Long before his bleak final years, when he struggled with mental illness and lived mostly on the streets, Victor Carl Honey joined the United States Army, serving honourably for nearly a decade. When his heart gave out and he died alone 30 years later, he was entitled to a burial with military honours. Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country.
A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh, so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.
S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio. In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.
Honey, who died in September 2022, is one of about 2,350 people whose unclaimed bodies have been given to the Fort Worth-based University of North .
