An Arizona man was deeply upset to find out his mother’s donated body was blown up by the U.S. military, according to an investigation .
Jim Stauffer has joined more than 30 other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Biological Resource Center, a company that collected dead loved ones to donate to medical researchers to help find cures for diseases.
Doris Stauffer died in 2013 at the age of 73 while in hospice care after suffering from Alzheimer’s in the final years of her life.
After her death, Stauffer made arrangements to donate her body to study Alzheimer’s but her doctors said she didn’t have the disease’s gene.
Stauffer looked elsewhere and contacted Biological Resource Center. The company came within 45 minutes of her death, he said.
“There was paperwork signed, stating what was and what was not to happen with her body,” Stauffer told ABC 15 in Phoenix .
He said he checked off a box on the donation form to ensure the body would not be used in explosions.
Days later, Stauffer received a wooden box with his mother’s information and told the majority of her ashes were inside.
That was not the case.
Years later, Stauffer said he was contacted by a Reuters reporter , who detailed what actually happened to his mother’s body, including being sold to the U.S. Army for blast testing.
“She was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of an apparatus, and a detonation took place underneath her to basically get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED (improvised explosive device),” Stauffer said.
Biological Resource Center was raided by the FBI in January 2014. Authorities made the grim discovery of bodies piled up and body parts in buckets, according to an agent’s statement in the lawsuit.
Company owner Stephen Gore was sentenced to probation after pleaded guilty to running an illegal enterprise in 2015.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
