Funeral Home Malpractice: Body Snatching and Medical Transplants
Posted by
Laura BlattMay 23, 2007 12:27 AMThree funeral home directors and four employees of a biomedical supply company are accused of stealing body parts, organs and tissue from corpses awaiting cremation or burial. Other charges include opening graves, unlawful dissection and fraud.
The defendants allegedly sold the parts to medical tissue banks, which provided them to hospitals and doctors for use in transplants and other medical procedures. Many of the body parts were from diseased or elderly donors.
The supply company was Biomedical Tissue Services in Brighton, New York, which closed in 2005. Biomedical's owner was a former dentist, Michael Mastromarino, who lost his license and then went into tissue recovery work. Mr. Mastromarino and three other men were charged with illegally removing bone and tissue from at least 1,077 bodies.
The funeral homes that were allegedly involved in the body parts scheme are located in the Rochester area of New York. They are the Thomas E. Burger Funeral Home in Hilton, the Profetta Funeral Chapel in Webster and Serenity Hills Funeral Chapel in Rochester.
The body snatching scheme is a particularly egregious example of funeral home abuse. Other cases involve improperly storing and handling human remains, losing the remains and mixing the ashes of several bodies during cremation.