$58.5 Million Verdict for Families Whose Donated Relatives Were Sold by Body Broker
A Maricopa County jury awarded $58.5 million to families who donated deceased relatives' bodies believing they would be used for medical research, only to learn the Biological Resource Center of Arizona had dismembered and sold the remains to brokers worldwide.
What happened
The Biological Resource Center of Arizona held itself out as a legitimate body-donation facility. Families signed consent forms under the understanding that donated remains would advance medical research. What happened instead was documented in grim detail after a January 2014 FBI raid: agents found approximately ten tons of frozen human remains, including 281 heads, 337 legs, and 97 spines, stored in buckets, coolers, and freezers. Some bodies had been sutured together from mismatched parts. Others had been sold abroad or used as blast-test subjects in military experiments.
Stephen Gore, the center's owner, pleaded guilty in 2015 to operating an illegal enterprise. He received one year of deferred prison time and four years of probation. Families learned of the deception only after the criminal investigation went public, many discovering through news reports how their loved ones' remains had actually been used.
Twenty-one families brought civil claims to trial in Maricopa County Superior Court before Judge Timothy Thomason. The trial began October 24, 2019. Burg Simpson attorneys Michael Burg, David TeSelle, Holly Kammerer, and Paul Friedman represented the plaintiffs, arguing that Gore and the BRC had obtained consent through deliberate fraud and caused deep emotional harm to families who had trusted the facility with their most personal loss.
Jurors returned a verdict on November 19, 2019, awarding $8.5 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages, for a total of $58.5 million. Ten of the twenty-one plaintiffs prevailed; the eleven who did not had not testified during trial. Individual awards included $6.5 million for a woman whose son's remains were sold for military testing and $5.5 million for a plaintiff who later became an advocate for stricter government oversight of the body-donation industry.
The defense challenged the punitive award as unconstitutionally excessive, and the trial court reduced the punitive damages to $8.5 million, cutting the total judgment to about $17 million. On appeal, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled in February 2022 that the trial court had lacked jurisdiction to modify the verdict and ordered the full $58.5 million judgment reinstated in Aloia v. Gore.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Colorado Lawyer (COBAR): A Triumph for Justice, Burg Simpson BRC case write-up·Archived copy
- 2.Phoenix New Times: Human chop shop owes $58M, jury says (Nov. 2019)·Archived copy
- 3.ABC15 Arizona: Verdict reached in 'human chop shop' case (2019)·Archived copy
- 4.Military Times: Jury awards $58M against body donation firm (Nov. 2019)·Archived copy
- 5.Aloia v. Gore, Arizona Court of Appeals Div. One (2022)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Burg Simpson Eldredge Hersh Jardine
All Burg Simpson Eldredge Hersh Jardine proven verdicts →A Denver jury awarded $31.8 million to the family of an 82-year-old woman killed and other residents injured when a punctured Xcel Energy gas line exploded at Heather Gardens retirement community in 2018, assigning Xcel 12% of the fault.
A federal jury awarded Georgina Perez $55.5 million after a Sunbeam Express Crock Multi-Cooker lid blew off and caused severe burns; the court later reduced the award to roughly $9.1 million under Colorado's statutory damages cap.
A Sears technician miswired Jacqueline Gebert's electric stove in January 2019, and she was electrocuted while lifting a pan. An Arapahoe County jury found Sears negligent and awarded $2,700,000, made up of $2,000,000 in noneconomic damages and $700,000 for physical impairment. The court cut the noneconomic part to the $468,010 statutory limit, so $1,168,010 stood. The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed in 2023 and upheld the cap against a Seventh Amendment challenge.
Burg Simpson secured a confidential settlement for the three children of Jason Varnish, 46, a New Jersey finance executive who died of positional asphyxiation after his jacket became entangled in a Blue Sky Basin chairlift at Vail in February 2020.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.