Jim Stauffer, a grieving son from Arizona who donated his mother’s body to medical research, was sickened to find out it was sold to the military for blast testing. He is speaking out amidst an ongoing lawsuit against a private body contribution facility accused of trafficking and mutilating human body parts ― including sewing them together in a “Frankenstein manner.”
Stauffer, from Phoenix, was under the impression scientists were going to study the brain of his mother, Doris Stauffer, 73, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. However, Biological Resource Center, the facility which took her body, secretly sold it to the US Army, who then used it to test explosives.
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When Stauffer agreed to donate his mother’s body, he said the paperwork specifically asked if we wanted to allow medical tests involving explosions. “We checked the ‘no’ box on all that,”1 he said, adding:
“She was strapped in a chair, and a detonation took place underneath her to get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED.
There was wording on this paperwork about performing tests that may involve explosions, and we said, ‘No’.”1
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In 2014, Biological Resource Center (BRC) collected Doris’s remains 45 minutes after her death. Several days later Stauffer received his mother’s ashes. Years later he learned the gruesome truth. He said:
“I feel foolish. I’m not a trusting person, but, you have no idea this is going on.“1
Officials from the US Army said they took BRC on their word that permission had been given. Records indicate that at least twenty additional bodies were blown up without consent. Stauffer lamented:
“I don’t see a pathway of getting past this. Every time there’s a memory, a photograph, there’s this ugly thing that happened staring at you.”1
Stauffer is one of thirty-three people now suing BRC and its owner, Stephen Gore, 52, who, according to Jim, doesn’t care about the families or the bodies he collected.
As we previously reported, the FBI agents found a horrific scene at BRC in Phoenix, including 1,755 human body parts and a woman’s head sewn on a male torso in a “Frankenstein manner”.
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Attorney Michael Burg, who is representing Jim Stauffer and others in the civil lawsuit, said that since the FBI raid in Arizona, the FBI has cracked down on several other body-donating facilities across the country, including in Detroit, Chicago and Colorado where similar lawsuits have been filed. Burg said:
“This is a national problem. We believe that this is going on in not only the cases that we have, but we believe that it’s something that’s been going on in the darkness for a long time.”1
