The alarm was raised by an employee of the mortuary at the La Fe Hospital in Valencia in mid-December 2022. The Albal City Council was going to take care of the funeral expenses of a french man who lived in poverty. But his body had not arrived at the town, where he was registered, to receive the funeral. The council conveyed its concern to the hospital about what happened. But the health center could only confirm that the Montesinos Funeral Homea small company in the capital of Turia with more than three decades of experience and specialized in repatriations and embalmings, had collected the mortal remains.
By then, they were already in a dissection room. According to the head of the Investigative Court number 1 of Valencia, two employees of the funeral home were allegedly responsible for falsifying, both before the hospital and before the Civil Registry, all the bureaucracy to state that the deceased had donated his body to science. In one of those documents, furthermore, one of the workers hid his identity under a false name.
It was not the first time that something like this had happened, as the police operation ‘Thanatos’but until that moment no one had realized the existence of an alleged tbranch that profited from donated corpsesor who appeared to be, to teaching and research, since there are “serious doubts” about “the reality of the donation documents” of the bodies. The opening of a judicial case on these events led to a second, broader one with seven other previous cases under suspicion. Now, after almost two years of investigation, the two procedures – pending the last appeals – are headed to oral trial. The instructor has prosecuted four men –two managers of the funeral home and two workers– for the alleged crimes of fraud and falsification of both public and private documents. Although at first the magistrate filed the case for the owners of the company, the Valencia Court ordered to investigate them as well as requested by the Prosecutor’s Office.
There are a total of eight events of this type between October 2020 and December 2022. The victims always followed the same pattern: foreign or very vulnerable people who were convinced that no one was going to claim. In them, one of the funeral home workers played a relevant role, as indicated by the judge in his indictment, who, helped by his partner, “prepared inaccurate documents, carrying out procedures in the mortuaries of hospitals and senior centers, in the Civil Registry, in order to dispose of the body of the deceased and bill for funeral services. Spanish legislation makes it clear that any donation must be voluntary and without compensation. But the universities that received those bodies do pay the costs of this altruistic act. The company under scrutiny received 6,000 euros for transfers that “otherwise they would not have achieved.”
The nurse of a residence claimed to have signed the consent “without really being aware of its contents”, understanding “under the deception” of the funeral home worker – who had filled out the paper – that it was a necessary procedure for the burial of a old man. In some cases, it appears in the documents that a relative authorized the donation, but the Police have not been able to verify this with them as they have not been able to locate them. In others, relatives were informed that they could not claim their loved one’s ashes or were unaware of the procedure to do so. A detail that becomes relevant in light of the next step of the plot.
The business continued once the anatomical remains had fulfilled their purpose, at the time of cremation. The Faculty of Health Sciences of the CEU Cardenal Herrera University He paid 4,500 euros for nine cremations, between January 2018 and April 2020, but there is no evidence that they were carried out in any crematorium in Valencia. “The destination of such bodies could not be located,” indicates the court order. From the confession of one of the workers investigated, it is extracted that “the funeral home placed several bodies in the same coffin” before the cremation and then issued different invoices. That is, they saved costs and multiplied profits illegally. Same modus operandi that they would have used with the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Valencia (UV), which paid two invoices of 270 euros each in 2021 for cremations that did not take place.
Disparate protocols
“Unjust enrichment occurred”at the expense of the universities, “in a somewhat painful way, since these are activities on corpses, which although legally they are considered an object for the law, we cannot forget that they are human remains, of people who have died, to whom which should be given a certain respect and consideration,” says the judge. Both affected centers defend the solidity of their protocols, although some sources consulted by ABC point out that some are more lax than others throughout the country.
In the case of the UV, the document to be included in the Body Donation Program It can only be registered while alive by the donor and two witnesses. In fact, none of the 60 transfers that the public university received in 2023 were authorized by third parties, a scenario that they reserve only for very specific cases in which a socio-health institution is responsible for a person without means. In addition, families can request the ashes after completing the study. A procedure managed by the funeral home – they work with different ones – that deals with your case.
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