© Reuters/Craig Lassig
Angela McArthur, director of the body donation program at the University of Minnesota, poses in the Anatomy Bequest Laboratory in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. August 15, 2017. Picture taken August 15, 2017.
The company stacked brochures in funeral parlors around Sin City. On the cover: a couple clasping hands. Above the image, a promise: "Providing Options in Your Time of Need."
The company, Southern Nevada Donor Services, offered grieving families a way to eliminate expensive funeral costs: free cremation in exchange for donating a loved one's body to "advance medical studies."
Outside Southern Nevada's suburban warehouse, the circumstances were far from comforting. In the fall of 2015, neighboring tenants began complaining about a mysterious stench and bloody boxes in a dumpster. That December, local health records show, someone contacted authorities to report odd activity in the courtyard.
Health inspectors found a man in medical scrubs holding a garden hose. He was thawing a frozen human torso in the midday sun.
As the man sprayed the remains, "bits of tissue and blood were washed into the gutters," a state health report said. The stream weaved past storefronts and pooled across the street near a technical school.
Southern Nevada, the inspectors learned, was a so-called body broker, a company that acquires dead bodies, dissects them and sells the parts for profit to medical researchers, training organizations and other buyers. The torso on the gurney was being prepared for just such a sale.
Comment: What kind of man "needs" a second wife? If he truly loves his wife, he has no need for another lover. This is a barbaric custom that has no place in modern society.