FBI finds bucket of human heads, body parts sewn together at donation facility
An Arizona body donation facility is being sued after the FBI reportedly found buckets full of body parts, male genitalia in a cooler, and heads and bodies of different people sewn together.
Eight families who donated the bodies of their loved ones to the facility — where bodies were processed after being donated for science — filed a civil lawsuit on Monday against the Biological Resource Center, alleging the donors were dismembered and sold for a profit, ABC15 reports.
The Phoenix facility, which served as a body donation center and tissue bank, was raided in 2014 by FBI agents in hazmat suits as part of the agency’s multistate investigation into the illegal trafficking and sale of human body parts, according to KMOV.
Agents found bodies cut up with chainsaws and band saws, and “pools of human blood and bodily fluids were found on the floor of the freezer” with no identification tags to mark the corpses, the lawsuit reportedly alleges.
One agent reportedly said 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, referred to as a “morbid joke” in the lawsuit, the outlet reports.
A head was reportedly priced at $500, while arms were $750 and a whole body could rake in $5,000.
The lawsuit claims the illegal activity dates back to 2007, ABC15 reports.
Troy Harp, who donated his mother and grandmother to the facility in 2012 and 2013 and is one of the more than 30 plaintiffs in the suit, called the situation a “horror story,” according to KMOV.
The center’s owner, Stephen Gore, was sentenced to a year of deferred prison time and four years of probation after pleading guilty in October to illegal control of an enterprise.
