Venezuelan Migrant’s Body Harvested in Texas Medical School

Over the past decade, there has been a sharp increase in the amount of Venezuelan migrants coming to the U.S. due to the ongoing socioeconomic and political crises in the South American country. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of Venezuelan immigrants in the United States has almost tripled since 2010, and more than 7 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015 due to the authoritarian regime and economic turbulence, with many fleeing through the Amazon jungle and the treacherous Darién Gap, which connects Central and South America. Amongst them was 21-year-old Aurimar Iturriago Villegas, who arrived in Texas after crossing into the U.S. in September 2022 hoping to lift her family out of poverty in Venezuela; within two months of arriving in Dallas, she was killed in a road rage incident. Without her family’s knowledge or consent, county authorities donated Aurimar’s body to a local medical school, where it was cut up and assigned different dollar values, buried, or cremated, all whilst her mother and family remained unaware, desperately seeking to have her body repatriated and returned to Venezuela. The coverage of her story is part of a bigger investigative project entitled “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.

Villegas’ story is one of many in a pattern uncovered by NBC News and Noticias Telemundo over the past two years, showing that the unclaimed bodies of more than 1,800 Latinos were sent to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center. Investigations found that overwhelmed local officials struggled to adapt to the rising numbers of unclaimed dead due to the surge in homelessness and opioid addiction and failed to contact reachable family members before declaring bodies unclaimed, meaning that their families’ wishes were disregarded as the corpses were either buried in paupers’ fields or sent to medical schools, biotech companies, and for-profit body brokers without their consent.

According to Aurimar’s mother, Arelis Coromoto Villegas, the young Venezuelan woman grew up in a house in La Villa Del Rosario with a sheet-metal roof and spotty electricity, and she long dreamed of helping her family, quitting school at 16 to take cleaning and yard work jobs to pull them out of poverty. In 2022, she was living in Bogotá, Colombia and making deliveries by riding her bike, and that spring, she informed her family of her new plan to join a group of six other people bound for the U.S. After traversing Central America, she crossed the Rio Grande into Texas in September and turned herself in to border authorities. Her mother told NBC that said Aurimar was released from a detention center and went to stay with an acquaintance near Dallas, a former neighbor from Venezuela named Alexis Moreno. In the evening of Oct. 28. 2022, Aurimar got in the car with some friends in Dallas and was shot in the head in an a road rage incident.

When police and paramedics found Aurimar’s body, she was taken to the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, where the search for her next of kin would commence according to protocol. The next morning, Aurimar’s family learned of her death not from authorities, but from a neighbor in Venezuela who knew Moreno. While it is not clear what exactly transpired after Aurimar’s death, her younger sister Auribel Acero Villegas said she spoke briefly with a person whom she believed worked at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office, and they asked for permission for Moreno to act as the family’s primary point of contact, which she agreed to. However, Aurimar’s case file features no mention of any call, with an entry instead stating that a county official reportedly met with Moreno in person and spoke with her mother Arelis through the phone.

In the file, it is written that Arelis allegedly granted Moreno authority to act as Aurimar’s legal next of kin; despite Arelis saying the call never happened and she only wanted Moreno to help return her daughter’s corpse to Venezuela. A county employee reportedly updated Aurimar’s file and listed Moreno as her official next of kin in the system, granting him authority over what to do with the body and cutting out her family from decisions. Arelis’ phone number was also included in the file, but nothing indicates that anyone in the office attempted to contact her for the next two years while Aurimar’s friends and family launched a fundraising campaign to help send her remains home.

Two and a half weeks after Aurimar’s death, Moreno wrote to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, offering to donate her body to the program on behalf of her mother, who says she never agreed to this. When he failed to send over the necessary paperwork, the Medical Examiner’s Office concluded its work on the case, and the body was now considered abandoned. Without her family’s knowledge or consent, Aurimar became one of the 2,350 people whose bodies were sent to the center since 2019 under agreements with two local counties, helping the center bring in about $2.5 million a year and saving the counties thousands in cremation and burial costs. Answers only came in October of this year when Arelis and Aurimar’s older brother Yohandry Martinez Villegas learned of what happened to his sister through a Noticias Telemundo article about unclaimed bodies.

“It’s a very painful thing,” Arelis told NBC News in Spanish in an interview at her home in Venezuela. “She’s not a little animal to be butchered, to be cut up.”