Body-donation suit: $58M
Jury awards 10 plaintiffs who sued Phoenix company
Ten of 21 plaintiffs who sued a now-shuttered Phoenix body-donation company will be awarded $58 million, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury decided Tuesday.
Of the jury’s award, $50 million was punitive damages and $8 million was compensatory.
Stephen Gore, the owner of Biological Resource Center, was not in the courtroom Tuesday and his lawyer declined comment.
“This is a landmark verdict,” said Michael Burg, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “The best part here is that the jury sent a message to people like Gore who are doing this around the country. Fifty million in punitive damages is a warning.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers believe the jury’s monetary award to the plaintiffs is one of the largest in recent Arizona history, though it’s not the highest. Information from
the State Bar of Arizona’s Arizona Attorney magazine says there have been at least five Arizona verdicts of more than $100 million in the past 15 years.
Gwen Aloia, a Phoenix resident who was awarded $5.5 million, cried when she found out about the verdict, partly because she was disappointed for the 11 plaintiffs who got no award, she said. Aloia attended the entire trial and got to know some of the other plaintiffs and all had been traumatized, she said.
Her own award is a tribute to her husband, Louis, whose head was found in a freezer after the FBI began investigating, she said. Aloia donated Louis’ body to Biological Resource Center in 2013 and signed the papers while Louis was in hospice care.
“I think the hospices were misled,” she said.
She’s not sure whether the ashes the company sent her really belong to her husband.
The jury began deliberating Nov. 12 whether to award up to $13.2 million each to plaintiffs who say the bodies of their deceased loved ones were mishandled and disrespected by Biological Resource Center.
The 21 plaintiffs in the civil action, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in 2015, say the remains of their family members were obtained through “false statements,” that body parts were being sold for profit, and that they were not stored, treated or disposed of with dignity or respect.
The plaintiffs say Gore was deceptive for not telling donors that their bodies would be cut up into pieces and sold to middlemen. In some cases, the bodies ended up being used for ballistics testing and as crash test dummies.
Burg, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, had said the civil case against Gore is the first of its kind and that whatever the jury decides should send a message to the body-donation industry about what happens if a company misleads and deceives donors. He estimates the nationwide industry is worth $1 billion.
Body donation is not organ donation
Arizona is a regulatory-free zone for the body-parts industry. At least four body-donation companies are operating in Arizona, in addition to a nonprofit cryonics company that freezes people after they die with the intent of one day bringing them back to life.
Gore started his company in 2004 and never set out to defraud anyone, his lawyer Timothy O’Connor said during closing arguments.
O’Connor said all of the plaintiffs signed consent agreements, which said they would donate their bodies to Biological Resource Center. The consent agreements clearly stated the bodies could be “disarticulated,” he said, adding that Biological Resource Center is not the only body-donation company to have used such language.
One of the key points Burg made during the two-week trial was that Gore misled prospective donors and their families by conflating organ donation and body donation, going so far as to mention the Donor Network of Arizona and its Donate Life slogan on his company literature, though the two entities had no relationship.
Organ donation and body donation are not the same thing, though it’s a common source of confusion. For one thing, organ donation is highly regulated, whereas body donation is not.
Organ donation involves transplanting organs into living humans and donors may sign up to do that through the Donor Network of Arizona or check the appropriate box through the Arizona Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicle Division when ordering a duplicate driver’s license/identification card.
In body donation, the cadaver is used for medical research, education and training. The head, arms and legs could be cut off and no part of the body is ever transplanted into a living human.
There is no regulatory framework that requires body-donation companies to disclose what they intend to do with the body, or what happened with the body.
In the case of Biological Resource Center, the company was private, and for-profit. Though the company asked people to “donate” their bodies after they died, the company was making money from the donation.
Like many body-donation companies, Biological Resource Center picked up bodies after the person had died, and returned the unused cremated remains to families free of charge. The company did outreach to hospitals and hospices across the state.
A cross-country criminal investigation into Biological Resource Center began after U.S. Customs officials found a shipment from the company on a Delta cargo flight that contained 15 severed human heads dripping blood in plastic ice coolers, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich told The Arizona Republic
in 2016.
Organs were being used for ‘something,’ lawyer says
An FBI official who participated in a raid of the company’s Phoenix headquarters described seeing severed limbs, including heads, and a cooler full of penises. He said some of the FBI personnel who participated in the raid did not want to go back into the building after what they had seen.
In his closing arguments, Burg said there was never any evidence uncovered that showed what Biological Resource Center was doing with the male genitalia. But he said there must have been a reason they were being cut off, and they were going to be used for “something.”
Gore already pleaded guilty in October 2015 to the criminal charge of “illegally conducting an enterprise” after accusations that he had provided vendors with contaminated human tissue and used body parts in ways that the donors had not permitted.
The accusations arose during a twoyear criminal investigation and included the Biological Resource Center of Illinois, which resulted in federal charges against its owners.
In a letter to Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Warren Granville before his December 2015 sentencing, Gore wrote that he felt overwhelmed, but that he was working in an industry with “no formal regulations” to reference for guidance.
“I could have been more open about the process of donation on the brochure we put in public view,” Gore wrote. “When deciding which donors could be eligible to donate, I should have hired a medical director rather than relying on medical knowledge from books or the internet.”
Gore was sentenced to four years of probation and a deferred sentence of one year in jail, which he did not serve because of good behavior.
Reacting to the Biological Resource Center case, Arizona passed a law in 2017 that says body-donation companies are not allowed without a state license. However, the law has not yet been implemented or enforced.