"Ghoulish, greedy, dangerous and criminal"

They say there's no such thing as monsters, but that ain't necessarily so:

Families who claim the corpses of more than 1,000 relatives were dismembered and sold in an illegal body-parts scandal sued funeral directors and others on Tuesday.

The class action suit represents hundreds of people who claim their relatives' body parts were harvested for medical use without their consent.

It charges seven individuals, and the funeral homes and human tissue services with which they worked, with conspiracy, negligence and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The seven were indicted by a grand jury last September and accused of harvesting bones, skin and tendons in unsanitary conditions, and selling them to hospitals with the risk that they could infect patients who received them.

And why, you might ask, would these people do something so terribly, horribly wrong?

The defendants allegedly made $3.8 million from sale of body parts obtained in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey between February 2004 and September 2005 in an operation that was "ghoulish, greedy, dangerous and criminal," the grand jury's report said. [my emphasis]

They did it for the filthy lucre, of course. And it sounds really filthy.

In all, the scheme took tissue from 1,007 bodies, including 244 from Philadelphia funeral homes.

The suit, filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common pleas, alleges that after removing parts from the corpses, the accused replaced harvested bone and tissue with foreign objects such as PVC piping "so that bodies would still appear normal for their pending visitations, funerals, or post-mortem proceedings."

Aside from this being a nasty, awful thing to do, they apparently also put hundreds of people who received tissue donations at risk of disease.

Five of the seven "people" involved also face criminal charges. I hope they go away for a long, long time.