‘None of this happened the way you think it did’

https://www.hcn.org/issues/51.10/communities-none-of-this-happened-the-way-you-think-it-did-cremated-remains

by axiomdata316 • 7 years ago

66 24 7 years ago

p1mrx• 7 years ago

Summary: People bring bodies to a scammer's funeral home, and are offered free cremation (a $1000 value!) by donating some organs to a good cause. The family receives burnt-garbage ash, while the scammer secretly sells the entire body to the highest bidder.

And she would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling FBI agents.

DoofusOfDeath• 7 years ago

Thanks for the summary. I appreciate the craft of this sort of long-form writing, but I also want a quick summary to know if it's worth investing the time to read.

magic_beans• 7 years ago

Agreed. The article takes way too long to get to the point. A blurb at the top would have been helpful.

evrydayhustling2• 7 years ago

Yeah it's a great article, but on HN at least the headline should be something like "Cremation scam returns fake remains and sells body"

bdavis__• 7 years ago

High Country News. I used to be a subscriber. Weird mix of mountain hippie viewpoints. With some ranchers mixed in.

daodedickinson• 7 years ago

A lot of the Body Worlds ripoff versions take "bodies of people who could not be identified" from China... the plastination process must begin within 24 hours of death... you can reason out the rest of the horror. It's just another holocaust you can see in real time but do little about as an individual. These tour the United States. I tried to protest one and could find no one else who cared. There's a persistent myth that there is some sort of "scientific" or "educational" value in seeing sleazy American business people and CCP police profit off of the cadavers of people who had illegal religions. Seems this article reveals they were only pretending to steal the bodies from China and they were stealing them from the U.S. instead. Still, not enough people care.

thaumasiotes2• 7 years ago

Still, not enough people care.

There's that saying that reality is what, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

I don't think the harm of grave robbing is real in this sense. It distresses people to know about the grave robbing. If they don't know about it, what damage does it actually do?

And if people are taking care that victims remain ignorant, such that no harm occurs, what is the appropriate amount to care?

speedplane2• 7 years ago

I don't think the harm of grave robbing is real in this sense. It distresses people to know about the grave robbing. If they don't know about it, what damage does it actually do?

Lying or hiding truth causes harm. If grave robberies are being covered up, it means that the government or some other institution is lying or at the very least shielding the truth. If people do not have access to reliable truth, they won't be able to make reasonable decisions, which can result in real harm.

badpun• 7 years ago

Let's say someone spits (or worse) into your soup at a kitchen restaurant. You have no way of knowing if they did. There is no real damage done if they did (the soup is boiling in the pot, so there's no risk of transmitting a disease). By your logic, you're ok with it?

kd5bjo• 7 years ago

A significant portion of the population believes both in an afterlife and that how a person’s earthly remains are treated will materially affect that experience for the deceased. To anyone that holds such a belief, this activity is causing grievous direct harm to a person that is not in a position to defend themselves.

Just because you don’t hold this belief doesn’t make it false— it can be neither proved nor disproved by any known method (short of dying yourself). Society has generally agreed to respect each individual’s beliefs in these cases, and each person is entitled to some direction of their own affairs after they have passed; this is why wills are enforceable.

AnthonBerg3• 7 years ago

It fundamentally undermines trust in society. On a primal, emotional level.

For those who remain skeptical about the intrinsic value of trust, it can be seen that trust is a foundation of economic efficiency: https://ourworldindata.org/trust

evrydayhustling2• 7 years ago

In the case of this scam, the market for cadavers incentivizes a fraud that is at least economic - the families could have been offered a higher price for the full body. Much more importantly, the Body Worlds type exhibits might actually incentivize murder and neglect, by creating a market for bodies of impovershed people in others' control. That is a very real harm even if the audience doesn't know where the bodies came from.

vinceguidry• 7 years ago

That moment when you realize the game Graveyard Keeper is based on real life.

‘None of this happened the way you think it did’

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