A SON was horrified to learn that his mum’s body which he donated to medical science was blown up by the US Military. Jim Stauffer, from Surprise, Arizona, thought his beloved mother’s remains would be used to study the effects of Alzheimer’s when she died five years ago. But instead 73-year-old Doris Stauffer’s cadaver was […]
A SON was horrified to learn that his mum’s body which he donated to medical science was blown up by the US Military.
Jim Stauffer, from Surprise, Arizona, thought his beloved mother’s remains would be used to study the effects of Alzheimer’s when she died five years ago.
But instead 73-year-old Doris Stauffer’s cadaver was strapped into a chair on ‘some sort of apparatus’ and bomb was let off beneath her.
She passed away in hospice care following a several year battle with the disease, despite doctors saying she didn’t carry the gene for it.
Medical officials feared the condition may have mutated and hoped to study her brain after her death to further investigate.
But when she died in 2014, her neurologist was unable to accept her remains, so Jim reached out to a number of donation facilities.
Finally, he settled on the Biological Resource Centre (BRC) in Maricopa County, Arizona following a recommendation from a nurse, under the agreement that the company – led by Stephen Gore – would send her brain to a neurological research group.
After learning what really happened to his mum’s corpse, he said: ‘They took my mum’s body and blew it up.
“They strapped her in a seat and then detonated an explosion underneath it.
“I saw a picture of the apparatus used and it looked like a seat fixed to some kind of tower.”
Jim recalled how an official from BRC came to pick up his mother’s remains within 45 minutes of her death.
There, he said he signed an agreement with the official in which it was detailed what “would and would not” happen to Doris’ remains.
Several days later he received a wooden box that contained the ‘majority’ of his mother’s ashes, however no information was provided about how Doris’ body was used or where the rest of her remains were.
But three more years would pass before he learned what really happened to his mother, when a reporter from Reuters sent him some documents.
The records showed that BRC workers detached one of Doris Stauffer’s hands for cremation. After sending those ashes back to her son, the company sold and shipped the rest of Stauffer’s body – including her brain – to a taxpayer-funded research ‘blast testing’ project for the U.S. Army.
There was actually wording on this paperwork about performing this stuff. Performing these medical tests that may involve explosions, and we said no. We checked the ‘no’ box on all that.
Jim Stauffer
The idea of the experiment was to ‘get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED,’ the documents detailed.
Jim said: “There was actually wording on this paperwork about performing this stuff.
“Performing these medical tests that may involve explosions, and we said no. We checked the ‘no’ box on all that.”
BIZARRELY 'body brokerage' is pretty much unregulated in the United States.
No law or regulation specifically covers the sale of human cadavers or body parts.
Only organs for transplant are subjected to stringent legal regulation and controls.
Brokers need the express permission from the deceased’s next of kin to take posession of the body, and normally do this by offering a free cremation service.
In some instances they have been known to fraudulently claim they are donating the bodies to medical research before flogging them on for profit.
This is why, despite the macarbre chop shop style enterprise some seem to run, if they face prosecution it is generally for fraud or violating hazardous material shipping laws.
BRC and military records show that at least 20 other bodies were also used in the blast experiments without permission of the donors or their relatives.
The donated bodies were all sold to the military for £5,000 each.
Military officials said they never received the consent forms from the donors or their families that along with the cadavers.
Instead, they were forced to rely on the assurances of BRC that the families or donors had all agreed to be used in the specified type of research.
Jim says he still struggles with the reality of his mum’s grisly end.
He said: “I don’t see a pathway of ever getting past this, every time there’s a memory, every time there’s a photograph you look at there’s this ugly thing that happened just right there staring right at you.”
Jim is one of 33 plaintiffs named against in a lawsuit against BRC and its owner Stephen Gore, in which the gruesome details of how the centre misused loved ones’ bodies is compared to Frankenstein.
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