News Desk |
Shocking as it may seem, a man who had donated his mother’s body to what he thought was Alzheimer’s research learned later it was used to test explosives by US army.
On August 6, BBC reported that new details of a lawsuit emerged against the Biological Resource Centre in Arizona, following an FBI raid in 2014 in which gruesome remains of hundreds of discarded body parts were discovered.
The report said, that the center, now closed, is accused of illegally selling body parts against the donors wishes.
BBC report stated that the newly released court documents revealed that families of those whose bodies had been donated said they believed their relatives’ remains would be used for medical and scientific research, but that was not the case.
The media outlet that the Biological Resource Center had come to pick up his mother’s body within 45 minutes of her death.
It’s been more than five years since Jim Stauffer’s mother died in hospice care. Stauffer, who is one of the multiple plaintiffs suing the center, told ABC 15 Arizona that he believed his mother’s donated body would be used to study Alzheimer’s, a disease she had, but he later found out it was used by the military to examine the effects of explosives.
Stauffer’s mother, Dorris Stauffer, 73, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease during the last years of her life, but doctors said she didn’t have the gene for it. Doctors were worried the disease may have mutated and hoped to study her brain after her passing to find out more.
When the time came though, her neurologist couldn’t accept the body, ABC 15 Arizona said, her son hoped reaching out to other donation facilities could lead to the same result. “I feel foolish,” said Stauffer. “Because I’m not a trusting person, but in this situation you have no idea this is going on — you trust. I think that trust is what they fed on.”
He told the media outlet that the Biological Resource Center had come to pick up his mother’s body within 45 minutes of her death. “There was paperwork signed stating what was and what was not to happen with her body,” Stauffer told the TV channel.
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Days later, he said, he received a wooden box with his mother’s information and an ID number. Inside, he was told, was a majority of her ashes. Years went by before Stauffer learned what he was told, wasn’t the case.
How did he Come to Know about What Happened to his Mother?
Stauffer says a reporter from Reuters contacted him with documents showing a paper trail of where his mom’s body really went.
ABC 15 Arizona while referring to the Reuters’ report stated that Stauffer’s mom was one of many bodies sold to the US Army for blast testing.
“She was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a detonation took place underneath her to basically kind of get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED,” he told ABC 15 Arizona.
“There was actually wording on this paperwork about performing this stuff,” he added. “Performing these medical tests that may involve explosions, and we said no. We checked the ‘no’ box on all that.”
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Several years later, Stauffer still struggles with the idea. “I don’t see a pathway of ever getting past this,” he said in the TV interview. “Every time there’s a memory, every time there’s a photograph you look at, there’s this ugly thing that happened just right there staring right at you,” he added.
Stauffer is one of many plaintiffs named in the suit against Biologic Resource Center and its owner Stephen Gore. Gore pleaded guilty to running an illegal enterprise in 2015 but was sentenced to serve probation.