Unclaimed Bodies Fuel a Lucrative and Unregulated Industry

Libero Marinelli Jr.’s journey from a public hospital to a for-profit body broker demonstrates the peril of an industry with little regulation, an NBC News investigation found. 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.”, 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 occurrin

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