This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
Every day for two seemingly endless months, Arelis Coromoto Villegas repeated the same prayer: From her small, cinder-block home in Venezuela, she asked God to protect her 21-year-old daughter as she trekked thousands of miles through treacherous jungle and desert terrain to reach America’s southern border.
Her prayers were answered in September 2022 when Aurimar Iturriago Villegas crossed safely into the U.S. and continued north with her own prayer — to land a job and eventually earn enough money to help her mother build a new house.
But within two months of her arrival in Texas, Aurimar was dead, shot in a road rage incident near Dallas as she sat in the back seat of a car.
And then, for her mother, the unthinkable somehow became the unimaginable.
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Without her family’s knowledge, county authorities donated Aurimar’s body to a local medical school, where officials cut it up and assigned dollar figures to parts that hadn’t been damaged by the bullet that struck her head — $900 for her torso, $703 for her legs.
Remnants of Aurimar’s body were cremated and buried in a field among strangers in a Dallas cemetery, all while her mother desperately sought to have her murdered daughter returned to Venezuela, unaware her body had become a commodity in the name of science.
Arelis only learned her daughter had been used for research two years after her death, when NBC News and Noticias Telemundo — as part of a broader investigation of the U.S. body industry — published the names of hundreds of people whose unclaimed bodies were sent to the Fort Worth-based University of North Texas Health Science Center.
“It’s a very painful thing,” Arelis said in Spanish, in an interview from her home in a small town in western Venezuela. “She’s not a little animal to be butchered, to be cut up.”
What happened to Aurimar was a matter of money, part of a pattern NBC News uncovered over the past two years: Across the United States, vulnerable people’s bodies often are mistreated and their families’ wishes disregarded as overwhelmed local officials grapple with rising numbers of unclaimed dead amid widespread opioid addiction, surging homelessness and increasingly fractured families. Reporters found that county coroners, medical institutions and others repeatedly failed to contact reachable family members before declaring bodies unclaimed.
In some cases, people were buried in paupers’ fields as their loved ones reported them missing and searched for them. In others, corpses were sent to medical schools, biotech companies and for-profit body brokers without consent.
Aurimar was one of about 2,350 people whose bodies were sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center since 2019 under agreements with two local counties, which helped the center bring in about $2.5 million a year and saved the counties hundreds of thousands of dollars in cremation and burial costs, according to financial records.
Hundreds of the bodies were used for student training or research. Others were leased out to medical technology companies that require human remains to develop products and train doctors on them. Some, including Aurimar’s, were used for both.
Donated bodies play a key role in medical education and the biotechnology industry, helping surgeons build their skills and researchers develop potentially lifesaving treatments. While using unclaimed bodies for this purpose remains legal in much of the country, including Texas, it’s widely viewed as unethical because of the absence of consent and the pain it can inflict on survivors.
Reporters have identified two dozen other cases in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative’s body had been provided to the Health Science Center. Eleven of those families only learned what happened from NBC News and Noticias Telemundo — including five, in addition to Aurimar’s loved ones, who were horrified to find their relative’s names on the list of unclaimed bodies published by the news outlets this fall.
In response to NBC News’ findings, the Health Science Center suspended its body donation program, fired the officials who ran it and pledged to stop using unclaimed bodies. Spokesperson Andy North did not answer questions about Aurimar’s case, but said in a statement to reporters that the center extends apologies to all the “individuals and families impacted” and has “taken multiple corrective actions.”
In many of the cases NBC News uncovered, the people whose bodies went unclaimed were homeless, struggling with drug addiction or estranged from their families.
Aurimar was none of these. She was in constant touch with her mother — speaking to her just hours before she died. Her family immediately scrambled to scrape together the thousands of dollars it would have cost to have her body repatriated to Venezuela, believing falsely month after month that her remains were preserved in a Dallas morgue.
Instead, what followed were a cascade of bureaucratic breakdowns and communication failures. The Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office had Arelis’ cellphone number on file, but there’s no record in documents obtained by NBC News that the agency attempted to call her before declaring Aurimar’s body abandoned. The agency declined to comment.
Throughout this ordeal, Arelis has struggled — from a home with no internet, in a country with no diplomatic ties to the U.S. — to reclaim her daughter’s body.
Until then, she said, she can’t truly begin to mourn.
“Every night I say, ‘My God, why did you take my daughter?’” she said. “I don’t accept my daughter’s death. Not yet.”
Aurimar long dreamed of helping her family. She grew up under a sheet-metal roof in a home with spotty electricity in La Villa del Rosario, about an hour and a half from the nearest city. She quit school when she was 16 and found jobs cleaning homes and doing yard work, determined to pull her family out of poverty. She would tell her mother, “Don’t worry, Mami, I’m going to work to give you all the things you need.”
In 2022, she was living in Colombia, where she rode a bicycle through the bustling streets of Bogotá making deliveries. But she wanted to earn more. That spring, she called her mother to share her new plan: She would join a group of six other people bound for the U.S.
Arelis pleaded with her not to make the journey, knowing all too well that many migrants die every year attempting to cross the infamous Darién Gap — an area of treacherous rainforest, swamps and mountains that spans the border of Colombia and Panamá.
Aurimar’s older brother, Yohandry Martinez Villegas, had mixed feelings about his sister’s plans. He shared his mother’s fears, but also admired how Aurimar “was fighting for a better future.”
Aurimar and her group entered the eastern edge of the Darién jungle on July 1. For two weeks, Arelis heard nothing from her daughter as she moved through the remote tropical forest with no cell reception. Arelis cried every day, terrified that her daughter might have fallen from a cliff or drowned in a river. Finally, Aurimar texted from a migrant camp in Panamá: “Mami, we’re out of the jungle.”
Aurimar became ill with flu-like symptoms as she traversed Honduras, but she recovered, celebrating her 21st birthday in Guatemala. In early September, Arelis said her daughter crossed the Rio Grande from México into Texas. After turning herself in to border authorities, she 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.
With Moreno’s help, Aurimar quickly lined up a cleaning job in Florida, promising her mother that she would soon have plenty of money to help her buy new appliances and treatments for her fading eyesight. Late on the evening of Oct. 28, 2022, while back in Texas for a short visit, Aurimar climbed into a car in a suburb north of Dallas with two acquaintances, neither of whom could be reached by NBC News or Noticias Telemundo.
It’s not clear where the three were going, but this much is known, according to police and court records: About 12:15 a.m., 25-year-old Shardrel Webb fired a gun into the rear window of the car Aurimar was riding in. He contended that the car had forced him off the road and that he’d initially shot in self-defense. Panicked, Aurimar’s acquaintance sped to a nearby apartment complex as more gunshots rang out.
That’s where police and paramedics found her, slumped over in the back seat, dead from a single gunshot to the head.
It had begun to rain when the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office representative arrived about 3:30 a.m. The death investigator removed a yellow tarp that had been draped over Aurimar and took notes on what he saw. He looked through her pockets, finding only a lighter and $8.18, which he placed in an evidence bag.
Workers then put Aurimar in a blue body bag and sealed it with a red tag: No. 3440146.
Her body was taken to the medical examiner’s office, where, according to protocol, the search for her next of kin would commence.
Aurimar’s younger sister, Auribel Acero Villegas, just 17 at the time, was the first to learn of her death later that morning — not from authorities but from a neighbor in Venezuela who knew Moreno.
Before Aurimar left for the U.S., she made Auribel promise that she would take care of their mother. Now, Auribel had to deliver news that she feared would break her.
Arelis had been speaking to Aurimar the night before, but her later calls went unanswered. About 2 a.m., Arelis had received a vague message from a neighbor about a shooting at Moreno’s apartment. She couldn’t sleep.
As soon as she saw the shaken expression on her younger daughter’s face that morning, Arelis’ heart sank. She cried out: “What happened?”
“Nothing, nothing happened,” Auribel responded, not wanting to deliver the blow while her mother was standing. “Let’s sit down, let’s make some coffee.”
Arelis dropped to her knees and pleaded: “Swear to me! If you really love me, swear to me that your sister wasn’t killed!”
No words were needed. The tears in Auribel’s eyes said everything.
It’s not clear precisely what transpired in the days after Aurimar was killed. Memories are shaky and some notations in public records are disputed by her family.
Their attempts to glean details about Aurimar’s death and claim her body were complicated by the fact that Arelis could make and receive calls outside Venezuela through the messaging app WhatsApp, but couldn’t afford to call landlines in the U.S. As a result, much of the information the family received came second hand.
The day after Aurimar died, Auribel said she spoke briefly with a person whom she believed worked at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office. The call came through a neighbor’s phone, she said, and the person asked for permission for Moreno to act as the family’s primary point of contact, which she agreed to. “That’s as far as the conversation went,” she said.
Aurimar’s case file, obtained by reporters through a public records request, contains no mention of any such call. Instead, in an entry dated Oct. 31 — two days after her death — a county official reported meeting with Moreno in person and speaking to Arelis on Moreno’s cellphone. According to the note, Arelis granted Moreno authority to act as Aurimar’s legal next of kin.
Arelis said that the call never happened and that she only wanted Moreno to help coordinate her daughter’s return to Venezuela, not take over legal decision-making authority. Nevertheless, without requiring Arelis to sign anything, a county employee updated Aurimar’s file to list Moreno as her official next of kin in the county’s system, records show — a move that granted him authority over what was to be done with the body, potentially cutting out Arelis. The county employee also wrote Arelis’ phone number in the file, but nothing indicates anyone at the office attempted to contact her over the next two years.
Meanwhile, Aurimar’s friends and family launched a fundraising campaign to help send her remains home.
But two and a half weeks after her death, Moreno wrote to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, offering to donate Aurimar’s body to the program on behalf of her mother — something Arelis said she never agreed to.
Tyler Johnson, the assistant manager of the center’s body donation program, responded the next day, relying on Google Translate to compose the note in Spanish: “First I need to confirm you and the mother understand body donation,” Johnson wrote, detailing how the process works. After Moreno confirmed he wanted to proceed, Johnson sent donor consent forms and gave an eight-hour deadline to return them.
“Unfortunately, we have little time for these forms to be returned to our offices,” Johnson wrote.
Moreno never sent the paperwork, according to follow-up emails from Johnson and Dallas County. And soon, Aurimar’s family said, Moreno stopped answering their messages, too.
Moreno didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment from NBC News and Noticias Telemundo.
Six weeks after Aurimar’s death, the Medical Examiner’s Office concluded its work on the case, records show. Because nobody had followed through on making arrangements, Aurimar’s body was “now considered to be abandoned,” according to a letter sent to an email address that was redacted from her case file.
The Dec. 15, 2022, letter said only that Aurimar’s remains “will be processed following our standard procedures,” providing no other details. Arelis said she never received any such notification.
Legally, it no longer mattered that she never signed donation papers; that same day, under those “standard procedures,” Aurimar’s body was delivered to the Health Science Center’s freezers.
By early 2023, Arelis had begun to fear something was amiss.
Moreno’s sister-in-law had previously shared an email address for Johnson at the Health Science Center. Arelis was uncertain of his role in the process, only that he might have information about Aurimar’s body. So she wrote to him on Feb. 10, saying in Spanish, “I have not heard anything about the body of my daughter Aurimar del Carmen Iturriago Villegas. Please, I need to know. God bless you greatly.”
Johnson quickly replied, copying his supervisor, Claudia Yellott. He forwarded Arelis his earlier exchange with Moreno, adding that her former neighbor never followed up to complete the donation. Johnson suggested Arelis contact the medical examiner, sharing a county phone number that she had no means of calling.
What Johnson and Yellott didn’t tell her: The Health Science Center had her daughter’s body in its possession and would soon be preparing it for one of its top customers.
Johnson and Yellott have since been fired, and neither responded to messages.
Three months later — as Arelis slipped deeper into depression, her health declining under the stress of not knowing the whereabouts of her daughter’s body — workers placed Aurimar’s torso onto a table inside the Health Science Center’s BioSkills laboratory.
The biotechnology company Relievant Medsystems had paid the center $35,672 to host a four-day course, according to an invoice, and needed 18 torsos for training on its Intracept back-pain procedure — a surgical technique so promising that the biotech giant Boston Scientific paid $850 million to acquire the company a few months later.
Jessica Sachariason, a Boston Scientific spokesperson, said Relievant officials did not know that the center had provided the company dozens of unclaimed bodies over the years, including Aurimar’s. In response to NBC News’ investigation, Sachariason said the company had updated its policies to require consent from the dead or their next of kin for any human specimens used in training.
“Our deepest condolences go out to the mother and the family of Aurimar Iturriago Villegas,” Sachariason wrote. “No family member should have to experience something this tragic.”
A month and a half after the Relievant training, on July 5, 2023, the Health Science Center sent a portion of Aurimar’s body to a Dallas-area crematory, according to billing records. And that September — just weeks after what would have been her 22nd birthday — her ashes were delivered to the Dallas County medical examiner, as required under the medical school’s contract with the county.
But the Health Science Center was not finished with her.
On Jan. 23, 2024, records show, Aurimar’s legs were used to train students studying to become physician assistants. North, the Health Science Center spokesperson, didn’t answer questions about what happened to the limbs after the course or whether it was routine for the center to hold onto parts of people’s bodies after other portions had been cremated.
That month, Arelis received a call via WhatsApp from the Dallas County district attorney’s office: Prosecutors had reached a plea deal to send Webb, her daughter’s killer, to prison for 23 years. He later wrote a note to the judge to say that he was devastated when he learned he’d killed someone and that he prayed the family would forgive him.
Arelis thanked the officials and asked about her daughter’s body. Although the district attorney’s office wasn’t responsible for Aurimar’s remains, spokesperson Claire Crouch said a prosecutor tracked down information and followed up to inform Arelis that her daughter had been deemed unclaimed by the county and cremated.
“We understand how deeply this has compounded their grief,” Crouch told NBC News, offering condolences.
She said a prosecutor also attempted to connect Arelis with local officials who could answer questions about the location of Aurimar’s remains. Arelis said she never spoke to anyone after that.
Nine months later, more answers came — in the form of a news article.
Aurimar’s brother, Yohandry, was scrolling through Instagram in October when he saw a Noticias Telemundo post promoting an article headlined “Do you know these people? Dozens of unclaimed bodies of Latinos were sent to a Texas medical school.”
The social media post included a few dozen names from the list of more than 1,800 compiled and published by NBC News, including one that stopped Yohandry cold: “Aurimar Iturriago Villegas.”
He showed the list to his mother.
The revelation that her daughter had been taken for research outraged Arelis, but it also gave her a brief sense of hope. Could this mean Aurimar’s body hadn’t been cremated and was preserved somewhere? Maybe she could see her daughter’s face one last time. Maybe she could give her a proper burial.
After Arelis emailed Noticias Telemundo, a reporter shared some of the information gathered as part of the NBC News investigation — including the likelihood that Aurimar’s body had already been cremated — and an email address to contact an official at the Dallas County medical examiner whose job is to assist families.
She emailed the employee on Nov. 12, asking if she could have her daughter’s ashes. “God bless you greatly,” Arelis wrote once again, ending the message with two hands folded in prayer.
The official wrote back that day:
Good afternoon, Mrs. Villegas,
First of all, I express my condolences to you for the loss of your daughter, Aurimar Iturriago Villegas. My heart goes out to you and your family for the loss of your daughter, and I hope that the fond memories you have of her will help you through this difficult time. While I know this may be a difficult time for you and your family, I was able to locate your loved one.
Mrs. Aurimar Iturriago Villegas has been buried in Laurel Land Memorial Park. Attached you will find a map of your family member’s burial location at Laurel Land Memorial Park. Please note that since your loved one was buried at county expense, there is no individually marked grave.
Again, I extend my condolences to you and your family.
The official provided no information about what it would take for her daughter’s ashes to be exhumed, and no instructions on how to have them shipped to Venezuela, if that was even an option. There was just a map of a cemetery Arelis had no way of visiting, half a world away.
And that’s when what little hope she held onto began to leave her.
“Even though it hurts my soul,” Arelis told a reporter, “I think I’m going to throw in the towel and leave things in God’s hands.”
In recent interviews, Arelis’ family said they’re worried about her. She hasn’t been eating. Her blood pressure has spiked. And she appears suddenly much older than her 55 years.
She still prays for Aurimar every day, but it’s a different prayer now. Kneeling over a candlelit memorial in the corner of her house, she asks God to please bring her daughter home.
