After an NBC News investigation revealed the names of hundreds of unclaimed bodies in the Dallas area sent to a local university for scientific research, one Venezuelan mother’s grief deepened: She says her mourning continues because she’s lost the chance to properly bury her daughter.
NBC News’ published an investigative story this week about Arelis Coromoto Villegas and her desperate, years-long attempts to repatriate her murdered daughter’s body back home to Venezuela after her daughter’s death in October 2022.
Her daughter, 21-year-old Aurimar Iturriago Villegas, was killed during a violent road rage incident that fall when a man fired a gun into the rear window of a car she was riding in, striking her in the head.
Aurimar, who was a U.S. migrant, had just arrived in Texas about a month prior after briefly living in Colombia. She later turned out to be one of hundreds of people Texas officials described as being unclaimed after their deaths: This triggered a process in which their bodies were sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where the bodies were then cut up by students or sold to private companies who use the bodies to help develop products or train their own private medical staffs. NBC News discovered the practice as part of a broad investigation into unclaimed bodies earlier this year.
NBC published the names of hundreds of deceased people whose bodies were sent to the science center. Aurimar’s body was one that had been sold to private companies, which her family only discovered when they read NBC’s story. This was more than two years into their exhaustive efforts to try to ensure that Aurimar’s body — which they believed was still intact in the U.S. — sent back to Venezuela for a funeral.
“It’s a very painful thing,” Arelis, the mother, told NBC News during an interview from her home in Venezuela. “She’s not a little animal to be butchered, to be cut up.”
Aurimar Iturriago Villegas.
Aurimar Iturriago Villegas/Facebook
According to Telemundo, which worked in partnership with NBC on the larger report, Aurimar’s family had raised thousands of dollars they believed they needed to have her body sent to Venezuela for a proper burial.
But Arelis told NBC News she and her family stopped receiving communications from Dallas County officials and were shocked to see their loved one’s name listed in NBC News’ report.
“Every night I say, ‘My God, why did you take my daughter?’” Arelis told the outlet. “I don’t accept my daughter’s death. Not yet.”
Aurimar was always “fighting for a better future” for her family, her brother Yohandry Martinez Villegas told NBC News, which documented how the Venezuelan woman left school when she was 16 to begin working odd jobs to make money for her family. After moving to Colombia and working a delivery job, Aurimar told her family she and six other migrants were planning to make the treacherous journey to the United States.
After a several month trip, according to NBC News, Aurimar made it to Texas in September 2022, turning herself in to border authorities who subsequently released her into the U.S. where she stayed with friends in the Dallas area. She was killed a month later.
NBC News discovered that Aurimar’s torso was one of 18 from unidentified bodies sold to a private biotechnology company, Relievant Medsystems, which trained medical employees on back procedures. Her legs were cut up by students at North Texas’ Health Science Center, an investigation revealed, and the ashes of her other remains were delivered to the Callas County medical examiner, NBC discovered.
The outlet said Arelis was “outraged” after discovering what happened to her daughter’s body but she now feels there’s little chance she’ll retrieve her daughter’s remains because, she says, communication with local officials continues to be fractured and infrequent.
“Even though it hurts my soul,” Arelis told NBC. “I think I’m going to throw in the towel and leave things in God’s hands.”
