‘Human Chop Shop’ Ordered to Pay $58 Million for Selling Donated Dead Bodies

A biomedical company that received donated dead bodies and then sold them for a profit for experiments such as IED blast tests has been ordered to pay $58 million to the families of the deceased individuals.

A Maricopa County Superior Court jury awarded ten of the 21 families of donors $58 million, finding that Biological Resource Center (BRC) of Phoenix deceived them into donating their deceased loved ones’ bodies. The families later discovered the bodies were sold for a profit without their consent.

A report at the Washington Post referred to BRC as a “human chop shop” and observed the case of Jim Stauffer, who donated his mother’s body to the company, hoping it would be used to advance research in Alzheimer’s Disease:

He filled out all the paperwork, and 10 days later, received her ashes in a wooden box.

But at the time, in 2013, Stauffer didn’t know that the ashes he received were just from his mother’s hand. He didn’t know, as Reuters would later discover, that the rest of her body had been shipped to the Army for a Pentagon experiment — to be used as a test dummy in an IED blast.

In an interview with ABC15, Stauffer said he discovered his mother’s body “was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of 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.”

Stauffer said when he completed the biomedical company’s paperwork, he checked “no” when it asked whether uses of the donated body may involve “explosions” and other situations.

In July, AZCentral reported that, during a January 2014 raid of BRC, an FBI special agent discovered “various unsettling scenes,” including a “head sewn onto a mismatched body, a bucket of limbs and a cooler filled with penises.”

The law firm of Burg Simpson, which represented the families, noted in a press statement the FBI’s involvement in the case. The agency’s “investigation which first exposed the nationwide wrong-doing originated from the finding of several severed heads being shipped to the middle east on a commercial airline,” the firm said.

“The evidence at trial proved that [BRC owner Stephen] Gore was running a body broker ‘chop shop,’ where he’d deceive families into donating their loved ones upon death for medical and scientific research, but instead chopped the bodies up and sold the parts to other body brokers for profit,” Michael Burg, a lead trial lawyer for the families, said in a statement.

David TeSelle, another lead trial attorney for the families, said the jury “sent a loud and clear message to body brokers across the nation that failing to treat donated bodies with dignity and respect, and selling off body parts for profit without full informed consent from the donors will not be tolerated in our society.”

TeSelle added:

What people don’t realize is that the illicit body broker trade is something going on right now across the nation. Unlike organ transplant donation, which is heavily regulated, there is very little regulation or oversight – and in most states, none at all – into body donation at death, to ensure that the donors and their families’ wishes are being met. Whole-body donation, when done right and by businesses who follow the rules, is a valuable and wonderful thing. But when done wrong, when it’s the product of deceit and greed, we as a society need to stand up and fight back. We are extremely grateful that this jury took a stand and said no more.”

The case suggested a double standard, however, to Lila Rose, president of the pro-life organization Live Action.

“WaPo reports on a ‘chop shop’ selling human remains without consent that is being forced to pay $58 million in damages,” Rose tweeted. “Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood chop shops that kill babies & sell their body parts are funded daily w/ $1.4 million in taxpayer dollars.”

WaPo reports on a “chop shop” selling human remains without consent that is being forced to pay $58 million in damages.

Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood chop shops that kill babies & sell their body parts are funded daily w/ $1.4 million in taxpayer dollars.https://t.co/p7ugU8TdY9

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) November 20, 2019

Center for Medical Progress (CMP) project lead David Daleiden and his colleagues went undercover to expose Planned Parenthood’s alleged profiting from the sale of aborted baby body parts.

The jury in Daleiden’s federal civil trial sided with Planned Parenthood and awarded punitive damages to the abortion chain of over $2.2 million after Judge William Orrick III ruled its members would not be allowed to consider any information Daleiden gleaned from the video recordings in determining the verdict.

In addition to the civil trial, a separate criminal case against CMP’s colleagues, brought by the California attorney general’s office, makes them the first undercover journalists to be criminally prosecuted in the history of the state of California.

Planned Parenthood, however, has yet to be investigated by the FBI for any of the allegations of profiting from the sales of the body parts of babies aborted in its clinics, despite requests by congressional committees.

In June, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and his predecessor Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote to Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray seeking an update on the federal investigation that was supposedly launched in 2017 into the allegations raised, in part, through the video documentation by CMP.

The senators asked Barr and Wray to respond to their inquiry no later than July 2.

In August, Breitbart News reached out to the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) press team for an update on the Department of Justice/FBI response and was informed SJC was still awaiting a response.

Breitbart News reached out again to SJC for an update and is awaiting a response.

The disregard for unborn humans by the abortion industry was also prominently featured in the trial of abortionist and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell and headlined recently in the news when authorities in Indiana and Illinois discovered thousands of aborted baby remains in the home and car of deceased notorious abortionist Ulrich Klopfer.