December 26, 2005--Thigh Bone Connected To The . . .
I’m from Brooklyn and worked for many years on Staten Island so I was not surprised to learn that an embalmer, who lives on SI, was at the center of a scam that involved a funeral home in Bensonhurst Brooklyn.
According to the NY Times (link below) here’s what they were up to before being busted by the Brooklyn District Attorney—bodies would be brought to the funeral parlor in Brooklyn where the embalmer from Staten Island would, without family permission, remove their bones and various organs and then sell them to Biomedical Tissue Services, located, where else, in New Jersey. Biomedical in turn would sell the bones and tissues to processing companies which would grind them up and prepare them in other ways for use in newly developed medical procedures that require less than full organs for the treatments. This apparently is not Frankenstein Redux but rather cutting edge biomedical technology.
So far so good. The investigation of the Bensonhurst funeral home and others in this new version of grave robbing was hardly a story for even the Times which promises to pass along “All the news that’s fit to print.” What caused the recent headline was the fact that Alistair Cooke, erstwhile and distinguished host of Masterpiece Theater, was among those whose body was plundered for its bones before he was cremated.
As you might imagine, his family, to quote them, is “reeling; it’s so horrific on many fronts.”
One of those fronts is the fact that after Biomedical Tissue did its thing they sold Mr. Cooke’s pulverized bones to two companies who then passed them along for transplant. Not knowing that Biomedical had altered the paperwork to hide the fact that he died at 95 of cancer and that it had metastasized to his bones. Biomedical said that the “donor” had died at 85 of a heart attack! None of the companies or parties involved has been available to respond or to let patients know that they may have received toxic transplants.
I suspect you may be thinking this is a rather ghoulish thing to be commenting about the day after Christmas. If you are it may be time right now to hit the delete key and move on to your post-Christmas gift returning.
Because I remained curious about what happened to the rest of Sir Alistair. And now I think I now know the answer because on further inquiry I learned that as a fully assimilated and naturalized American, and a true New Yorker, he had always wanted to have his ashes scattered in Central Park. Which is illegal. (You can only imagine if it wasn’t.) When his family was asked about this, they too declined to comment.
Thoughts?
According to the NY Times (link below) here’s what they were up to before being busted by the Brooklyn District Attorney—bodies would be brought to the funeral parlor in Brooklyn where the embalmer from Staten Island would, without family permission, remove their bones and various organs and then sell them to Biomedical Tissue Services, located, where else, in New Jersey. Biomedical in turn would sell the bones and tissues to processing companies which would grind them up and prepare them in other ways for use in newly developed medical procedures that require less than full organs for the treatments. This apparently is not Frankenstein Redux but rather cutting edge biomedical technology.
So far so good. The investigation of the Bensonhurst funeral home and others in this new version of grave robbing was hardly a story for even the Times which promises to pass along “All the news that’s fit to print.” What caused the recent headline was the fact that Alistair Cooke, erstwhile and distinguished host of Masterpiece Theater, was among those whose body was plundered for its bones before he was cremated.
As you might imagine, his family, to quote them, is “reeling; it’s so horrific on many fronts.”
One of those fronts is the fact that after Biomedical Tissue did its thing they sold Mr. Cooke’s pulverized bones to two companies who then passed them along for transplant. Not knowing that Biomedical had altered the paperwork to hide the fact that he died at 95 of cancer and that it had metastasized to his bones. Biomedical said that the “donor” had died at 85 of a heart attack! None of the companies or parties involved has been available to respond or to let patients know that they may have received toxic transplants.
I suspect you may be thinking this is a rather ghoulish thing to be commenting about the day after Christmas. If you are it may be time right now to hit the delete key and move on to your post-Christmas gift returning.
Because I remained curious about what happened to the rest of Sir Alistair. And now I think I now know the answer because on further inquiry I learned that as a fully assimilated and naturalized American, and a true New Yorker, he had always wanted to have his ashes scattered in Central Park. Which is illegal. (You can only imagine if it wasn’t.) When his family was asked about this, they too declined to comment.
Thoughts?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:35 AM
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