", Tina Shanon, whose mother was dismembered against her will, told the court, "I've worn many masks to cover the pain. Both have become experts on the secret industry of selling body parts on a world wide market. It is unbelievable, said Dave Teselle, a Denver-based attorney who represents Hancock and more than five dozen other families in a claim against the owners of Sunset Mesa and the companies who are accused of buying the body parts. All rights reserved. Donor Services has circulated a brochure that reads: Be a hero. An indictment filed last week by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Denver alleges 43-year-old Megan Hess, of Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services, harvested body parts from hundreds of dead people without any authorization from their families. Hes already facing charges of official misconduct and perjury stemming from allegations last year that he sent his wife Staci to multiple death scenes even though she wasnt authorized to serve as a deputy coroner. He would not discuss the nature of those complaints or any action it may be taking. Shannon and Staci Kent did not respond to interview requests from The Denver Post. Koch's central role was chopping up the bodies, court records show. She signed a contract with a Montrose funeral home to have his body cremated. A woman in Colorado has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for illegally selling body parts. The Colorado Sun is a journalist-owned, award-winning news outlet based in Denver that strives to cover all of Colorado so that our state our community can better understand itself. This whole situation, oh, I thought it was part of my past.. She said, No, no, well take care of that first thing in the morning, recalled Eberspacher. No one returned her voicemails. And as of. She was sold, embalmed and shipped out within just a few hours of her death, said Holloman. They both plan to file complaints with the Department of Regulatory Affairs. She showed me her collection of gold teeth one day, said Escher, who helped manage a former cremation-marketing business owned by Hess. Legal Statement. Hess and Koch also shipped bodies and body parts that tested positive for, or belonged to people who died from, infectious diseases including Hepatitis B and C, and HIV, despite certifying to buyers that the remains were disease-free, authorities said. You are not looking at the full disposition (of a body). Body snatcher, vile, pure evil, sociopath, are the words they used when asked to describe Hess. We did not provide our messaging to be repurposed in this brochure, and are following up, said spokeswoman Erin Dolin. Authorities are now investigating. Both Hess and Koch originally had pleaded not guilty to the charges. The Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services building in Montrose, Colorado, U.S., December 16, 2017. Just about any adult can run for coroner in Colorado. You know, they can't put his head back on his body, they can't put his arms and legs back on his body. Hess' mother, Shirley Koch, has also been indicted. Separate from the FBI inquiry, Reuters has learned that Colorado state funeral regulators are investigating Hesss funeral home, Sunset Mesa. Paul Hawthorne, Getty Images. More by The Associated Press, Got a story tip? According to theDenver Post, prosecutors reached a plea agreement with Hess this year regarding a 2020 indictment against her and her mother. Reuters identified 34 body brokers that have been active across the United States during the past five years. E.W. Two funeral homes owned by Lake County Coroner Shannon Kent are under investigation after law enforcement earlier this month found an unrefrigerated body, an abandoned stillborn infant, bags of unl They both plan to file complaints with the Department of Regulatory Affairs. These people deserve to know why what was done to them was done to them. and Cavanagh, Reh had an immensely difficult time reaching the Kents, the phone ringing unanswered for weeks. There is even more money to be made in dissecting those bodies and selling the parts. The funeral home's owners, Megan Hess, 43, and her mother . Megan Hess faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison after entering the plea Tuesday in Grand Junction, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window), Members of the FBI, along with Montrose law enforcement investigate the Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services building Tuesday morning, February 6, 2018. The other nine were structured as nonprofits, including Donor Services the only broker Reuters could find that still doubles as a funeral home. At the focal point of the FBI probe: funeral director Megan Hess, who did not return Fox News request for a comment. Finally Reh and her boyfriend went to the funeral home with the expectation that they would see their baby. Shannon and Staci Kent, 45, of Leadville were charged on Friday with attempted tampering with a deceased human body. I'll never be OK.". Six people were killed, including federal District Court Chief Judge John Roll; Gabe Zimmerman, one of Giffords's staffers; and a 9-year-old girl . PUBLISHED 8:21 PM CT Apr. With heavy hearts, we announce the death of Arnold Roger Tesnow (Colorado Springs, Colorado), born in Worth, Illinois, who passed away on February 25, 2023 at the age of 78. It comes on the heels of a law passed in 2020 that. A Colorado funeral home is accused of victimizing families after claims that it secretly sold body parts in the hours after death. Kent is already facing charges of perjury and official misconduct for sending wife Staci Kent, who is not authorized to act as a deputy coroner, to death scenes on at least three occasions, according to a September 2019 grand jury indictment. No one would pick up the phone. Though Koch dissected bodies in the back room at Sunset Mesa, they claimed that the body had to be sent out for harvesting, Eberspacher said. In one instance, on March 10, 2019, Staci Kent was significantly delayed to the scene because the van she was using to pick up the body had a dead battery, bald tires and was buried in snow, prosecutors alleged. Reached by phone at Sunset Mesa, Koch said she did not wish to talk with a Reuters reporter. Another alleged victim said her mothers body was desecrated. On Oct. 2, the Lake and Eagle county sheriffs departments executed a search warrant at the Bailey-Kent Funeral Home in Leadville, where deputies encountered a strong odor of decomposition, according to an Oct. 13 summary suspension issued by the states Office of Funeral Home and Crematory Registration, before finding: In addition to the Leadville funeral home, the state issued suspension orders for the Kent Funeral Home Gypsum. Some of those family members are now questioning if the services were held free of charge while Donor Services sent some of the remains (body parts) to clients for payments without the knowledge and consent of family members. In court on Tuesday, Hess declined to speak to the judge. Could, Lake County coroner turns in resignation letter, State suspends operations of Leadville, Gypsum funeral homes, 3 BULLETS TO THE BACK: The striking silence around a police, Last Season Hunters Harvested the Most Bucks in 21 Years | Outdoor Life, Republicans are barring medical boards from punishing doctors who prescribe ivermectin: report | Salon.com, Mead High School student gets musical Make-A-Wish surprise, Bruce Cassidy Defends Tuukka Rask After Tough Showing Vs. ThinkStock via Getty Images. She took orders for body parts via Hotmail, email records show. An agent with the FBI has interviewed at least four former employees who worked for funeral director and body broker Megan Hess, seeking information about how she operates her businesses, the former workers told Reuters. Kent also still faces second-degree official misconduct charges stemming from a September 2019 grand jury indictment in the Fifth Judicial District. She has been told parts of her husbands body were sold on the world-wide market. Bailey-Kent Funeral Home, pictured at left, is one of two funeral homes owned by Shannon Kent now under criminal investigation. The Lankford Funeral Home and Family Center is under investigation by Jeffersonville Police Detective Division after 31 deceased individuals and the post-cremated remains of 16 individuals. It is illegal to buy or sell organs such as hearts, kidneys and tendons for transplant. MONTROSE, Colorado The Federal Bureau of Investigation is interviewing former employees of a funeral home whose owner runs a side business on the same premises selling human body parts. Family and friends can send flowers and condolences in memory of the loved one. You are not looking at the full disposition (of a body). Thats when E.W. Contact7 Chief Investigative Reporter Tony Kovaleski traveled to Montrose and talked to more than a half dozen family members now victims about what they describe as a scheme to profit from their pain. His head and his arms from his elbows to his fingers, his legs from his knees to his toes, had been removed from his body and they had been sold.. Colorado is nicknamed the "Centennial State" because when it became the 38th state, the United States turned 100 on August 1, 1876. Colorado regulators have shut down the funeral home. This whole situation, oh, I thought it was part of my past.. More Reuters investigations and long-form narratives, Got a confidential news tip? Neither addressed the issue about the teeth. GRAND JUNCTION A Colorado funeral home operator accused of illegally selling body parts and giving clients fake ashes has pleaded guilty to mail fraud in federal court. Donating bodies, selling the parts: Frequently asked questions. Its tentacles go throughout not only the country but the world.. Andrew Scheid has been the director at . Copyright 2019 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. After Mabry threatened to sue Hess for losing the eye, he said Hess wrote him a check: $500, a refund of the money Dunlap had paid to donate plus $5. It was kinda creepy., It is totally unregulated, said Burg. Colorado Funeral Homes. In an interview in 2016, she described Donor Services as a small, family business. Hoping to get answers, Denver7 visited Hess home in Montrose. While operating Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado, Hess and Koch sold remains of the deceased for body broker services without family consent and gave families ashes that were. The Lake County Sheriffs Office confirmed an active criminal investigation is underway. They are distinct from the organ and tissue transplant industry, which the U.S. government closely regulates. heres a recap of our months top stories, Carriage Services reports Services and Revenue drops in 2022. Reuters Investigates offers several ways to securely contact our reporters. Screen for heightened risk individual and entities globally to help uncover hidden risks in business relationships and human networks. . Former workers told Reuters that Hess and Koch conducted unauthorized dismemberments of bodies, and a few weeks after a 2018 story was published, the FBI raided the business. The state's Department of Regulatory Agencies. Its not something that can be fixed., Hancock was notified by the FBI that her husbands body parts had been sold without her consent. Hancock is one of many family members who has learned the cremains she was given by the owners of Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose contained items and materials that were not her husband. Hancocks story started after her husband, Thomas, passed away. . After contacting Hess in December about the content of the brochure, Dolin said Hess told the organ transplant group that the brochure in question was old and has not been used for some time.. The suspension order details a 2019 instance in which an unnamed individual arranged with Kents funeral home for the cremation of their stillborn child. are acquisitions larger in general? MONTROSE, Colo. A Colorado funeral home is accused of victimizing families after claims that it secretly sold body parts in the hours after death. He covers everything from stolen art and towing to mobile homes and quirky stories that defy category. Golden Gate's owner denies all allegations. She says Shirley Koch came to pick up his body. No one would pick up the phone. Records from the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies showthis was not the first time Kent has been in the crosshairs of state regulators. On March 17, the unsealed indictment revealed that this donor services business would harvest the human remains and then sell them, illegally and without the families' knowledge. The Daily Sentinel reportsthat Megan Hess faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison after entering the plea Tuesday in Grand Junction. Instead, the media was interested in the dark history behind the town's funeral home, Sunset Mesa. You could hear the machine going, she told Kovaleski. The FBI hired a lab to test the cremains given to the families, and they have determined the boxes of ash contain cement, sand and other non-human particles. felt they were too heavy to be those of a stillborn child, and submitted them for analysis. Funeral homes in Leadville and Gypsum are under criminal investigation after authorities this month found an unrefrigerated body, bags of unlabeled cremains, an abandoned stillborn infant and at least one instance in which a family received cremains for their stillborn child mixed with bits of adult body parts and metal fragments. U.S. District Judge Christine M. Arguello on Tuesday sentenced Hess, 46, to 20 years in prison the maximum allowable for her role in a nearly decade-long scheme to sell body parts without the. Pictures show bodies stacked in hallways and unrefrigerated rental trucks. Hess is tentatively set to be sentenced in January. Hess had created a nonprofit organization in 2009 called Sunset Mesa Funeral Foundation as a body-broker service doing business as Donor Services, authorities said. John Wayne Gacy's house has since been torn down and replaced with a new residence, built on the same land where Gacy reportedly buried many of his victims. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper. Megan Hess, 46, pleaded guilty to fraud in July. [the FBI told me] his head was sent to so and so. She showed Denver7 the container that she was given. A Colorado funeral home is accused of victimizing families after claims that it secretly sold body parts in the hours after death. NBC10 . After losing his ability to conduct cremation or funeral home services in December, Kent's Silverthorne funeral parlor sat empty until this month when the new tenant, Colorado Funeral Homes . It can't be fixed, said Hancock. pleaded guilty to fraud in July after a . After receiving the cremains, E.W. Subscribe to Funeral Director Daily The back of the brochure featured the logo Donate Life, the national brand that promotes organ donation and is managed by Donate Life America, a nonprofit group. But selling body parts such as heads, arms and spines which is what Hess did for use in research or education is not regulated by federal law. parents are now under investigation by the FBI. "Hess and Koch used their funeral home at times to essentially steal bodies and body parts using fraudulent and forged donor forms," prosecutor Tim Neff said in a court filing. In mid-March, Kent received a letter of admonition" from the Office of Funeral Home and Crematory Registration after unembalmed, unrefrigerated remains were found in the Gypsum funeral home over 24 hours after the person had died. After an extensive investigation into this and dozens of similar cases, federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged the owners of the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, Colorado, on suspicion of illegally brokering the body parts of deceased individuals they were hired to cremate. It is the only state in the country that does not license funeral home and. Other charges against Hess will be dropped under a plea agreement, the Sentinel said. On January 8, 2011, U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords and 18 others were shot during a constituent meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Casas Adobes, Arizona, in the Tucson metropolitan area. Kent has not yet been arrested for the most recent incidents, which at the Leadville funeral home included authorities' discovery of an abandoned stillborn, according to the Oct. 13 summary suspension issued by Colorados Office of Funeral Home and Crematory Registration. POCATELLO, Idaho Police in Pocatello are investigating a local funeral home after they said a state health inspector contacted them about the business and a badly decomposed body was found. The body was identified by fingerprints as Victor Akubuo, 42, from Southern . The lawsuit claims the three sold torsos for $1,000, a pelvis with upper legs for $1,200. A Colorado funeral home operator who was accused of selling and stealing body parts pleaded guilty to mail fraud on Tuesday, the US justice department . Nursing Home Under Investigation After Woman Declared Dead Found Breathing at Funeral Home The incident happened at the Water's Edge Rehab and Nursing Center in Port Jefferson, the. At her funeral home, Hess charged families up to $1,000 for cremations that never occurred, prosecutors said, and she offered others free cremations in exchange for a body donation. After a reporter asked questions about the websiteand her background, Hess removed the Add to Cart donation pages from her cremation website and cut the mention of the mortuary science degree from her online biography. Subscribe today to see what all the buzz is about. a contrarian view? Details of Shannon Kents operations come on the heels of a Montrose funeral home that made international headlines in 2018 after an FBI raid and subsequent two-year investigation. High Country News reports that, duringthe initial investigation, the FBI tested 128 samples of remains tied to Sunset Mesa. . The conflict of interest of having a side business in body parts just leads to problems. DALLAS The Texas Funeral Service Commission says it has opened an investigation into allegations of the mishandling of corpses at one of the most high-profile mortuaries in the state. Updated: 8:07 PM MDT September 14, 2021. Sam Tabachnik is a roving reporter for The Denver Post, focusing on stories outside metro Denver. Hansons box included wires and what appear to be old batteries. Ducks, Used body bags, medical gloves and other surgical equipment with dried bodily fluid on them piled on the floor, Bodily fluids leaking out of a body bag containing an individual who had not been refrigerated, A container of animal remains leaking fluids, Several bodies in refrigeration wrapped in sheets or blankets without identifying tags or paperwork, An unmarked casket containing a stillborn infant that was abandoned, the suspension order states, Paperwork scattered several feet deep on the floor. Further, the van was holding two other bodies that needed to be removed.. As she mourned the loss of her son, Cavanagh was referred to the Kent Funeral Home in Gypsum to do the cremation. In another call two months later, Staci Kent responded to a death scene without a body bag, the indictment states, which led to an argument with law enforcement. Hess runs Sunset Mesa, a funeral home, and Donor Services, a body broker operation from the same building in Montrose. Colorado regulators shut Sunset Mesa down in February 2018, KMGH-TV reported. "We don't even have a name for a crime this heinous. Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way. Feb 4, 2023, 5:26 PM SGT. Thats when E.W. Think about it, the FBI came in and raided them, and they raided them because they knew this body broker this was getting bigger and bigger and bigger, said Berg. At the time of publication, no charges had been filed against the coroner, though Colorado has suspended the business licenses for both funeral homes. She did. Theyre united by the pain of believing they purchased cremation services for their loved ones, knowing they never agreed to let Hess dismember the bodies. Hiring funeral directors: Do you look for IQ or EQ? After reading the states suspension order this week, two women told The Denver Post that the circumstances surrounding E.W. sound eerily familiar. When Mabry and Eberspacher went to Sunset Mesa the morning after Dunlap died, Hess and Koch said they could not locate the eye, Eberspacher said. However, on Thursday, Colorado police arrested Shannon and Staci Kent after finding a decaying corpse in a funeral home they previously operated. Sunset Mesas operators, Megan Hess and Shirley Koch, were indicted by a federal grand jury in March for allegedly shipping body parts all over the world against the will of family members, who found out years later that the ashes in their homes were not those of their loved ones.
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