The body of a man who died from COVID-19 was dissected in front of a live, paying audience at an entertainment expo in Portland, Oregon, last month.
Just over two dozen guests paid between $250 and $500 to watch the dissection of David Saunders, who was 98 at the time of his death, at an “oddities” expo in Oregon. Saunders had wished to donate his body to science. However, his family was shocked to learn that his corpse was being used as part of a traveling oddities and curiosities expo.
“It makes me really feel saddened that this gentleman was not given the dignity and the respect that he deserved and what he thought and his family thought that would be happening to his body,” Mike Clark, a funeral director in Louisiana, told KING5, a news station in Seattle. Clark oversaw the preparation of Saunders’s body.
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According to Clark, the body was donated to Med Ed Labs in Las Vegas. The for-profit company receives body parts and sells them to various medical schools and programs for the advancement of medicine and science. Clark told KING5 the funeral home had stopped working with the lab after learning about Saunders’s body.
The host of the event, Jeremy Ciliberto, said the family knew Saunders’s body would be used for medical science, which he alleged is accurate for the show. Ciliberto said the event was educational and “allows the students to explore the body in a much more intimate way.”
“It is safe. It is legal,” Ciliberto told Portland’s KGW-8. “This is an educational event. This is not a sideshow. This is very professional. This is exactly college-level teaching.”
Ciliberto also said the medical lab knew of his plans for the cadaver and had obtained consent prior to the sale. However, the lab said Ciliberto was not honest in his intentions for the body and that it believed he would be using the body for a medical class, according to KING5.
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The event lasted several hours at a Marriott in downtown Portland, KING5 reported. The man responsible for conducting the autopsy, a retired anatomy expert from Montana, told the audience that the procedure he was using was the same he had taught medical students when he was a professor.
A similar show scheduled for Halloween in Seattle was canceled by team members. No reason for the cancellation was given. Despite the cancellation, Ciliberto said he expects to do more shows in 2022.
