A judge sentenced a Colorado funeral-home owner who carved up corpses and sold parts of them without families' permission to 20 years in prison on Tuesday, according to the Department of Justice. Funeral homes owned by Lake County coroner under investigation Kent also operates funeral homes in Silverthorne, Idaho Springs, Fairplay and Buena Vista. Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the worlds largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day. Few state laws provide any oversight. Hess, however, charged families to donate their bodies $195, plus $300 more if relatives want cremated remains returned. Weeks passed before Hess told him that Donor Services couldnt retrieve the glass eye because the company couldnt locate the researcher who received Dunlaps head, Mabry said. She operated a funeral home, Sunset Mesa, and a body parts entity, Donor Services, from the same building in Montrose, Colorado. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. It is unbelievable, said Dave Teselle, a Denver-based attorney who represents Hancock and more than five dozen other families in a claim against the owners of Sunset Mesa and the companies who are accused of buying the body parts. That individual, referred to in the order only as E.W., received no notice that the cremation would be done at the Gypsum funeral home, one of six locations Kent operates in Colorados high country. There is also evidence of Donor Services shipping at least 26 boxes containing body parts to various parts of the world in 2016 according to evidence that has been recovered. Selling body parts: Colorado's secret black market industry - KMGH His head and his arms from his elbows to his fingers, his legs from his knees to his toes, had been removed from his body and they had been sold.. But two said Hess sometimes bragged about how lucrative it was to sell bodies and body parts. 31 decomposed bodies, cremated remains discovered during Clark - WAVE Two funeral homes owned by Lake County Coroner Shannon Kent are under investigation after law enforcement earlier this month found an unrefrigerated body, an abandoned stillborn infant, bags of unl The Lake County Sheriffs Office confirmed an active criminal investigation is underway. Kent also still faces second-degree official misconduct charges stemming from a September 2019 grand jury indictment in the Fifth Judicial District. You are looking at how to make money.. A human head and spine sold for $850, while a full pelvis all the way to the toes priced out at $2,850. Body brokers sometimes market their services using language that could mislead prospective donors into believing the broker handles organ donations. Colorado Funeral Homes. Escher said Koch, who embalmed and dismembered bodies, pulled teeth from some of the corpses to extract the gold in crowns or fillings. None of the former employees or associates Reuters interviewed worked directly for the body broker business. (McGovern said no industry regulated by the Division of Professions and Occupations has regulators assigned exclusively to it.) The 20-year term was the maximum allowed under law. The details of the plea agreement are unknown, but a trial for Hess' mother is still on track to proceed. . Jacque Hampson spent a year working as Hesss personal assistant. Just about any adult can run for coroner in Colorado. The Daily Sentinel reports that Megan Hess faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison after entering the plea Tuesday in Grand Junction. [the FBI told me] his head was sent to so and so. Colorado Funeral Home Caught Selling Bodies Intended For Cremation In addition, a lawsuit has been filed by Shirley Hollenback and her daughter alleging that the remains she received purported to be the cremation ashes of her husband are somebody elses remains and not those of her husband. felt they were too heavy to be those of a stillborn child, and submitted them for analysis. An Upstate New York funeral home proprietor is facing imminent criminal charges for allegedly keeping dead human bodies in "advanced states of decomposition" in his business and its detached garage, local officials announced Friday. Colorado Funeral Home / Body Broker Continues Under Investigation When Reuters reported earlier this year about the unusual twin businesses of owner Megan Hess, federal agents raided the facility and state regulators ordered the funeral home to be shut down. The Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services building in Montrose, Colorado, U.S., December 16, 2017. The suspension order details a 2019 instance in which an unnamed individual arranged with Kents funeral home for the cremation of their stillborn child. POCATELLO, Idaho A Pocatello funeral home under investigation by the Idaho Board of Morticians has had its licenses revoked. Funeral Director Daily take: I have a hard time fathoming what may have went on at this funeral home. The Bailey-Kent Funeral Home was the only option given to her for cremation under a certain weight, she said. Montrose funeral home owner who allegedly sold - The Colorado Sun But the business arrangement is highly unusual. Two months later, after hearing nothing from Hess, Schum went to Sunset Mesa to retrieve her friend's ashes. In another call two months later, Staci Kent responded to a death scene without a body bag, the indictment states, which led to an argument with law enforcement. Market data provided by Factset. Jan 3 (Reuters) - A former Colorado funeral home owner was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on Tuesday for defrauding relatives of the dead by dissecting 560 corpses and selling body parts without permission. On at least three occasions, Staci Kent allegedly responded to calls from law enforcement requesting a coroner at a death scene, according to the indictment. Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox. The gruesome details of the case which authorities say included more than 500 victims drew international attention and shined a light on the . One of Hesss donors was Rex Dunlap, a frugal Coloradan battling brain cancer. The true-crime podcast "Criminal," which covered the story in its 131st episode, reports that when Grand Junction resident Debbie Schum visited Sunset Mesa after the death of her friend in 2017, the funeral home's director, Megan Hess, told Schum that she could not provide cremation services unless Schum paid her $1,000 upfront. The conflict of interest of having a side business in body parts just leads to problems,Steve Palmer, a funeral director in Cottonwood, Ariz., and former member of the policy board at the National Funeral Directors Association, said. DENVER -- To many it is simply the unthinkable. A change of plea hearing for Koch is scheduled for July 12. Body brokering is not illegal in Colorado; however, a 2020 Denver7 report noted that Hess, along with her mother, were donating bodies without the consent of the deceased's family. Colorado regulators can now inspect funeral homes and crematories As a matter of fact, the FBI has set up a hot line and e-mail address for potential victims of the businesses to contact with information. This content was originally published here. ThinkStock via Getty Images. That's part of my nightmare. No such degree exists in the United States for morticians, veteran funeral directors say. Its for profit and people dont realize there is a huge demand for cadavers and body parts., That demand comes from all over the world including medical schools, law enforcement agencies, the military and a variety of other industries looking to legitimately purchase bodies and body parts for credible research. Updated: 8:07 PM MDT September 14, 2021. The recent parade of early deaths has hit close to home. I know these are not his ashes because his body parts went all over the country, Hanson said. felt they were too heavy to be those of a stillborn child, and submitted them for analysis. Instead of paying the standard $695 cremation fee to Colorado Cremation, Hesss former cremation marketing business, Dunlap paid Hess $495 to take his body. Reuters began examining the Hess companies more than a year ago as part of the news agencys exploration of the human body trade, a virtually unregulated industry that largely operates in the shadows. Emmanuel Macron shared his vision of a renewed partnership with Africa in which it stands equal with France, as he concluded a tour where he has sought to dispel France's image as an arrogant former colonial power whilst bidding for future influence. "No, I did not," Hancock responded. Now its possible its not my baby in the urn, Reh said. Its for the good of the world, and I like to help people, Hess said. Pictures show bodies stacked in hallways and unrefrigerated rental trucks. According to Reuters Sunset Mesa Funeral Home had seen their call volume increase from 59 in 2015 to 128 in 2017. And as of. Funeral homes owned by a Colorado coroner under investigation following No one returned her voicemails. The confrontation escalated when Shannon Kent allegedly called Lake County Sheriff Amy Reyes and threatened her with arrest for questioning his wifes decision not to use the body bag, prosecutors said. Finally, after a month, she got Staci Kent on the phone and laid into her, asking why she hadnt heard anything about her sons cremains. The FBI hired a lab to test the cremains given to the families, and they have determined the boxes of ash contain cement, sand and other non-human particles. The legislation has support from the state's largest trade association for funeral homes, the Colorado Funeral Directors Association. SENTINEL FILE PHOTO Sisters Layna and Janet Hutt hold photos of their father, Raymond Hutt, who died in 2016 at the age of 96. Contact7 Chief Investigative Reporter Tony Kovaleski traveled to Montrose and talked to more than a half dozen family members now victims about what they describe as a scheme to profit from their pain. The surgical-training companies and other firms which bought the arms, legs, heads and torsos from Hess did not know they had been fraudulently obtained, prosecutors said. DENVER, Colorado - A former Colorado funeral home owner was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on Tuesday for defrauding relatives of the dead by dissecting 560 . Reuters identified 34 body brokers that have been active across the United States during the past five years. Its not something that can be fixed., Hancock was notified by the FBI that her husbands body parts had been sold without her consent. Neither addressed the issue about the teeth. Its sickening, said Hanson. Hansons box included wires and what appear to be old batteries. State suspends operations of Leadville, Gypsum funeral homes Jeffersonville funeral home under investigation after police find Peck was given another six months of probation. All they got was the urn and a death certificate no other paperwork. Six people were killed, including federal District Court Chief Judge John Roll; Gabe Zimmerman, one of Giffords's staffers; and a 9-year-old girl . Suppliers of transplant tissue must obtain federal recognition and operate as charities. I go to sleep with the visions of him being dismembered with a power saw, said Ruthie Pettyjohn, whose sons body parts were allegedly sold. Some former staff members of Sunset Mesa said they never heard Hess disclose to donors that the bodies would be sold for profit. There are people and businesses who spend millions and millions of dollars," Teselle added, "trafficking in these body parts as if they were nothing more than cans of soup or loaves of bread., I was pretty shocked, said Jacque Hampson, a former employee of the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose. But experts say its the underground black market that also contributes to the increased demand for body parts. Hess had created a nonprofit organization in 2009 called Sunset Mesa Funeral Foundation as a body-broker service doing business as Donor Services, authorities said. On Oct. 2, the Lake and Eagle county sheriffs departments executed a search warrant at the Bailey-Kent Funeral Home in Leadville, where deputies encountered a strong odor of decomposition, according to an Oct. 13 summary suspension issued by the states Office of Funeral Home and Crematory Registration, before finding: In addition to the Leadville funeral home, the state issued suspension orders for the Kent Funeral Home Gypsum. The report also noted that a former employee at Sunset Mesa was troubled by Hess mother, who was responsible for embalming and dismembering the dead bodies. On January 8, 2011, U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 others were shot during a constituent meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Casas Adobes, Arizona, in the Tucson metropolitan area.

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