Funeral-home owner charged with selling body parts

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SAN DIEGO — A Southern California funeral-home owner has been accused of illegally dissecting corpses and selling the body parts to medical researchers at universities and pharmaceutical companies without the permission of family members, who believed their loved ones' remains were cremated.

Michael Francis Brown, 42, of Lake Elsinore, Calif., a town of about 30,000, 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles, was charged last week with 156 felony counts of unlawful mutilation of human remains and embezzlement.

Karen Gorham, Riverside County deputy district attorney, said Brown had received about $400,000 for the body parts that he sold in one year. The parts were taken from remains of at least 81 people intended for cremation, some of them indigent, she said.

Brown, who has operated a funeral home and crematory since 1994, opened a third business, Bio-Tech Anatomical, in February 2000, to funnel tissues from bodies that had been willed to science to research institutions.

Five years ago, the Los Angeles County coroner's office was widely criticized for harvesting thousands of corneas from cadavers without the consent of relatives.

The practice ended after the Los Angeles Times published a story about the practice, disclosing that the tissue bank that was allowed to salvage the corneas sold them for more than 1,200 percent of the price it paid to the coroner's office, an arrangement critics said constituted a "virtual cornea mill."

The case also raises questions about what assurances families have that their wishes for the cremation of their loved ones' will be followed, a concern that has also been evoked by gruesome scenes in Noble, Ga., where investigators have found hundreds of bodies that had been intended for cremation at the Tri-State Crematory.

Clients of Bio-Tech Anatomical included the Orthopedic Bioengineering Research Laboratory at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Kent Bachus, the laboratory's co-director, said the facility buys hips and knees to test new designs of implants before they are used in patients.

It finds suppliers "by word of mouth, from other researchers," he said.