A Guy Who Donated His Mother's Body for Research Finds Out it Was Blown Up in a Bomb Test Instead

Source – An Arizona man learned five years after his mother’s death that her body had been sold to the military and detonated in a bomb blast test without his consent, a report said.

Doris Stauffer died at the age of 73 in 2014 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease later in life. Her son, Jim Stauffer, agreed to allow doctors to study his mother’s brain … with the hopes his mother’s body could be used to further research into what causes memory loss in Alzheimer’s patients.

Biological Resource Center (BRC), a since shutdown Phoenix-based organ-donor facility, arrived within 45 minutes of her death to take the body away, he said. He said he signed paperwork that specified what was and what was not to happen to his mother’s body. “Performing these medical tests that may involve explosions, and we said no. We checked the ‘no’ box on all that,” Jim Stauffer said.

He later received a box with what he was told was the majority of his mother’s ashes, some information and an ID number.

He said Reuters assembled a paper trail using internal documents obtained by authorities that revealed BRC sold his mother’s body to a military contractor to be used in detonation testing. Her body was strapped to a chair and a bomb was detonated underneath it to simulate what happens to the human body when a vehicle hits an IED, he said. …

He joined a civil lawsuit filed against BRC and its owner Stephen Gore, which alleges the body-donor facility preyed on low-income, uneducated and grieving families to get them to donate their loved ones’ bodies under false pretenses.

Look, I get it. I had to lay my sainted mother to rest. So I’m not without sympathy for Jim Stauffer. No one bids their last farewell to their silver haired mom who gave them unconditional love their whole life, or sends her off to her final reward only to picture her corpse strapped to a chair with a C4 vest and blown to tiny bits like someone in a Cronenberg film.

So I have empathy for the family, is this really worth suing over? With all due respects to Doris, rest her soul, if the doctors figured her cadaver couldn’t help them with Alzheimer’s research, is that it? The end of the line? She can serve no further purpose so it’s off to the crematorium with her?

The way I see it, Alzheimer’s is a very, very serious problem. So good for them for their selflessness and sacrifice. One of the biggest priorities we have a society is finding a treatment and a cure. But the crippling effects of IEDs is a huge priority too. We need cadavers to be blown up every bit as much as we need brains to be sliced thing and put under a microscope. I can’t speak for Doris but I can speak for me as someone with “Organ Donor” on my driver’s license. If sitting me down on top of a pile of gun powder and blasting me to the moon will help some Special Forces warrior or give doctors a clue of how to treat a kid who lost a leg in some war torn hell hole, then strap me in and let’s light this candle.

Mostly though, my thoughts and prayers to the Stauffer family. Just take comfort in knowing Doris has done her part for medical research.