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…
Tarrant County will take additional steps to find the families of dead people and honor their religious beliefs following an NBC News investigation.
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 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.
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.
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