Harvard morgue theft ring stole body parts, sold brains, turned human flesh into leather, officials say

[passenger]

The suspects “stole dissected portions of donated cadavers, including, for example, heads, brains, skin, bones, and other human remains," an indictment says.
The 15-page indictment doesn't go into extended detail about what the body parts were purchased for, but it does mention that Maclean shipped human skin to a man in Pennsylvania "and engaged in his services to tan the skin to create leather."
Maclean asked Cedric Lodge to supply more tissue to send to "the dude I send the chest piece to tan," according to the indictment.
LINK

 

[MrDawn]

My only thoughts:

 

[Dee]

Can we say, "It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again?" Wait a minute, they couldn't do that, lol.

 

[Nebulous]

Thats pretty messed up if you ask me!

 

[Torque]

This reminds me of that Sunset Mesa Funeral Home that was raking in cash by selling body parts and giving families fake ashes. They were not only committing fraud against the families of the deceased, they were also committing fraud against buyers by selling diseased body parts that were claimed to be healthy.

One of my favorite podcasts did a great episode on it (link).

 

[Black Angel]

Gee, I wonder where they got that idea.. (being totally sarcastic here, as I know exactly where it came from..)

I mean for regular people needing organs, they are often restricted due to age and other issues, that seeming don't apply to the wealthy. Wasn't there some wealthy man out there that was well into his 90s and onto his fourth heart transplant? Stuff like this doesn't happen in a vacuum, especially when Black people have gone (and still go) missing and turned up dead with missing organs.. and the incisions on the remains similar to that of a surgeon.

This honestly doesn't surprise me as shit like this has been happening for years to Black people since at least Jim Crow and prior and it didn't always occur at prestigious universities like Harvard either, it also occured in jails, prisons and hospitals too. It is one of those things that you'd hear from an older relative, and think that it is some crazy conspiracy due to their old age, and end up dismissing at first, until they repeat it so often that, you have no choice but to look it up yourself and end up horrified after discovering the fact that it really did happen. I've always looked into the stuff I heard my older relatives say, and while, some of the smaller details might've been mixed up, the claims turned out to be true.

And it tracks when you consider the fact that Hitler got all his ideas for the Holocaust from here. So this means that of all the f--ked up things that happened to the Jews and other people during the Holocaust, happened to Black people before, during and after Jim Crow, inclusive of the concentration camps.. The Devil's Punchbowl in Natchez, Mississippi is just one of many, but it is also the most notable example.

There are exhibits in the Jim Crow museum that has the objects that were made out of slaves, including leather shoes. It was also customary that they collected the remains of lynching victims and kept them as their souvenirs just like the post cards that commemorated the event. These events were formal affairs called " lynching picnics" (I also learned that this is why many Black people (esp. those in my family) often use the term "cookout" or "barbecue" instead of "picnic" when referring to an outdoor gathering with food..) and in these events, cannibalism wasn't out of the question either.

(The Europeans used to eat the mummies they exhumed out of Egyptian tombs (after robbing the tombs themselves..) and the Colonists did the same when they landed in Jamestown in 1609.. so it really isn't a shock.) The lynch mob did the same to Nat Turner after he was brutally tortured, lynched and castrated because they believed that he'd rise from the dead if they didn't. I read that his skull, and penis (which was kept in a jar by another family and passed down as an heirloom) were the last things returned to his descendants for a proper burial in 2016.

But, I digress..

There are books that cover extensively cover this and other subjects in explicit detail too. (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington and The Delectable Negro by Vincent Woodard and many other books are good places to start.) And I wouldn't be surprised if this practice went back all the way to when Harvard was built, and that slaves were the first options, seeing as how they built that and other 'prestigious' universities. In fact, we should probably check if other universities did the same.. usually what one does, others do follow.

Anyway apparently Hitler (and his acolytes) studied the Jim Crow laws here from afar and initially thought that we went too far, and then proceeded to kill at least 6 million people, most of whom were Jews.

This is probably why so many states have opted to ban both Black and Jewish history as well because they are inextricably linked, just as it is with other histories, especially Native, Asian and others. Even Albert Einstein saw and noted the similarities in the way Hitler treated the Jews, and everyone else for the Holocaust and the way this country has and still treats Black people and he spoke out about it until his death.

This blew my mind when I looked into this years ago and it turned out to be true..

How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow | HISTORY

To craft legal discrimination, the Third Reich studied the United States.

www.history.com

It really just goes to show that there really isn't anything new under the Sun as history just repeats itself again and again.