PHOENIX, AZ — New court documents detail the grisly scene federal agents found when they raided a body-donor facility in Phoenix in 2014: a “Frankenstein” head, a bucket full of arms, legs and heads, and a cooler filled with penises.
The FBI raided the now-shuttered Biological Resource Center after getting a tip the owner, Stephen Gore, was selling donated body parts for profit. Gore has already been charged criminally and sentenced, but now 33 families who donated their loved ones’ bodies have filed a civil lawsuit against him in Maricopa County Superior Court.
The families accuse Gore of obtaining the body parts through false pretenses, of selling them as whole cadavers or dismembered parts to various entities through middlemen, and of storing, treating and disposing of the bodies in a manner that lacked the dignity their loved ones deserved.
Gore, whose business specialized in providing donated human bodies, organs and tissues to medical schools both in the United States and abroad, admitted to the elements of the civil lawsuit in his 2015 criminal case. He said he sold body parts that had been willed to science to medical researchers, medical equipment developers and pharmaceutical companies. Investigators said he knew many of the body parts were infectious or diseased before they were improperly packaged, transported and sold to the unsuspecting buyers.
In a declaration included in the civil lawsuit, former FBI Assistant Special Agent Mark Cwynar said he “personally observed various unsettling scenes” inside the Biological Resource Center, located off 24th Street and University Drive.
Besides the cooler filled with penises and the bucket of limbs were a “large torso with the head removed and replaced with a smaller head sewn together in a ‘Frankenstein’ manner’ ” and a pile of body parts that weren’t properly tagged to identify the person whose body was donated, according to a report by news station KNXV.
The sale of donated body parts was a lucrative business, according to court documents cited by the Arizona Republic. A fully intact body sold for about $6,000, while one without shoulders or a head fetched $2,900. The price of a whole spine was $950. A leg ran about $1,100. Knees and feet were priced at about $375 and $450 a pop, respectively. The price on a pelvis was $400.
The criminal case against Gore, which was part of a nationwide investigation into the black-market body parts brokering business, prompted Arizona lawmakers to pass a law in 2017 requiring licensure of body donation businesses. However, the Republic said the law hasn’t been implemented or enforced.
Four body donation companies are currently doing business in Arizona, and each is accredited by the American Association of Tissue Banks, the newspaper said.
The civil lawsuit against Gore is scheduled to go to trial on Oct. 21.
In 2015, he pleaded guilty to a state charge of conducting an illegal enterprise and was given a 12-month suspended sentence and 48 months of probation. He was also ordered to pay $122,000 in restitution.
At the time, he wrote in a letter to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Warren Granville that there were no formal regulations to guide him in his business, and that he “should have hired a medical director rather than relying on medical knowledge from books on the internet.”
He also admitted that he could have been more open about the donation process in a brochure.
His arrest in 2014 was part of a nationwide investigation of black-market body part businesses that included raids in Detroit and Chicago.