Lawsuit Alleges 'Research Facility' Was Selling Body Parts For Profit

By Jim Bochnowski in News on May 30, 2015 6:00PM

William Earl Perkins, a Cook County Sheriff's Officer, died of a stroke in 2013. Before he passed away, he and his daughter, Pequeena Dixon, signed a contract with the Biological Resource Center of Illinois to donate his body to science. According to the document, any body parts not used for medical research were to be cremated. His daughter even received his cremated remains.

Which made it all the more strange when the FBI found his head sitting in a lab last month.

In January, federal authorities raided the Biological Resource Center of Illinois, where they found thousands of body parts, with everything from heads to feet, that were used in a "body broker" ring. According to documents related to the raid, the facility was regularly freezing body parts instead of cremating them, and sold them to medical training facilities in the United States and overseas.

Dixon has filed a lawsuit against the company. According to the lawsuit, her father's remains were in "a condition such that the Defendants’ promise to treat the remains with dignity and respect was utterly violated, and suggesting that the ashes delivered to plaintiffs were likely not Perkins’ remains at all."

Additionally, Dixon alleges that her father's remains were sold for profit instead of being used for medical research. The lawsuit is seeking damages for fraud, emotional distress, breach of contract, negligence, conspiracy and is seeking "unspecified damages."