Two inmates who died in Alabama state prisons were found to be missing organs when returned to their families.
The body of Charles Edward Singleton, 74, was sent back to his family without his brain, according to court documents obtained by ABC 33/40 News earlier this week.
Singleton died in the custody of the state Department of Corrections in November 2021 and his autopsy was performed by the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Pathology.
His family asked that his body be sent to a funeral home in Pell City. The funeral director then told them it ‘would be difficult to prepare his body for viewing’ due to its ‘noticeable state of decomposition’ including ‘advanced skin slippage’, state the documents.
Family members were then told Singleton came with no organs, which are typically stored in a bag and put back into the body. They requested the body parts from the university, which said they never received Singleton’s organs.
It is the second alleged case of missing organs to come from the Alabama prison system recently.
In early December, the family of Brandon Dotson, 43, filed a federal lawsuit after they found his heart missing from his body.
A pathologist performing a second autopsy on Dotson, who died at Ventress Correctional Facility in mid-November, said his heart was not in his chest and that the examination could not be finished.
The family’s lawsuit demands that Dotson’s heart and other remains be immediately returned.
‘There are very few things that shock me anymore in this system. But there is something so grotesque and disrespectful and unacceptable about taking the organ from a person without the family knowing,’ stated the family’s lawyer, Lauren Faraino.
The family’s lawsuit reads: ‘The heart of a deceased person simply does not go missing in the absence of deliberate illegal activity or gross negligence on behalf of the entity or entities that had possession of the body prior to it being turned over to the family for burial.’
Other families have expressed skepticism over the Department of Corrections’ claims about overdoses and wonder if their family members were murdered, ABC 33/40 News reported.
The department declined to comment on pending litigation.
Singleton’s case emerged just a few months after a hospital security guard was allegedly caught having sex with an elderly woman’s corpse in a morgue freezer in Arizona.
And in June, a Harvard Medical School morgue manager was charged with stealing human remains from mortuaries and selling them for profit.
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