PHOENIX (KRON) – An FBI raid on a Phoenix body-donation business after a nationwide criminal investigation yielded a bucket of limbs, a cooler filled with penises, and more unsettling discoveries.
The Arizona Republic reports the Biological Resource Center specialized in accepting the bodies of people after death and in exchange offered families free pickup of the bodies as well as the cremated remains of the body parts the company did not sell.
Thirty-three people are suing the Biological Resource Center, alleging the remains of their family members were “obtained through false statements,” and that the body parts were being sold for profit to middlemen and were not stored or treated “with dignity or respect.”
A law was passed in Arizona in 2017 prohibiting body donation companies in the state without a license, but that law has yet to be enforced.
There are at least four known body donation companies in the state, all accredited by the American Association of Tissue Banks, according to the Republic.
The BRC was not.
Former Phoenix FBI special agent Mark Cwynar told the Republic he “personally observed various unsettling scenes” while inside the BRC.
That included body parts piled on top of one another with no apparent identification to whom the parts belonged, as well as a “large torso with the head removed and replaced with a smaller head sewn together in a ‘Frankenstein’ manner.”
Officials said that some families may have mistaken body donation and organ donation, which are two very different things.
The BRC allegedly often dismembered and sold various body parts and did not give bodies to charity, as some families may have assumed.
Arizona is a regulatory-free zone for the body parts industry.
