Man says 'I feel foolish' after learning mother's body was sold to US army, strapped to chair and blown up

Jim Stauffer donated mum's corpse for medical use - only to find it had been passed to the military for so-called blast-testing

The son of a great grandmother whose dead body was secretly sold to the US military where it was blown up in a so-called "blast test” has said he will never recover from finding out what happened to her.

Jim Stauffer, of Phoenix, Arizona, donated mum Doris’s corpse for medical research when she died in 2013 after suffering with Alzheimer’s disease.

But the 74-year-old’s body was then passed to the army where it was strapped to a chair before a bomb was detonated underneath it.

Now, Mr Stauffer is one of 33 people suing the Biological Resource Center, also of Phoenix, which it is said systematically misled people about what would happen to their loved ones.

“I feel foolish,” he said. “Because I’m not a trusting person, but in this situation – you have no idea this is going on – you trust. That trust is what they feed on.”

He added he had signed paperwork refusing experiments involving explosions: “we checked the ‘no’ box on all that,” he said.

And, speaking to Arizona’s ABC15 news channel, he added: “I don’t see a pathway for ever getting over this. Every time there’s a memory, every time there’s a photograph you look at, there’s this ugly thing that happened just right there staring right at you.”

The news of the legal action against BRC had already stunned America last week when court documents revealed FBI agents had found buckets full of heads, arms and legs during a 2014 raid at the centre.

Heaps of male genitalia were stored in refrigerators, while different people’s body parts had been sewn together. Bodies had been dismembered with band saws, it was said.

Mr Stauffer, himself, found out what had happened to his mother after a 2016 investigation by the Reuters news agency discovered the centre was supplying bodies for Pentagon-approved experiments without permission.

Military records show that at least 20 other cadavers were also used in blast tests - designed to offer an insight into what exactly happens to bomb victims - without the knowledge of relatives. BRC sold each one for $5,893, it was discovered.

The centre’s owner Stephen Gore pleaded guilty to running an illegal enterprise in 2015 and was sentenced to serve probation. He has been named in the new law suit.

“He didn’t care about the families, he didn’t care about the people and he didn’t care about the memories,” Mr Stauffer said. “If I can be a little small part of his personal financial destruction, I don’t care.”

Army officials said in 2016 that, though they never received the consent forms, they had been reassured by BRC that families had agreed to let the bodies be used in such experiments.