00:00New horrifying details are coming out about what happened to bodies that were being tended to by
00:04the Sunset Mesa funeral director's home in Montrose.
00:07Well his head was sent so-and-so, his two shoulders went somewhere else,
00:11and one elbow to the fingertip went somewhere. I said I don't want to hear anymore.
00:15For almost a decade, these two funeral directors made money off the dead
00:20by illegally selling the body parts of hundreds of victims without any consent.
00:25A lot of the families, and my family, myself included, we've had nightmares about those two
00:33women chopping up body parts in the back of the building.
00:37Candice Salazar's grandmother, Bonnie Hamblin, died in 2014. Before dying,
00:42she had made her funeral arrangements with Megan Hess, the director of Sunset Mesa funeral home.
00:48I was really close with my grandma. I lived with her a lot growing up,
00:52and she was kind of like a second mom to me. She wanted to make sure that we didn't have to worry
00:58when she died about any funeral arrangements or costs. She was in the medical field, so that's
01:04how she knew Megan, and we were glad to see her do that because we wanted her wishes carried out.
01:10But from 2010 to 2018, Megan Hess and her mother Shirley Koch ran a side business
01:18illegally selling human body parts out of the same building as the funeral home.
01:23This is known as body brokering. A largely unregulated industry,
01:27these body parts are often used for research and educational purposes by universities,
01:32medical schools, plastic surgery classes, car companies, and the military.
01:37In the case of Sunset Mesa, the bodies were sold against the family's wishes,
01:42and even when the deceased agreed to donate their body,
01:45they didn't receive proper information on how they would be used or sold.
01:50That's what happened to Bonnie Hamblin.
01:52She was 83 when she died, but if there was something that they could use,
01:57maybe for research or anything like that, she did say that she wanted to have donation.
02:02She just wanted her body to go for science if possible. She didn't want, you know,
02:08these two women to benefit from selling her body parts for who knows what purposes.
02:16She did tell my father that someone was able to see again with her eyes.
02:20I think she mentioned maybe some other internal organs that were used for donation with someone
02:25else. Just some really strange things that I kind of thought, you know, she was 83 years old.
02:31But what do I know?
02:32In 2018, shortly after the release of an investigation by the news agency Reuters,
02:38the FBI raided the Sunset Mesa funeral home in Montrose, Colorado.
02:43Sunset Mesa was shut down in March by the state after evidence surfaced
02:47that the owner, Megan Hess, may have been selling bodies and body parts without family's consent.
02:51I found out because my father called me one day and said,
02:54have you seen the news about Sunset Mesa funeral home?
02:57And so that was my very first knowledge of what was going on.
03:02And then I reached out to the FBI myself to ask them if my grandma was
03:08one of the victims involved in this. And they did confirm it.
03:12They told me that she had been sold to an agency called RRI and that they don't know
03:20exactly what happened because there were incomplete records after she was sold.
03:25Megan Hess in her documentation had put in there that there were several different body parts that
03:31sold to them, like knees and ankles, shoulders, things like that.
03:37In the course of the investigation, the FBI also discovered that the two women
03:42would give cremains to the families that did not actually correspond to the ashes of their loved
03:47ones.
03:48The state shuts down a funeral home after a family says
03:51they got cement instead of ashes of their loved one.
03:55A lot of the other families are saying that what they were getting back was a mixture.
04:00She was actually throwing everything in to be burned, including trash at their facility,
04:07and then just scooping up many people's different ashes and putting it in urns.
04:12I would like to think maybe a part of her is in that urn, but we won't ever know.
04:18During the trial, families took turns at describing the horror
04:22of discovering what had happened to their loved ones.
04:25You know, we already grieved her, and that was really hard.
04:29She lived a long life, and I didn't want to lose her, and I felt so selfish for my
04:35grief back then in 2014.
04:37But to just go through this all over again, I felt like such an injustice was done to her,
04:45and such disrespect for them to treat her like, well, I guess like trash.
04:51She just was a moneymaker to them, and her wishes, they weren't abided by.
04:57So it's kind of hard to describe that kind of grief,
04:59because there's so much anger that goes along with it.
05:02In January 2023, Megan Hess was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison,
05:08and her mother, Shirley Koch, to 15 years.
05:11They were convicted of mail fraud, as some of the shipments of body parts
05:15had been sent on commercial airlines, and also of aiding and abetting.
05:20Following the case, Colorado enacted stricter regulations on the industry.
05:25The only thing that they really could get them on was the fact that they were
05:30transporting body parts on commercial airlines, and that's a federal crime.
05:35We didn't actually have laws on the books for this sort of thing.
05:38So that's changing now.
05:41Thank God.
05:42I feel more of a sense of closure now that they have been convicted and sentenced,
05:47but I don't think it'll ever go away.
05:50The pain of it will never go away.
05:52This is just something that we all have to live with, and just knowing the facts.
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