Tarrant County, UNTHSC end partnership on ‘unclaimed' dead bodies

A years-long agreement between Tarrant County and the University of North Texas Health Science Center over the use of unclaimed dead bodies has now ended.

For years, UNTHSC has had an agreement with Tarrant and Dallas counties to take custody of bodies of people whom the city cannot find loved ones for or whose loved ones don't want to deal with funeral or cremation costs.

The idea was to take the costs off the counties, saving them a combined million dollars annually.

UNTHSC made a profit of about $2.5 million by taking the bodies of more than 2,300 people who died in North Texas and leasing their body parts to outside groups, like medical companies, according to financial records reviewed by NBC News.

An NBC News investigation also uncovered that, in many cases, there were failures to reach family members before deeming a body unclaimed.

In one case, a man named Oscar Fitzgerald died of a drug overdose outside a Fort Worth convenience store in 2020.

County officials failed to reach his siblings or adult children, so they had no voice in deciding whether to donate his body.

It was taken to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, pumped with preservatives, and assigned to a first-year medical student to study over the coming year.

NBC News found that five months passed before Fitzgerald's family learned from a friend in September 2020 that he was dead. ​​When his brother rushed to Fort Worth to claim the remains, he said the Health Science Center told him that he’d have to wait — the program was not done using the body.

Patrick Fitzgerald, who had last seen his 57-year-old brother the previous Thanksgiving, was aghast.

“Now that the family has come forward,” said Fitzgerald. “You mean to tell me we can’t have him?”

Instead, according to NBC News, Fitzgerald said he was told his family must fill out donation consent forms to receive his brother’s ashes eventually.

A year and a half later — after the body had been leased out a second time to a Texas dental school — the center billed the family $54.50 in shipping costs for the box that arrived at Fitzgerald’s Arkansas home containing his brother’s remains.

Once they learned of the investigation, Tarrant County leaders decided to reconsider their contract with UNTHSC and put it on their meeting agenda.

County Judge Tim O'Hare said that since then, and before the vote, UNTHSC has sent the county a notice of termination.

According to that letter, dated Friday, Sept. 13, UNTHSC said it had ended its Bio Skills Lab, the branch of its Willed Body Program that deals with unclaimed bodies.

A school spokesperson told NBC 5 that the umbrella Willed Body Program has also been temporarily suspended pending internal and external reviews.

“I was shocked. I don’t think anyone really considers how we acquire these bodies, especially because … these programs are called Willed Body Programs," said Serena Karim, a UTA nursing student who helped research the topic with her professor.

Karim spoke at Tuesday's commissioner's court meeting to urge commissioners to end their agreement with UNTHSC, saying that even if a body is unclaimed -- and legal for medical schools to use -- it's not ethical because nobody has given consent.

“I could understand for a surgeon if they need to get through and feel the real tissue and know what they’re dealing with. I think the most important thing, though, is that those students know that the bodies they’re working on is from people who consented to give it," said Karim.

Tarrant County leaders agreed, voting unanimously to end their partnership with UNTHSC.

"We’re directing the county administrator to wrap up the program with UNTHSC as fast as humanly possible," said O'Hare. "No one’s body should be used for medical research absent their pre-death consent or the consent of a loved one, and certainly no one’s body should be sold for profit absent consent one way or the other.”

Medical ethicist Dr. David Capper said the question of what to do with those bodies remains.

“What happens once they die and there’s nobody -- nobody who can represent them and nobody can claim them?” he said.

Capper is with the Tarrant County Medical Society, a professor at TCU, and works with people who experience homelessness and often end up as unclaimed bodies.

“Absolutely above nothing else and everything else, you want to treat that body with respect, because that body is imbued with dignity that needs to be preserved, even in death," said Capper.

That means Texas counties need to try their best to find living loved ones for those who die.

“Did we really do a good job of finding the family?” he said.

But after that -- who's responsible?

“Are we, the taxpayers, always going to bear this burden when no tax funds have been allocated for this?” said Capper.

That's a question Tarrant County leaders will have to answer next.