Stolen Body Parts Implanted in Thousands of People Across The Country
A macabre scandal in which corpses were plundered for body parts could be even bigger than previously disclosed, with one company alone saying it has distributed thousands of pieces of human tissue that authorities fear could be tainted with disease.
Biomedical Tissue Services, LTD. (BTS) has been accused of collecting body parts without donor consent and selling them for use in transplants performed at hospitals and other medical facilities across the country. The owner of BTS and three others were charged in a scheme that earned them millions of dollars.
A massive 122-count indictment by a Brooklyn grand jury accused a former New Jersey dentist of being the ringleader in a scheme in which more than 1,000 bodies sent to funeral homes were allegedly cut open illegally for bones, ligaments and other tissues that wound up in hospitals around the country. The Brooklyn indictment charged the former dentist and others with forging death certificates and consent forms by altering the deceased’s age and cause of death.
A former Biomedical employee told the Philadelphia Daily News that he dissected dozens of corpses inside a local funeral home during the last two months of 2004. After harvesting spines, veins, tendons and bones, the recovery technician said, he brought them in plastic bags on ice to BTS.
“This is nothing short of a case of medical terrorism,” Executive Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione told Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge John Walsh.
Civil lawsuits from Oklahoma to New York are flooding the courts on behalf of families who gave no consent to have their loved ones’ body parts removed.
If you have been injured due to medical negligence, call attorney David I. Fuchs at 800-570-2858.