FFS - Family Finds Dead Grandfather Being Dissected at an 'Oddities' Event [View all]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkpy4g/family-finds-dead-grandfather-being-dissected-at-an-oddities-event?utm_source=email&utm_medium=editorial&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=211103&utm_term=daily_automation_interest

A family who thought their grandfather’s body would be donated to science learned that he ended up as a sideshow for an “oddities” event, dissected in front of a paying public audience in the middle of a hotel event room across the country.

The body of David Saunders, a 97-year-old WWII veteran, ended up in the ballroom of a Portland, Oregon Marriott hotel, where people paid up to $500 for tickets to see a live autopsy in person.

The family discovered what happened to their grandfathers’ body only after an undercover journalist from Seattle news outlet KING5 attended the October event and spotted the man’s name on a tag hanging from his body. The autopsy, performed by a retired college anatomy professor, included several hours of dissection: slicing into the chest cavity and removing organs and the brain.

Mike Clark, a funeral director in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, handled Saunders’ body after his death. Clark told KING5 that he passed the body to a private company called Med Ed Labs, which claimed to solicit corpses for medical research purposes. That company then sold the body to Jeremy Ciliberto, the founder of DeathScience.org, who partnered with the Oddities and Curiosities Expo to hold the cadaver autopsy event. Ciliberto said he bought bodies for this event for more than $10,000.