of his father?s death and later told him the remains were available to be picked up.
About the same time, NBC News had found Honey?s name on a list of people whose unclaimed bodies were obtained by the Health Science Center. Using public records, a reporter tracked down Patman, Honey?s ex-wife, and sent her a message on Facebook. She responded immediately.
On a call, the reporter broke the news of how Honey?s body was used.
His family was appalled. Patman said she would have argued against Honey being cut apart and studied, noting that he once told her that he didn?t want to be an organ donor. Victor, though, said he might have been open to donating his father?s body for medical research.
?But y?all should have asked us about it,? he said. ?They just sent his body parts away.?
When the family gathered in early June to finally lay Honey to rest, many expressed remorse about not being able to help him. They were frustrated to have no say in what happened to his body. And they said they hoped sharing his story would help spare others from similar anguish.
?Victor had a big, strong family,? Patman told family members. ?And now we are going to speak for him.?
On a muggy Monday morning, a couple dozen of Honey?s relatives ? nieces and nephews, siblings and cousins, Patman and their children ? gathered in a pavilion at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery for the farewell they had long been denied.
A recording of taps played. A soldier knelt in front of Honey?s daughter, Victoria, and handed her a folded U.S. flag ?as a symbol of our appreciation of your loved one?s honorable and faithful service.?
After the funeral, Honey?s relatives made their way to Section 40, Grave No. 464, where a crew dug a hole and placed the urn in the ground. They installed a temporary marker that soon would be replaced by a white granite headstone standing among rows of thousands.
Brenda Cloud, Honey?s sister, is furious over what transpired in the 622 days between her brother?s death and his burial. And she wants answers for the others whose bodies were cut up and studied without consent.
?Whether they had family or not,? she said, ?every person deserves to have that dignity.?
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