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Monday, June 12, 2006

Dark Harvest

Posted by on June 12 at 13:00 PM

Here’s a very disturbing article about a New York based tissue harvesting company called Biomedical Tissue Services which was caught stealing body parts from cadavers in funeral homes:

The man’s body stretched out in front of Lee Cruceta in the back room of a Manhattan funeral home after hours one day last summer had yellowish skin. His vacant eyes had the same sickly cast - a sign of jaundice. Cruceta telephoned his boss, Michael Mastromarino, to tell him the bad news: The body had failed inspection.

The boss came down, checked out the body himself and declared that “everything looked fine.”

Out came the surgical tools. The extraction of flesh and bone began.

Authorities say Biomedical Tissue Services secretly carved up hundreds of cadavers - among them, that of the British-born host of “Masterpiece Theatre,” Alistair Cooke - without the families of the deceased knowing about it. They then peddled the pieces on the lucrative non-organ body parts market.

Authorities released photos of exhumed corpses that were boned below the waist like a freshly caught fish. The defendants, they alleged, had made a crude attempt to cover their tracks by sewing PVC pipe back into the bodies in time for open-casket wakes.

Not only does this brew up fresh hell for the families of the violated cadavers as well as innocent tissue recipients with God-knows-what stuffed and stitched to their bodies, but it reminded me of an Invader Zim episode that really scares the shit out of me (Dark Harvest, parts I and II). Thanks for stirring up trouble, freaky body snatchers.


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More organs means more human!!! - Zim

There's a whole industry exploding around this. Earlier I googled "Michael Mastromarino" and received these unsettling Sponsored Links:

Illegal Tissue Transplant
Are you a recipient of contaminated
or illegal tissue? Contact us.
www.wrongful-death.com

Stolen Body Tissues
Class action for human body tissue.
Lawyers & Legal help. No obligation
www.monheit.com/biomedical-tissue

Illegal Tissue/Bone Graft
Are you the recipient of an Illegal
bone/tissue graft? We can help
www.darcylaw.com

Alpha Phi Delta
The National Italian American
Heritage Fraternity.
www.apdscholarship.org

I'll be fine. I bet my squeedly spooch on it.

Now if this really were a Capitalistic, free-market economy, like TPTB keep telling us it is, I'd be able to sell my valuable internal organs on some sort of "futures basis" today, and make a pile of $$. Instead, what we get are a bunch of goons coming in after the rigor-mortice had already set in, and making a tidy sum off somebody's innards, while they get squat out of the transaction.

There ought to be a law, I tells 'ya.

I THOUGHT that was Alistair Cooke's coccyx on eBay, turns out I was right.

I would just like to point out some useful information:
1. No organs were collected in this manner - tissue only. Organs die without a constant supply of oxygen rich blood. You can only retrieve organs from someone whose heart is beating (this is why organs donors are kept on respirators after their brains die).
2. Tissue consists of veins, bones, skin and some parts of the eye. The processing of tissue eliminates nearly all risk of viral transmission.

I'm not trying to excuse behavior; this is a gross vioation of the trust one puts in the caretakers of the dead. It dishonors the deceased and their family members to have the wishes of either party ignored. I just felt the poster of the article was grasping at straws to make his point and in doing so, merely illustrating his own ignorance in the matter of organ and tissue transplantation.

Info,

I'm not sure what point you think I was trying to make that I appear to be "grasping at straws", but let me spell it out for you:

Forging the signatures of family members and illegally sawing off pieces of cadavers in funeral homes (cadavers who would be judged as too old or diseased in an above-board tissue harvesting operation), and then selling them to be stitched to unwitting recipients is *a bit creepy.*

You're right. I don't know much about the tissue harvesting community. I'm sure most of the folks are swell! But I read enough to be appalled.

On another note, I did call them "freaky organ stealers." My bad. I'll change it.

GOD CIENNA YOU TOTALLY DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT TISSUE HARVESTING OBVIOUSLY YOU SHOULD JUST GIVE UP

Eggs -

You got the belly gurrgle out of me for the day. Good work, wit shines above all ....

I read he original story, fearful of nighmares after four or five paragraphs.

Creepy stuff - but kinda fits funeral homes in general ... full employment for ghouls .... my three experiences with burying have all been worse than evan all the warnings out there .......

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