Does the cost of burying the dead outweigh immorality?

All around America, body brokers solicit low-income families suffering from a loss. They guarantee to cover final expenses from the death care industry if they donate most of their loved ones remains for the advancement of science.

“Don’t expect to die without paying first.” A quote I begun to get accustomed to after experiencing the toll funeral homes take on unsuspecting Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The first fact anyone learns growing up is we are all bound to experience an encounter with the deathcare industry at some point in our lives.

The vultures will always circle when we least expect it and whether our health declines or someone in our family dies. Theres no shortage of bad news when a poor household has to bury a loved one whose insurance policy collapsed months before their death.

Unfortunately, my mother went through a similar experience when her late husband, Troy, passed away. Before he succumbed to his disease, he had better and worse days. His memory was either intact or deteriorating, so his health barely left room for a crumbling life insurance policy.

Then my mother, finally discovered the terrible news a few days after burying her husband. The last thing she wanted to discuss with her funeral director was payment issues, particularly when this deathcare specialist has a fascinating history of disturbing graves to retrieve his unpaid products.

He then left the body for the unfortunate family to collect. Thankfully, she was fortunate enough to have the funds to pay the funeral home.

But what if my family had no other alternatives and couldn’t afford additional resources to bury Troy? The funeral home in Mississippi would have dug up Troys grave, and my familys last resort would be to consult with a distant partner of the deathcare industry, a body broker.

A body broker is an individual or a firm that operates under a non-transplant tissue bank. These organizations pale in-comparison to the organ donation and tissue transplant industries, which the United States regulates. Meanwhile, selling organs and tissues may be illegal, but body brokers operate in a grey area called whole-body donation.

The sale of cadavers or human remains is legal as long as the individual consents or a family member does so on behalf of the deceased. In some cases, brokers tend to oversell themselves with dishonest language, including terms that suggest their business is solely to make a contribution to science.

A quick way to help anyone considering donating their body to science is to examine the type of operation the company is conducting in plain sight. Some of the distinctions between for-profit and nonprofit non-transplant tissue banks are funding, purpose, staff, and leadership. Remember, how a company gathers capital to fund their ventures determines the basis of their operation.

For-profit body brokers need investors to invest in their business, and then, in turn, they may receive a share of the profits in return. Whereas their counterparts, nonprofits, run solely on donations given without reimbursement.

The second point of distinction is the purpose of the institution. For-profit brokers want to provide nontissue human remains to consumers for a profit. This business model usually includes renting out cadavers for profit to medical researchers, military training organizations, and other buyers. Nonprofits start with the intention of helping further development in medical education, training, and research.

Finally, the staff and leadership of for-profit whole-body donation firms comprise of paid employees and leadership with notable financial stakes in their companys success. Nonprofit brokers guide their business with no financial gain but instead an aim to improve the strides in medical science.

Sadly, when for-profit body brokers consult with a client, their conversations lack transparency about the actual nature of their organization. Due to a lack of understanding, even some funeral directors charmed by the mission to better the world of science have no idea what body brokers neglect to mention. Their business model operates on a surplus of bodies donated by a large percentage of the poor population since most brokers offer to cremate a portion of the donor free of charge.

The body broker industry metaphorically resembles a game of chance. If you will, a flip of a coin whether the betterment of science is heads and the disgrace of the dead is tails. However, the National Funeral Directors Association said in 2019, the average cost to bury one adult was $9,135, and the cost to cremate one was $6,645.

So, considering how the funeral business is strangely booming with prosperity despite their silent clientele should caution every American citizen.

After all, nothing about common decency for the dead is sacred in the United States of America. The government doesn’t monitor the sale of cadavers; but federal laws are in place to govern the sale of organs and tissue. Despite the importance of the role of body brokers, a national registry of brokers has yet to exist.

After numerous stories emerged in the media, Doctors began to compare broker organizations to 19th-century grave robbers that made a killing off the dead. Since, this career remains unregulated, amateurs are able to enter the business with no experience using a construction saw to hack a corpse into pieces. Brokers can then rent out parts of an individual’s body for profit. Then after their done with the donors contribution, they send the remains to a waste incinerator.

Some brokers have a warehouse filled with hundreds of chopped-up corpses, so a whole cadaver or several parts of one donor can be sold or rented for a profit so many times for different purposes. It eventually becomes difficult for amateur brokers to find their actual body. In Montrose, Colorado, a funeral home once operated by Megan Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, moonlighted in the resale of whole body donations. Hess and Koch managed their lucrative side venture from their establishment, Sunset Mesa Funeral Home.

Megan Hess had created an easy-to-navigate online space for prospects to donate their remains or a family members on her website. The only actions required was filling out a few forms and adding the service to the checkout cart. Then presto, the desecration of a loved one remains should be delivered in an urn. But remember, Sunset Mesa never said it would be your loved one in that urn or even a loved one.

Hess and Koch harvested a trail of bodies from across the world in the back room of their funeral home, the storefront of their criminal enterprise. Since, for the most part, Hess and Koch never asked for authorization, or if they did, the family rejected the pairs offer for donation. Despite rejection, Hess and Koch continued to prepare hundreds of bodies without consent. The duo even sold the remains of willing participants far beyond what the family intended.

I presume when body brokers Megan Hess and Shirley Koch accomplished profiting off a donor. They cremated the body in their crematorium, then, according to a few witnesses in their funeral capacity, they delivered several strangers remains to different families.

One witness said this about Sunset Mesa to a reporter from NBC News, “We don’t know who was in that box, only that it wasn’t her. It felt like we lost her again,” said a victim. “How was my mothers body treated? Was it crushed? Buried in a decomposition bin? I don’t want to bring up the horror, but that’s what we, the survivors, have to deal with.”

Another witness said, “We will never know the final resting place of our mom. We will never know what happened to her.” she continued, “Is she on display somewhere? Is she in a medical waste bin somewhere? Was she chopped up like an old car?”

In other cases, Hess and Koch would return urns filled with sand, concrete, and cat litter disguised as a loved ones remains. Its no wonder Hess and Koch had the two careers I learned to detest the most in America besides Politicians and drug dealers. Its sad to witness the outcome of the old, innocent mom-and-pop burial services from esteemed members of society to funeral hustlers and body snatchers.

Does the cost of burying the dead outweigh immorality? On one hand, Sunset Mesa got away with forgery for years, but then again, they were both arrested. But after Hess pleaded guilty to mail fraud in a plea deal, other charges against her were dropped. Megan Hess then received a maximum sentence of 20 years for mail fraud, but her mother only received 15 years.

The original charges never mentioned mistreatment of the donors in the body broker industry, and she still received a plea deal after falsifying forms. Since Hess and Koch shipped bodies to buyers that tested positive from Hepatitis B, C and HIV after certifying they were disease-free. Then the pair violated the Department of Transportations regulations by shipping hazardous materials on commercial air flights.

These charges still involve the living with little regard for the deceased except consent, and besides, theres still an even darker side to the broker industry. The expensive cost of the deathcare industry compared to the mistreatment of the dead by body broker firms shouldn’t be plausible. However outside Southern Nevada Donor Services, their neighboring tenants complained about a foul stench and bloody boxes?

Then, later that December, health records show someone contacted authorities to report odd activity in the courtyard. It turns out that a man in medical scrubs was thawing out a human torso with a garden hose in the afternoon for every curious passerby to witness.

Of course, bits of tissue and blood washed into the gutters. Even when officials walkthrough Joe Collazo’s storage facility, their search yielded a bloody, motorized saw and moldy body parts. The only person charged was a funeral home employee. Gary Derischebourg said it was his responsibility to prepare body parts for Collazo, but one day, he was too busy, so he asked an unemployed friend to do it. Derischebourg pleaded guilty and took the fall for the misdemeanor pollution citation with the torso.

Sadly, the rising costs of the deathcare industry still prove this argument necessary for alot of unfortunate people. Sure, theres another important issue of some poor American not wanting to discuss or even think about making arrangements for their death. This mindset only prolongs the inevitable and leaves the physical cost versus the weight of a decision that could cause tons of helpless families to side with corruption.

I know many people have a nonchalant attitude towards their death, but I challenge everyone here to take a second to feel empathy about their final resting place. After all, no one deserves to be pimped out by the highest bidder, or worse with their torso sprayed by a garden hose in an alleyway for the improvement of science at the cost of the destruction of humanity.

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