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Stolen Human Tissue Stolen human tissue ends up in several mountain patients who went into the hospital for surgery. The material was stolen from funeral homes in New York that removed bone and tissue from corpses without getting permission from families. Now hospitals around the state are looking into whether any of their patients got the stolen tissue. Officials at Mission Hospitals say 16 patients may have received some of the stolen tissue. They believe that although the tissue may have been stolen it was still sterilized and tested for infectious diseases. Mission Hospitals' Dr. Dale Fell says patients were...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Human tissue stolen from funeral homes in New York may have been implanted in at least 26 patients of four Charlotte-area hospitals. None of the patients appears to have been harmed. Officials at Carolinas Medical Center and Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte and Catawba Valley Medical Center in Hickory say they notified doctors and patients after learning patients received bone and other tissue. The tissue came from companies that bought material from Biomedical Tissue Services of New Jersey. Biomedical is under investigation for allegedly removing bone and tissue from corpses without permission from families and selling them for...

Michael Bruno's life had been uncomplicated: He was an immigrant who worked hard, spoke his mind and succumbed to kidney cancer two years ago at 75. "Typical Italian cab driver," recalled his son, Vito. "He had an opinion about everything." It's only after death that his story became ghoulish. Authorities believe his body and those of hundreds of other people — including famed British broadcaster Alistair Cooke — were secretly carved up in the back rooms of several funeral parlors citywide to remove human bone, skin and tendons without required permission from their families. Authorities allege the body parts were...

Relatives of Alistair Cooke, the late broadcaster, have spoken of their revulsion after it was found that his bones were cut from his body by a criminal gang and sold for transplant tissue. New York police said his body was one of dozens chopped up for profit by rogue morticians in Brooklyn. After presenting BBC radio's Letter from America for more than half a century, Cooke died in March last year of lung cancer, aged 95. The "body-snatchers", as the New York tabloids call them, surgically carved out his bones the day after he died, said the Daily News. His...

A fiendish team of body snatchers in Brooklyn defiled the body of beloved "Masterpiece Theater" host Alistair Cooke, removing his bones for profit without his family's permission.......the body of the avuncular TV icon, who died in March 2004 at 95, was cremated at New York Mortuary in Spanish Harlem — but not before a pair of heartless harvesters got their hands on him. Cooke, who hosted the PBS anthology series of British programs from 1971 to 1993, was among dozens of victims whose bodies were sawed up and peddled by funeral director Joseph Nicelli and disgraced dentist Michael Mastromarino, cops...

Vt. Teen Accused of Stealing Corpse's Head By Associated Press April 13, 2005, 8:01 AM EDT MORRISVILLE, Vt. -- A 17-year-old Morrisville youth was being held on $100,000 bail after police said he raided a tomb in a cemetery and removed a head from a corpse. "We had a person voice their concerns about information they had heard on the street," said Chief Richard Keith of the Morristown Police Department. Keith said police at first could not believe what they had heard. But when they went to Morrisville Cemetery and investigated, they found that someone had broken into a tomb,...