Tarrant County commissioners unanimously voted to close out a program donating unclaimed and indigent bodies of residents to the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. 

“No one’s body should be used for medical research absent their pre-death consent or the consent of a loved one. And certainly, no one’s body should be sold for profit, absent consent one way or the other,” Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare said prior to the vote and after meeting in closed session with commissioners to receive legal advice on the matter. 

Commissioners have directed staff to wrap up the program “as fast as humanly possible,” he added. 

The Health Science Center announced the suspension of its Willed Body Program and the termination of program leaders on Sept. 13 following a monthslong investigation by NBC News. The investigation found county and Health Science Center officials failed to adequately contact family members before declaring a body unclaimed and using it for medical training and research. 

Following the NBC News report, Health Science Center President Sylvia Trent-Adams sent a Sept. 16 email to faculty, staff and students about the decision to suspend the program, which earned the university roughly $2.5 million per year from outside groups. 

“A few years ago, the Willed Body Program began working with several local counties to receive its unclaimed bodies for medical education and research, as state law allows. This led to a substantial influx of bodies into the program,” Trent-Adams wrote. “This growth exceeded management capabilities and led to significant oversight issues.” 

Trent-Adams said the investigation revealed details that her administration was not aware of, including shipping of unclaimed remains — including those of veterans — out of state, an expansion of requests for body parts and remains from out-of-state entities, a lack of oversight of outside contractors and deficiencies in leadership, respect and professionalism.

“We are refocusing our efforts on the original educational intent of the program and are working to make sure no unclaimed bodies are still being used in any of our programs,” said Trent-Adams. 

The center also plans to hold a town hall meeting on the issue. A date was not specified.

In the agreement that first went into effect in 2019, Tarrant County donated bodies that were unclaimed or required disposition to the Health Science Center. Essentially, the center assumed the responsibilities of transporting bodies, filing death certificates, notifying Social Security and, ultimately, cremating the body whether it was used for medical research or not, according to an April 2022 Fort Worth Report article on the university’s cadaver program. 

Prior to the county’s agreement with the Health Science Center, the county was responsible for the disposition of unclaimed bodies. Tarrant County spent around roughly half a million dollars annually on burials and cremations. 

NBC identified 12 cases in which families learned weeks, months or years after the fact that a relative’s body had been provided to UNT Health Science Center. 

In one case, Oscar Fitzgerald died of a drug overdose outside of a Fort Worth convenience store. His body was donated to the Health Science Center and used for study for first-year medical students. When a family member learned of Fitzgerald’s passing and came forward five months later to claim the remains, the Health Science Center told him to wait, they were not done using the body. 

Longtime Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani, who served from 1979 to 2021, told the Report he agrees with the county’s decision to terminate the contract. He was dismayed when he read about the Health Science Center’s practices and hopes university officials were unaware of the unethical actions. 

“You can’t really sell body parts. That’s really, absolutely unacceptable,” said Peerwani, who is on the advisory council for Physicians for Human Rights and has investigated use of excessive force in Rwanda, Gaza and Bosnia. “It’s against the ethics as promoted by the American Medical Association and other organizations.”

Peerwani outlined the process for how the county went about determining its unclaimed bodies. 

“We would maintain the human remains in our cooler for 21 days, and if there was nobody there to claim the body for whatever reason, we would then call the county’s human services department,” Peerwani said. 

The human services department then worked with an area funeral home that would do the internment at a fee. A human body would only be cremated if a family member affirmatively agreed to doing so. The medical examiner’s office kept detailed records on where a body would be buried.

“If the family came to us two months, one or 10 years later, you can tell them exactly where the next of kin is buried,” Peerwani said.

That process was turned over to the Health Science Center two years before Peerwani retired in 2021. The university program began to earn scrutiny later that year, when UT-Arlington professor Eli Shupe published a Dallas Morning News column questioning the ethics of conducting research on the unclaimed bodies of the poor without consent. 

Serena Karim, a nursing student at UT-Arlington who co-authored a Journal of the American Medical Association article with Shupe on the use of unclaimed bodies in medical education, urged commissioners to terminate the contract at the Sept. 17 meeting. 

“I was shocked to discover that one’s body could be dissected, separated and sold without consent from the deceased or their next of kin,” said Karim during public comment at the meeting before commissioners voted to close out the program. “As future health care professionals, we are taught to advocate for our patients, to speak up when we feel their rights are violated, and to consider the ethical implications of our practice beyond the hospital.”

On Sept. 13, once the commissioners meeting agenda was posted, the Health Science Center sent the county a notice to cancel its contract, stating that they ended their Bioskills program. County Administrator Chandler Merritt will now send a letter to the Health Science Center to close out the program.

The county administrator will research other options regarding the disposition of unclaimed bodies, and of the deceased where families can’t afford burial or cremation services. These options will be considered at a future meeting, according to commissioners court documents.

Reporter David Moreno contributed reporting.

Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, in partnership with Open Campus. Contact her at shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.

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