14 DAY TRIAL // Investigators made a shocking discovery when they exhumed the body of an 82 year-old woman. They found that many of her bones had been removed and replaced with plastic pipes.
Supposedly, the woman and her family were victims of a biomedical New Jersey firm which planned to sell human bones and tissues all over the world.
Michael Mastromarino, one of the accused, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services of Fort Lee, turned himself in and, according to his lawyer, he is innocent, stating that he followed the regulations for harvesting tissue. The lawyer also asserted that his client "was not responsible for interacting with the families of the deceased or for obtaining the documentation needed to harvest the tissue."
Authorities started their investigation last year, when they found out that Mastromarino and others alike tipped funeral services in order to harvest tissue from the dead without their families being aware of it.
Since the news of the investigation, many families complained that their loved ones' bodies were being plundered, accusing Biomedical Tissue of changing death certificates by replacing infectious disease with normal causes of death and changing the age. Some of the stolen body parts come from elderly people who suffered from infectious disease.
The tissue was then sold to a company which used it, without being aware of how it was obtained, for dental implants and other surgeries. On February 3, Biomedical Tissue was shut down, on the grounds that it altered death certificates of the people whose tissue was put up for sale.