Attorney: Body-Parts-for-Sale Case Worse Than One Settled for $58M

Attorney Mike Burg of the Denver-based law firm Burg Simpson recently won a $58 million verdict for ten of 21 plaintiffs who sued the owner of a body-donation facility in Phoenix described as a human butcher shop. But Burg says the facts of the case at the center of two separate lawsuits filed against Montrose's Sunset Mesa funeral home "are even more egregious."

According to Burg, Megan Hess, Sunset Mesa's owner, and her associates, including her parents, Alan and Shirley Koch, "didn't even try to get any type of consent. In other words, the people who brought their loved ones in to be cremated had no idea that she was taking those bodies and selling them out the back door either in whole or in part." (Hess has not responded to multiple interview requests from Westword.)

The lawsuits filed by Burg Simpson earlier this year — the first in February, the second in June — are filled with horror stories told by approximately fifty plaintiffs, including Bobby Espinoza, who believed the remains of Jerry Espinoza, his father, had been cremated at Sunset Mesa until being informed otherwise by representatives of the FBI following a raid on the facility. The complaint alleges that "Jerry Sr.'s body had been dismembered and sold for parts." Defendants "carved off his head and his legs from his body and severed his torso and pelvis. These parts were then sold piecemeal to three different body-buyer defendants."

Equally grisly details emerged from investigation of Biological Resource Center of Arizona, whose owner, Steve Gore, pleaded guilty to taking part in a criminal enterprise back in 2015. Gore "opened up BRC in 2004, and he had no medical training," Burg points out. "I understand that for a while he was involved in recovering corneas for transplantation from an eye institute. But he then got the idea that he could open a whole body donation company, which he, his brother and a college friend began to operate out of Phoenix, and he was able to do it because while organ donation is highly regulated — there are a lot of rules you have to follow both federally and in states — whole-body donation at the time, and pretty much even today, is unregulated."

Read more: https://www.westword.com/news/colorado-body-parts-for-sale-case-and-impact-of-58-million-ruling-11554155