Invasion of the Body Snatchers

[Mephisto]

Just in time for Halloween too!

Secret pleas, new charges in stolen body parts scandal

POSTED: 8:50 p.m. EDT, October 18, 2006

NEW YORK (AP) -- Seven funeral home directors linked to a scheme to plunder corpses and sell body parts for transplants have secretly pleaded guilty to undisclosed charges, prosecutors announced on Wednesday.

The unidentified directors have agreed to cooperate with investigators, prosecutors added. The probe involves a plot to harvest bone and tissue and sell it to biomedical supply companies, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said.

"It is clear that many more funeral home directors were involved in this enterprise," Hynes said at a news conference.

The seven entered their pleas in closed courtrooms and their names were withheld, but defense attorneys said that among those cooperating was the director of a funeral home that took parts from the body of "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke, who died in 2004.

The four original defendants in the case pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to enterprise corruption, body stealing and other charges in the new indictment. If convicted, they face up to 25 years in prison. All remain free on bail.

Prosecutors allege Michael Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon, and three other men secretly removed skin, bone and other parts from up to 1,000 bodies from funeral homes, without the permission of families.

They were charged in February with counts including body stealing, unlawful dissection and forgery in a case a district attorney called "something out of a cheap horror movie."

All the defendants pleaded not guilty before being released on bail.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/10/18/body.snatchers.ap/index.html

[Mephisto]

Wow! The Tri-State Crematorium didn't realize they were sitting on a gold mine. ;)

Crematory's 'Unspeakable Disrespect' on Trial
Opening statements scheduled today for case involving 339 corpses and nearly 1,500 plaintiffs
R. Robin McDonald
Fulton County Daily Report
March 5, 2004

When friends tossed Chattanooga, Tenn., attorney Robert Crawford Jr.'s cremated remains into the wind on his favorite golf course, the ashes sparkled as the sunlight caught them. Crawford's sister Teri D. Crawford said there was something angelic about her brother's ashes glittering in the wind. But the hint of grace the attorney's friends and family perceived proved to be something else.

A year after Robert Crawford's February 2001 funeral, Walker County officials laid bare a landscape of decaying corpses at the dilapidated Tri-State Crematory near Noble, Ga. In the days that followed, 339 corpses that should have been cremated by Tri-State were salvaged from the crematory grounds. And Teri Crawford discovered that a portion of her brother's remains preserved in a small urn by his widow was adulterated with bits of metal, rock and silica. The sparkles seen by Crawford's friends were not his ashes, his sister said in a deposition unsealed last month.

Teri Crawford and an estimated 1,500 other survivors are part of a federal class action suit that began this week in Rome, Ga. Opening statements are scheduled to begin this morning before U.S. District Judge Harold L. Murphy.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1078368921591#

[Lurker]

Damn Republicans!

[Mephisto]

Damn Republicans!

:) To be fair, it was an equal-opportunity organ pool. I wonder if this is a good excuse for cremation, or if cremation would allow them the liberty of lending your entire body out piecemeal?