Texas county adopts policy to ensure unclaimed bodies are treated with dignity

This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.

A Texas county that for years gave unclaimed bodies to a local medical school without families’ consent will now cremate or bury those people instead — but only after officials document that they have done all they can to contact relatives.

The revamped rules, approved unanimously Tuesday by the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, are the latest change prompted by an NBC News investigation that revealed how the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth cut up and leased out the remains of hundreds of unclaimed people to other schools, medical technology companies and the Army. The vast majority of the unclaimed bodies — people whose families could not afford funeral arrangements or could not be found — came from Tarrant and Dallas counties, which each saved half a million dollars a year in burial and cremation costs. 

“The county is now in a position to do things ethically, as opposed to before, when we counted on the University of North Texas Health Science Center to handle our business,” Commissioner Alisa Simmons said after Tuesday’s vote. 

Tarrant County had delegated the work of contacting dead people’s families and cremating their remains to the Health Science Center. The new policy brings that responsibility back to the county — at an estimated cost of $675,000 a year.

Officials in Tarrant and Dallas counties had justified sending unclaimed bodies to the Health Science Center by saying their use for training and research would help improve medical care for the living. NBC News found repeated failures to contact relatives who were reachable before the bodies were declared unclaimed. 

The Commissioners Court did not publicly discuss the details of the new policy — or its costs — before it voted unanimously to adopt it. Commissioners Court records indicate that the county has $57,760 in a burials account and will have to find additional money to cover the cost of the new policy.

A spokesperson for Judge Tim O’Hare, Tarrant County’s top elected official, said in a statement that Tuesday’s vote was important “to honor the dignity and memory of deceased individuals the County is responsible for handling after they pass away.” 

The policy document directs the county medical examiner’s office, along with funeral homes, medical facilities and nursing homes, to try to locate and notify deceased people’s relatives “using all information and means available” and to detail those efforts in writing. Before cases can be referred to the county as unclaimed bodies, the facilities must either file affidavits with the county clerk saying they cannot identify the people’s next of kin; make at least three attempts on three separate days to contact family members by phone, email, text or door knocks; or determine that the families refuse to accept responsibility or cannot afford to. The policy also adds another layer of oversight by having the county Department of Human Services make its own attempts to contact families.

Only then, and after 11 days have passed since people’s deaths, can the county cremate or bury the bodies.

The revamped rules give preference to cremating unclaimed bodies, which is cheaper than burial. But they allow for burial if deceased people are unidentified, are military veterans or had wills that prohibited cremation or if the families object to cremation. The new policy also requires the county to give “due consideration” of the dead people’s religion.

Tarrant produced the new policy with help from Eli Shupe, a bioethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington. For years, Shupe urged officials to stop providing unclaimed bodies to the Health Science Center, saying it was immoral to have them dissected and studied without consent.

Although the practice is legal in most of the country, including Texas, many body donation programs have halted it, and some states have prohibited it. The changes are part of an evolution in medical ethics that calls on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients. 

In an interview Tuesday, Shupe said she approved of the policy, although she would have preferred burial as a default, rather than cremation, because many religions favor it.

“The county has done a very good job at taking responsibility for its ethical oversight and correcting it here,” she said. 

The NBC News investigation found that the Health Science Center had received about 2,350 unclaimed bodies from Tarrant and Dallas counties in the past five years. The center leased out some of them, charging $1,400 for whole bodies, $649 for heads and $900 for torsos.

Dale Leggett, who died at a Tarrant County hospital in May 2023, was among those whose bodies were given without consent to the Health Science Center and leased to out-of-state companies — a fact his brother, Tim Leggett, learned only two weeks ago after NBC News published the names of 1,800 people whose corpses went to the program.

Tim Leggett said his brother, 71, was private and reclusive, so it was not unusual to go more than a year without hearing from him. Dale did not even like having his photo taken; there is no chance, Leggett said, he would have wanted his body dissected for research. 

While he is still waiting to hear from the Health Science Center about the location of his brother’s body, and he remains angry that he and his sister were left in the dark, Leggett said he was relieved to learn that Tarrant County was implementing a policy to prevent similar failures in the future.

“Nobody,” he said, “should have to learn about the death of a family member from a news article.”

NBC News has now identified at least 21 cases in which families learned weeks, months or years later that relatives had been provided to the Health Science Center. Seven families, including Leggett, found out what happened from NBC News.