This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
CORNELIUS, N.C. — Last year, Karen Wandel received an alarming message: Her father had died more than five months earlier in a South Carolina hospital and, when no family claimed his body, the hospital sent it to be used for medical research.
Wandel had a strained relationship with her father, Libero Marinelli Jr., a widower, and hadn’t spoken to him in years. But as a lawyer in North Carolina, she wasn’t hard to find. Neither were Marinelli’s brother in California or sister in Massachusetts, who had kept in touch on birthdays and holidays. But they all learned of his death only after Marinelli’s brother sent him a Christmas card that was returned unopened.
Wandel remains stunned by the treatment of her father, who, as a former Army service member, was entitled to be buried in a veterans’ cemetery but whose corpse instead was first sent to a body broker in another state.
“I just want somebody to look me in the eye and say, ‘What we did was wrong, and we are sorry. We are sorry to your family, and we’re sorry that your father suffered this indignity,’” Wandel said. “Particularly after he served his country.”
Supplying unclaimed bodies for medical research is widely considered unethical, and most major medical schools — and a few states — have halted the practice. And yet it continues, in part due to the health care industry’s steady demand for human specimens and local officials’ feeling overwhelmed by a rise in bodies without next of kin to claim them.
What’s difficult to gauge is just how often it occurs: The body business has no federal regulation or oversight, and many states do not track the practice.
NBC News spent months documenting the use of unclaimed bodies in medical research, submitting public records requests to dozens of state agencies, county coroners and medical schools. The records offer glimpses of where and how this is occurring.
Since 2020, a community college in North Carolina has received 43 unclaimed bodies from local welfare agencies and medical examiners to teach embalming to funeral services students. In Pennsylvania, a state body-donation program that distributes human remains to medical schools said that it had received 58 unclaimed bodies from county coroners, medical examiners, hospitals and other facilities since 2019. Louisiana State University provided records on a single 2023 case in which an unclaimed car wreck victim was sent to the school’s forensic department for study; a university spokesperson said the lab prioritizes “ethical practices and respect for the dignity of individuals.”
But in many states where it is legal to use unclaimed bodies for medical research, officials told NBC News that they did not have records of any such cases or denied requests for detailed information. That included Pennsylvania, where an official said the body-donation program could not share how the 58 unclaimed bodies were used. In Illinois, a 2018 law requires record-keeping of the unclaimed bodies provided to medical institutions, but a spokesperson for the state agency responsible for the task said it is not doing it because no one allocated any money for the effort.
“There could be a lot more happening that we don’t know about,” said Joy Balta, an anatomy professor at Point Loma Nazarene University in California. He wants to see more regulation of the body donation industry and has written guidelines that call for donation programs to stop using unclaimed bodies. Otherwise, he said, “There’s no way to know about it.”
The most extensive use of the unclaimed dead that reporters found was at a Fort Worth-based medical school, the University of North Texas Health Science Center. NBC News reported this year that the center collected thousands of unclaimed bodies from county medical examiners and leased some out to private companies and the Army, often without consent from any next of kin. The center halted the use of unclaimed bodies in response to NBC News’ reporting, citing failures of “respect, care and professionalism.”
In the absence of regulations, many coroners, hospitals or nursing homes are left to decide for themselves what to do when people die without a relative available to arrange a funeral. For some, the easiest — and cheapest — solution is to donate the body to a medical school or a body dealer, even if there is no indication that is what the person or their next of kin wanted.
Marinelli’s journey from a public hospital to a for-profit body broker demonstrates the peril of this choice: Health care workers and local authorities often lack the time and expertise to find people’s relatives, NBC News has found, and when they fail to do so, families are denied the chance to decide what happens to their loved one’s remains.
Once she learned of her father’s death, Wandel began to seek answers, growing angrier at each step.
“If they could do this to a veteran Army officer, a guy with a house, a guy with a dog, a guy with family,” she said, “imagine what could happen to really vulnerable people.”
Wandel acknowledges that her father was a difficult man.
Marinelli grew up in New Jersey, joined the Army, attended law school and served several years as a military lawyer during the Vietnam War. He told his daughter that an assignment representing a soldier who had fired on his own unit nearly broke him, and sparked a drinking habit that developed into alcoholism. He went on to work at the Justice Department’s tax division, but lost his job and went into private practice, Wandel said.
Marinelli’s wife, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, also suffered from addiction, and from mental illness, Wandel said. They separated but did not divorce. Neither was able to properly care for Wandel, their only child, so she spent much of her childhood in foster care but stayed in touch with her parents.
For years, Marinelli tried to clean up and get his daughter back but couldn’t make it stick, Wandel said. Still, he taught her to swim, ride a bike and drive. He took her to folk and bluegrass concerts. He attended her graduations from high school, college and law school, and walked her down the aisle at her wedding.
In 2009, after Wandel’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she returned to her and slept by her bedside until she died. She and her father later fought over his refusal to help administer her mother’s affairs, Wandel said, and, in 2011, they stopped talking.
Caring for her mother inspired Wandel to volunteer at a hospice. “I found the idea of people dying without dignity or without somebody there to listen to them and hold their hand really offensive,” she said.
If she had known her father was dying, she said, “I would have been there.”
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