Moore said she and her brother had struggled to stay in touch with their father across the miles. After not hearing from him, her brother filed a missing person report in Wichita Falls, about two hours from Dallas, where Yenner had lived. They still don’t know how he wound up in Dallas, how he died or why nobody contacted them. A Dallas County worker signed a form in June 2021 stating she had completed an exhaustive search for possible relatives.
But after spotting Yenner’s name on a list of unclaimed bodies provided by Dallas County, NBC News quickly identified Moore and her brother as Yenner’s children and found working phone numbers for each of them.
“If you could find us,” Moore said, “why didn’t they?”
Another question left unanswered: Given that Yenner was an Army veteran and entitled to federal burial benefits, what was the economic argument for Dallas County to send his body to the Health Science Center? At least 32 unclaimed veterans, including Honey, have been given to the program since 2020, records show.
After the center was done with Yenner’s body, it was cremated and interred among fellow service members at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery. Moore said she’s heartbroken she couldn’t bury him with the rest of his family in New Jersey.
“To not have any kind of funeral for him,” she said, “for his family to come see him to say goodbye?”
Without commenting on specific cases, Dallas County Administrator Darryl Martin offered condolences to families whose relatives were used by the program. He said his staff works hard to locate family members and treats bodies with dignity. He didn’t address the use of unclaimed veterans.
In January, in an attempt to improve its efforts to find survivors in Tarrant County, the Health Science Center hired a company called The Voice After Life, whose mission is to help governments locate families of the unclaimed. The center said it has found families in about 80% of cases since then; officials did not know the previous success rate.
In a statement issued weeks before announcing it was suspending the program, the center said it “seeks to understand and honor the wishes of the family and deceased.”
It did not, however, honor the wishes of Michael Dewayne Coleman’s relatives.
Coleman, 43, died alone on Oct. 21, 2023, in a Dallas hospital after possibly being hit by a car. An investigator for the medical examiner signed off on his case file, saying “all reasonable efforts” had been made to find next of kin.
But his relatives should have been easy to reach. More than a week before his death, his fiancée, Louisa Harvey, had filed a missing person report with the Dallas Police Department after he failed to return from a night out with friends, not knowing he was already languishing in a hospital. She spent months searching for him, alongside two of Coleman’s sisters. She printed missing person posters and canvassed neighborhoods near their home.
She said she called the detective assigned to the missing person case almost every day, eventually suspecting that finding Coleman wasn’t a priority because of his criminal record, which included illegal drug use and two domestic violence convictions.
Harvey finally learned of his death in March, after the Dallas County medical examiner listed him as an unclaimed body in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, a free federal database meant to connect missing person reports with reports of unclaimed bodies. By the time Harvey found the posting online, the medical examiner had sent Coleman’s body to the Health Science Center.
His family could have learned of his death months earlier if the police detective assigned to find Coleman had listed him as a missing person in NamUs, but records show he never did. In response to questions from NBC News, a Dallas Police spokesperson said the department had opened an internal investigation into the detective’s handling of the case and would implement a policy change to prevent similar mistakes.
Harvey couldn’t believe Coleman’s body had been donated without the family’s consent — or his. Last year, while filling out an application for a state ID, she said, Coleman had made clear he didn’t want his organs donated because of his distrust of the medical system; she doubts he would have wanted to donate his whole body.
But when Harvey and one of Coleman’s sisters, Shea Coleman, repeatedly asked the medical examiner and the Health Science Center to release his body — or at least to let them view it — they were told no. In June, a worker at the medical examiner’s office wrote in case notes that she spoke to Yellott, the manager of UNT’s body donation program, who told her Coleman was slated to be used in a longer-term course and that his family could receive his remains when the center was finished with him.
In 12 to 24 months.
In August, after NBC News inquired about his case, a Health Science Center official told reporters that Coleman’s body would be cremated and returned to the family much sooner — an abrupt reversal that the center attributed to the Texas Funeral Service Commission’s temporary ban on out-of-state body shipments. Ten days later, the medical examiner called Harvey to let her know Coleman’s ashes were ready to be picked up.
The center’s refusal to let her see her fiancé’s body has made it harder to grieve, Harvey said.
“I’m lying awake every night thinking, ‘Is that my Michael?’” she said. “‘Did he actually die?’”
After Victor Honey’s body arrived at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, the harvesting began.
Depending on how they were to be used, bodies were either frozen or embalmed. Some were left whole and set aside to train students. Others, like Honey’s, were dissected with scalpels and bone saws, to be distributed on the open market.
In November 2022, Honey’s right leg was used in a training at the center paid for by Getinge, a Swedish medical technology company that makes instruments for use in a surgical procedure called endoscopic vein harvest.
In January 2023, a week after the medical examiner’s office reported that Honey was eligible for a veteran’s burial, bones from his skull were shipped to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston — where Honey had been ordered to report before his Gulf War deployment more than three decades earlier.
In May 2023, the Health Science Center shipped Honey’s torso to Pittsburgh, where the training company National Bioskills Laboratories provided it to a medical product company renting its facilities to teach doctors a pain-relief procedure called spinal cord stimulation.
NBC News informed Getinge, the Army and National Bioskills about the center’s regular use of unclaimed bodies and Honey’s family not providing consent.
Dr. Douglas Hampers, National Bioskills’ CEO and an orthopedic surgeon, said he was disturbed to learn his company has received unclaimed bodies and expressed sympathy for Honey’s family.
While human specimens are crucial for medical advances, Hampers said bodies should not be used without consent. He said his company would ensure that it no longer accepted unclaimed bodies and would adopt policies to make certain future specimens were donated with families’ permission.
“I don’t think you have to violate a family’s rights in order to train physicians,” he said.
A Getinge spokesperson emailed a statement saying only that the company regularly reviews its policies and operations, “including what we expect from our suppliers.”
In a statement, the Army said that if Honey’s remains were procured legally, the use of his body complied with the service’s current policies.
In July 2023, after Honey’s torso had been returned to the Health Science Center, his remains were cremated and later his ashes were brought to the Dallas County medical examiner.
And there they sat, with no one to claim them. Months passed.
In late April, Honey’s son, Victor, was boxing cans at the Dallas food bank where he volunteered when a woman approached him. She’d overheard someone calling out his name. “Do you know someone else named Victor Honey?” she asked him.
The woman said she knew his father when they both stayed at a downtown homeless shelter and had heard he died. Victor didn’t want to believe it. He tried to put it out of his mind. But the next morning, he called his mother and told her what he’d heard. She cried out and burst into tears.
An internet search led Victor to the medical examiner’s office, which confirmed the details of his father’s death and later told him the remains were available to be picked up.
About the same time, NBC News had found Honey’s name on a list of people whose unclaimed bodies were obtained by the Health Science Center. Using public records, a reporter tracked down Patman, Honey’s ex-wife, and sent her a message on Facebook. She responded immediately.
On a call, the reporter broke the news of how Honey’s body was used.
His family was appalled. Patman said she would have argued against Honey being cut apart and studied, noting that he once told her that he didn’t want to be an organ donor. Victor, though, said he might have been open to donating his father’s body for medical research.
“But y’all should have asked us about it,” he said. “They just sent his body parts away.”
