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redander t1_j2ujjf4 wrote

The body part industry is so unregulated it's ridiculous. Seriously why is body part broker a thing?

Edit: why are they a thing. Seriously it's ridiculous and needs to be better regulated

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Illumnyx t1_j2ujjwd wrote

>"It's concerning to the court that defendant Hess refuses to assume any responsibility for her conduct."

I guess you could say she's not too cut up about it.

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dsfromsd t1_j2ujvzx wrote

No surprise here. Everyone knows Funeral Homes charge an arm and a leg

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davidwb45133 t1_j2ultgm wrote

Replying to redander (#1,274,749)

When people hear body parts they immediately tend to think of organs like heart, kidneys, etc. These are strictly regulated in western medicine and hard to skirt. The provenance of an organ is checked at every step from pre-donation to post-op. But bones, skin, tendons, etc are also body parts that are used in medicine and regulated but somewhat easier to skirt because a single donation goes to a myriad of donees and unlike solid tissue, they aren’t necessarily used right away.

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cpas2b t1_j2um127 wrote

It was just a part time gig… Basically just lending a hand here and there…

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AlabamaHotcakes t1_j2um2iz wrote

Okay that's it I'm writing a will that states that if my kids can sell my parts for profit they're allowed to do so.

Fuck cremation, it's capitalism from the womb to the grave babyeeee!

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silverman987 t1_j2unoz3 wrote

Replying to DeffNotTom (#1,274,824)

according to the article: "It is illegal in the United States to sell organs such as hearts, kidneys and tendons for transplant; they must be donated. But selling body parts such as heads, arms and spines – which is what Hess did – for use in research or education is not regulated by federal law."

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livethelifeyoulove t1_j2upd2v wrote

I have a friend who’s sister passed away and they used this funeral home. A couple years later the FBI showed up and asked to text the ashes to see if they were actually human or concrete.

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walterodim77 t1_j2upewr wrote

You want a toe? I can get you a toe, believe me. There are ways, Dude. You don't wanna know about it, believe me.

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DeffNotTom t1_j2uq7j3 wrote

Replying to silverman987 (#1,274,972)

Disingenuous wording there. It's illegal to steal body parts for any reason, which is what that person did. The two main categories of selling human remains are for legitimate education and research, which has a massive paper trail.. and collectors who deal on antiques. If you're selling or buying new human specimens as a collector, they're 100% stolen and you're already breaking the law.

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problembearbruno t1_j2ussr2 wrote

Jesus Christ, just realizing that this woman was the same age I am now in this picture... I don't think she lived hard so much as she lived old.

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DeffNotTom t1_j2utc5b wrote

Replying to silverman987 (#1,275,226)

It's illegal to steal body parts from people. You need consent from the person before they die, or from their family, in order to do anything with them. Anyone buying body parts for a legitimate purpose ensures they have that paperwork. You cannot just walk into a funeral home and buy body parts. That's regulation. In a lot of those cases, the funeral home got consent from families through fraud or forged documents and sold to legitimate buyers who thought they had the right paperwork. They would have had everything they needed to beat the government in attempts of anymore oversight. In other cases she straight stole body parts and sold them on the black market in a way that wouldn't have been reported anyway. I'm not sure how you think the government is going to regulate someone selling things out of the backdoor of a funeral home when you can't check if the urn you got had all your loved ones pieces in it.

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oshkoshpots t1_j2utnlu wrote

Why did I just have an Unsolved Mysteries flashback

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silverman987 t1_j2uu39n wrote

Replying to DeffNotTom (#1,275,286)

I was responding to your initial comment about regulation. You wrote it's regulated. The article says it's not regulated, at least not federally. Locally may be different, but on a federal level, there is no regulation.

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DeffNotTom t1_j2uwl58 wrote

Replying to silverman987 (#1,275,335)

Again, it's disingenuous. It makes it sounds like there's a free for all and anyone can just purchase body parts from a funeral home. That's very obviouly not the case. Next time a loved one dies, try to keep anything other than created remains, or try to buy some that aren't from some antique medical collection. Get a signed contract, a will, religious declaratio, whatever legal documents you can think of. You can't. You're not going to write laws that will stop some shithead who's already breaking the law.

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Bending_toast t1_j2v4g2a wrote

-"Our sweet mother, they dismembered her," Erin Smith said, selling her shoulders, knees and feet for profit. "We don't even have a name for a crime this heinous.— Good god I can’t even fathom having to go through that. That lady is a ghoul through and through

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matt_1060 t1_j2v6cv9 wrote

What corpse did she steal that wig from?

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toxic_badgers t1_j2val2a wrote

Gross. Horrible if you find out this was one of your loved ones being sold.

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docmedic t1_j2vbz12 wrote

Replying to houseman1131 (#1,276,022)

The water heater contractor was telling me how his grandfather was swapped out for someone else. Granted a lot of people were dying of covid (including the grandfather), but mixing up bodies is utter bullshit given what funeral homes charge. In any case, he was able to check.

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dpmad t1_j2vclup wrote

The name was “Abby Normal”.

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aint_that_right t1_j2ve3g8 wrote

This happened in my home town. She would come through the drive through on her way to court, absolutely unbothered by the fact that the barista on warming had her son given back to her as cement powder. We all hated her, I pride myself on my kindness to every customer - she never got a single smile from me. 20 years isn’t long enough!!

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operarose t1_j2vucz4 wrote

The Swindled episode on this wretched ghoul made me furious. May she rot.

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fishrunhike t1_j2wddpd wrote

" I got a question about you morticians. You bang the dead bodies? I imagine stuff like that goes on all the time. I mean, I don't give a shit. If I was dead you could bang me all you want. I mean, who cares? A dead body is like a piece of trash. I mean, shove as much shit in there as you want. Fill me up with cream, make a stew out of my ass. What's the big deal? Bang me, eat me, grind me up into little pieces, throw me in the river. Who gives a shit? You're dead, you're dead! "

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ctesibius t1_j2wgux6 wrote

Replying to houseman1131 (#1,276,022)

I’m a funeral officiant in the UK. During lockdown, the bodies in my region were in double body bags. That’s all bodies, not suspected COVID cases. It would not have been possible to see your grandma. I do know that there is a robust method of tracking here, so I’m confident that the right people were buried or cremated, and in any case we are back to allowing viewings.

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malphonso t1_j2wlcbo wrote

Replying to docmedic (#1,276,270)

There's absolutely no excuse for that. When we take someone into our care, the first step is to put a hospital style tag around their ankle. On it is their name and date of death. We do that in their homes before we even lift them onto a stretcher.

In addition, we ask the families to bring in an ID or photo of the decedent so we can have something to compare them to at every step.

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jonny_jon_jon t1_j2wqe5p wrote

how much does and arm and a leg cost these days anyways?

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bee-milk2 t1_j2wqgw9 wrote

I dated someone whose deceased grandparent was victim to this abhorrent shit

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Narrator2012 t1_j2wy1z3 wrote

I got a question about you morticians. You bang the dead bodies? I imagine stuff like that goes on all the time. I mean, I don't give a shit. If I was dead you could bang me all you want. I mean, who cares? A dead body is like a piece of trash. I mean, shove as much shit in there as you want. Fill me up with cream, make a stew out of my ass. What's the big deal? Bang me, eat me, grind me up into little pieces, throw me in the river. Who gives a shit? You're dead, you're dead! Oh shit! Is my mic on?

−4

mjetski123 t1_j2wyxlu wrote

What kind of weird ass font is Reuters using?

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Ghost_of_a_Black_Cat t1_j2x0g6e wrote

Replying to malphonso (#1,278,178)

>There's absolutely no excuse for that. When we take someone into our care, the first step is to put a hospital style tag around their ankle.

I've worked in hospitals for years. The last one at which I worked would put a toe tag around one ankle and another around the opposite wrist.

We attached another to the zipper of the body bag, and then clipped one more toe tag to the decedents door in the morgue (we had stainless steel stalls with big refrigerator doors).

The toe tags were made from heavy-duty tag board and we used thick rubber bands to attach them. They weren't going anywhere unless manually removed.

Anyway, four levels of ID right there. No excuses. The Sisters didn't fuck around.

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Winendinen69 t1_j2x3yll wrote

Replying to houseman1131 (#1,276,022)

My now-husband (then boyfriend)'s Holocaust surviving Grandpa died in Vienna, Austria a few years ago - when the head of a local Orthodox jewish temple found out that he the deceased was Jewish, the man stole my husband's grandpa's body from the hospital. The guy REFUSED to give the body back to my husband's family because the grandpa wanted to be cremated, and you aren't allowed to be cremated in the Jewish faith

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MajorKoopa t1_j2x4h3f wrote

How does someone look like the crime they committed?!?

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JohnGillnitz t1_j2x5gzd wrote

Depending on what state you live in, funeral homes can be outright horrific. Sure, everything looks clean and respectful in the front of the house. Where the actual work goes on can look like a horror show. Covid deaths were piling up and homes were literally stacking bodies one on top of each other in broom closests cooled only by a AC window unit. What goes into that $5K casket (not coffin, there is a difference) is pretty much a husk filled with poison and caked on makeup. I'm donating my body to science. No way I want someone spending thousands of dollars to get rid my mortal meat. Throw me out to the buzzards like nature intended.

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SuperSimpleSam t1_j2xak64 wrote

FYI: you can't do a transplant with an organ from a corpse.

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aint_that_right t1_j2xfsnn wrote

Replying to Zelensexual (#1,279,778)

Oh, we took absolutely no care with her drink. She’d come back for remakes so we’d deliberately make it wrong again. Drove her crazy, she still kept coming though because Starbucks corporate was the only coffee shop that would still serve her!

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newluna t1_j2xnyzm wrote

Replying to silverman987 (#1,275,226)

Selling anything stolen is illegal. The reason heart and other common life-saving organs are illegal to sell at all is that allowing so will create a whole lot of abuse. That doesn’t mean you can sell a “sellable” organ without the consent of the donor or their next of kin.

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silverman987 t1_j2xowsk wrote

Replying to newluna (#1,280,181)

Correct and I didn't say you can. I'm only responding to OPs statement that there are regulations when in the article it clearly states there is not. Honestly, if there was this would not happen as often or be done so easily.

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beenburnedbutable t1_j2y1erl wrote

It’s nearly been a year since a bunch of human heads were stolen in Denver.

Where are those heads?!?

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DickieIam t1_j2yawy5 wrote

Wow… this lack of regulation around the sale of body parts was an issue around the HH Holmes thing too! He would sell skeletons of his victims to universities.

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gmo_patrol t1_j2ycybd wrote

20 years for simple theft? Seems absurd considering they're dead meat.

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SGTree t1_j2yiwu9 wrote

Replying to AlabamaHotcakes (#1,274,887)

I know you wrote this to be funny but like, do it.

Write up an advance directive. Let people know what you want done with your body. If you don't want cremation, find an alternative that works for you and write that shit down.

Otherwise, it'll be up to your grieving family to decide and you don't want them being pushed into a $10,000 embalming/vault/casket bullshit by some pushy funeral director.

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super80 t1_j2yleqq wrote

Replying to beenburnedbutable (#1,280,760)

It was stolen from a delivery truck along with a dolly I’ll speculate and say it’s the same genius who steals from Walmart /career shoplifter saw an opportunity and just took the stuff while the driver was inside delivering. Imagine the surprise the heads are probably in some land field.

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metonymimic t1_j2yn8hf wrote

Incidentally, I've known two people in Colorado who've died from bad bone transplants. One dude caught cancer from the donor bone (he and a handful of others all ended up with cancer from the same donation), and one chick didn't wake up from hers. Which is always a danger. But it was the same hospital with presumably same doctors and almost the same procedure and they lived like a half a mile from each other and they died a year apart and it's unrelated just weird that's all.

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Use_this_1 t1_j2yqlr4 wrote

This is why my husband's family sticks around until the casket is sealed into the vault.

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SGTree t1_j2ysu3h wrote

Replying to AlabamaHotcakes (#1,281,670)

You still want it written down, so that way there are no arguments or misunderstandings.

My mother never wrote it down. Some people wanted parts of her ashes. Others wanted to keep her all together. Some people want her buried or put in a columbarium. Others wanted to keep her at home. My dad wants her interned with him and we're all adamant that that doesn't happen. The result is that her ashes sat in a closet for several years. Shes now in a box in my sisters living room. None of us can agree what to do with her, 15 years later.

Legally, the newspaper and ditch is not an option, exactly. You might look into natural burial if you just want a hole in the ground.

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Ok-Chart1485 t1_j2yuq2f wrote

Replying to Stan_Archton (#1,276,475)

Surprisingly you get a lot more abroad than in the US, according to the Google. 3.5 k for a kidney (which frankly sounds crazy cheap, used car pricing with similar life expectancy, but for something you can't get off a lot), apparently more like 10k if you go to eg Mexico, but more hassle, risk, and overhead.

Just another day , another wiki dive , that probably gets me added to (another?) government watch list lol

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BlackEyedGhost t1_j2z8vjz wrote

So... she hurt some people's feelings and took money for services she didn't actually provide. Needlessly harsh sentence for what essentially amounts to giving people the wrong ashes and insulting their dead relatives. She sold the parts to surgical-training companies, so there were real medical benefits to other real people because of what she did. Organ donation really should be opt-out rather than opt-in.

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Junior_Builder_4340 t1_j2zfy05 wrote

Replying to Winendinen69 (#1,279,156)

Wait. What?? The man wasn't even a Rabbi (not that it would make it better)? I hope your husband's family filed charges against the man and sued the hospital. I can't fathom something like that happening to one of my family members. My condolences to your family.

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Temptemp123321 t1_j30edow wrote

20 years seems excessive. They didn't actually harm anyone. The worst they did is rob some worms of a meal.

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