The Unclaimed

In the days before the world's leaders arrived in San Francisco in November 2023, the people living on the city's streets disappeared. Not all of them. But enough that the residents noticed, the merchants noticed, and the governor was asked about it on camera. The dwellings emptied. The shelters did not fill. And when the summit was over, a member of the city's own homelessness oversight commission looked at the data and said the part that matters for everything that follows in this installment: the numbers did not reconcile. People had been moved out of view, and no one was required to say where they went.

SECTION ONEThe Vanishing

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit ran from November 11 to 17, 2023, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. President Biden met President Xi Jinping there. Twenty-one member economies sent delegations. Roughly twenty thousand people came to the city for the event.

In the weeks before, the city changed. Streets were power-washed. Fencing went up around a twelve-block perimeter. Murals appeared. And the homeless encampments that had lined the downtown streets thinned dramatically. Residents sent local news outlets photographs of tents appearing in neighborhoods where they had not been before — the displaced reappearing at the margins.

Governor Gavin Newsom was asked directly whether the cleanup was for the summit. His answer, delivered at a Friday press conference, became briefly famous:

"I know folks are saying, 'Oh, they're just cleaning up this place because all those fancy leaders are coming to town.' That's true because it's true — but it's also true for months and months and months before APEC, we've been having conversations." — Gov. Gavin Newsom, November 2023

That's true because it's true. The first half of the sentence is the admission. The second half is the framing the administration would maintain afterward: that the reductions were the product of long-running policy, not a summit-driven sweep.

The city's own data complicates the framing. A tent-and-vehicle count conducted by the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management on November 22, the week after the summit, documented a decrease of 101 tents and 365 inhabited vehicles between July and November — a 16 percent drop in tents and a 35 percent drop in vehicle dwellings such as RVs. Public records showed the city had prioritized encampment clearings in high-visibility areas: Van Ness Avenue, United Nations Plaza, the area around the federal building.

Here is the seam. The city's homelessness department said it added no shelter beds for the conference and saw no corresponding increase in placements. So the dwellings emptied, but the people did not enter the shelter system in any matching number. The math does not close. A member of the city's Homelessness Oversight Commission, Christin Evans, said so plainly when she saw the post-summit count:

"[The data] seems to indicate widespread sweeps. The numbers were not surprising. What was surprising to me was we didn't see a corresponding increase in shelter bed use." — Christin Evans, SF Homelessness Oversight Commission

The president of the Castro Merchants Association, describing the unhoused people who appeared in her neighborhood during the summit and then vanished afterward, put it in the language of someone watching a population be moved like furniture:

"They just disappeared back to wherever they came from. It'd be nice if city services came out and assisted the people who need help instead of just setting them loose on us." — Terry Asten Bennett, Castro Merchants Association

To be precise about what this is and is not: there is no evidence that the people swept for APEC were harmed, trafficked, or killed. The honest, documented finding is narrower and, for the purposes of this installment, more important. A government demonstrated, on camera, with the governor narrating the reason, that it has the power to make a population disappear from view — and that it bears no obligation, and operates no system, to account for where that population went. The dwellings emptied. The shelters did not fill. The oversight commissioner flagged the gap. Nobody with standing was required to track a single one of those people, because the unhoused are a population for whom no notification is owed to anyone.

That is the precondition for everything that follows. The swept encampment resident and the unclaimed body on the medical examiner's table are the same population at two points on a timeline. APEC is the displacement mechanism, in daylight. The rest of this installment is the disposition mechanism, after death. Same population. Same vacuum. The summit simply let you watch the machinery move.

SECTION TWOThe Oldest Node

The trade in unclaimed bodies is not a modern abuse. It is the oldest node in the entire architecture this series documents — older than the prison autopsy contract, older than the foster-care system, older than the research university. It is the original consent vacuum, and the laws that govern it were written, deliberately, to keep it open.

In the early nineteenth century, American medical schools faced a chronic shortage of cadavers for anatomical instruction. Dissection carried deep religious and cultural revulsion; almost no one donated a body voluntarily. So the schools acquired corpses the only way they could — by sending students, janitors, and physicians to rob fresh graves. The practice was technically a misdemeanor and almost never prosecuted. Politicians protected it. Lawyers argued that because the previous occupant had vacated the body, its ownership was in legal doubt, and so there was no victim.

The grave-robbing fell, overwhelmingly, on the powerless. The burial grounds most often raided were those of the poor, the enslaved, and the free Black communities of the early republic. A 1788 New York anatomy proponent argued, in a sentence that should be read as the architecture stating its own logic out loud, that "the only subjects procured for dissection are the productions of Africa or their descendants … and if those characters are the only subjects of dissection, surely no person can object." Free Black New Yorkers petitioned that same year demanding the medical students stay out of their burial grounds. The petition was the documented objection. The dissection continued.

The public revulsion eventually produced legislation — but the legislation did not end the practice. It legalized it, by redirecting the supply from stolen bodies to unclaimed ones. Massachusetts passed the first American anatomy act in 1831, making the bodies of the unclaimed poor available for dissection in medical schools and hospitals. New York followed in 1854. Pennsylvania in 1883. State by state, the same template took hold: the unclaimed body of a poor person became, by operation of law, the property of the medical establishment.

The British Anatomy Act of 1832 — the model many American statutes drew from — established the consent structure that the American laws inherited and that survives, in substance, to this day. Under the British act, individuals could exempt themselves from dissection by registering dissent in writing or verbally. But, as one historical analysis of the act records, the very poor were not required to be made aware of this right, and the act did not require that family be notified after a death — so their absence could be taken as acceptance for dissection.

In many states, kin could reclaim a body destined for dissection — but only if they could pay the burial costs. Poverty, in other words, was the qualifying condition for the body's seizure, and poverty was also the barrier to its recovery. The same lack of money that made a body "unclaimed" made it unrecoverable by the family that might have claimed it.

The system occasionally caught someone it was not built to catch, and those moments are the only reason much of it was ever documented. In 1878 the body of former U.S. Representative John Scott Harrison — son of President William Henry Harrison and father of President Benjamin Harrison — was discovered on a dissection table at the Ohio Medical College, having been stolen from his grave the day after his funeral. The scandal was national precisely because the victim was powerful. The thousands of unclaimed poor who arrived on the same tables, before and after, produced no scandal, because no one with standing was looking for them.

SECTION THREEFort Worth

In 2024, NBC News published a ten-month investigation titled "Dealing the Dead." It documented, in granular and sourced detail, that the two-hundred-year-old machinery described in the previous section is not historical. It is operating now, at one of the largest health science centers in Texas, with the bodies supplied by the elected officials of two of the most populous counties in the United States.

For five years, the unclaimed dead of Dallas and Tarrant counties were delivered to the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth. Elected county officials approved the transfers. According to the NBC News investigation, the counties sent more than 2,350 unclaimed bodies to the Health Science Center since 2019. More than 830 of them were selected for use — dissected for medical-student training or leased out to outside entities.

The bodies were assessed on arrival based on their usefulness to medical science. Those that tested positive for infectious disease or had begun to decompose were cremated. The rest entered the program. And the program, the records showed, was a business. The Health Science Center charged fees for access to the bodies and the parts cut from them.

The recipients of the leased remains included for-profit medical device makers, other universities, and the U.S. Army. The body parts were shipped across state lines so that doctors and engineers could practice procedures and test products. Among the bodies shipped, the Health Science Center's own president later acknowledged, were those of U.S. military veterans — sent across state lines, the president said, without leadership's awareness.

The defining feature of the program — the feature that makes it the contemporary embodiment of the 1832 consent structure — is what did not happen. NBC News documented repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties, and by the Health Science Center, to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed and using it for research. The families were not notified. Many learned what had happened only when reporters told them, or when NBC News published a list of names.

The case the investigation built much of its reporting around was Victor Honey — a homeless and mentally ill Army veteran whose body, after his death in September 2022, was dissected and leased out to groups around the country, including the Army he had served. His family, including relatives who lived in the Dallas area and could have been found, knew nothing about it until reporters reached them.

When NBC News presented its findings, the response was swift — which is itself a data point about how the closing of the record works once it is forced open. The Health Science Center initially defended the program. Then, as the reporting became undeniable, it suspended the body-donation program, fired the officials who ran it, and hired a consulting firm to investigate. The center's president, Sylvia Trent-Adams, wrote to students and staff that documents uncovered while responding to the reporters' public-records requests had revealed details "of which HSC leadership was not previously aware" — including a lack of sufficient controls and oversight over how outside companies handled the corpses. The Texas Funeral Service Commission opened an investigation in October 2024 into whether the failure to notify families violated state law. More than 25 families came forward after the names were published.

And then the crucial sentence, the one that connects Fort Worth to the anatomy acts and to every other section of this series. The use of unclaimed bodies in exactly this way — dissected, leased, shipped, monetized, without consent from the dead or the knowledge of their families — remains legal in Texas, as in most states. The program was shut down not because it was illegal, but because it was seen. The law that permitted it is the direct descendant of the 1831 Massachusetts anatomy act. It is still on the books.

SECTION FOURThe Market

The University of North Texas was a public institution operating under a state anatomy framework. Around it, and largely beyond the reach of any framework at all, operates a private market in human remains. The defining investigation of that market is the Reuters series "The Body Trade," published in 2017 over the course of a year of reporting by Brian Grow and John Shiffman.

The structural fact the Reuters investigation established is the regulatory asymmetry at the heart of the entire trade. The market for organs intended for transplantation is heavily regulated in the United States. The market for cadavers and body parts used for research, training, and product development is, by comparison, almost entirely unregulated. A firm that acquires whole bodies — usually for free, through donation programs marketed to grieving and often poor families — can dissect those bodies and sell the parts for hundreds or thousands of dollars each, in a manner the firms themselves compare to dealing in raw materials. These firms are called body brokers. They prefer the term non-transplant tissue banks.

The Reuters reporters demonstrated the absence of oversight in the most direct way available to journalism. Identifying themselves truthfully as Reuters employees, they purchased human body parts from a broker. For $900 plus shipping, the news organization bought two heads and a cervical spine. The transaction required essentially no vetting of the buyer. A member of Congress, told of the ease of the purchase, called it "sickening."

The investigation also documented how the trade had entwined itself with the legitimate American funeral industry. Reuters identified dozens of funeral operators that had struck arrangements with body brokers — in some cases referring families to a broker and collecting a referral fee that exceeded what the funeral home would have earned on a cremation, in at least one case with funeral-home owners holding a financial stake in the broker business itself. The family believed they were donating a loved one to science. The body became inventory.

The market's failure state — what happens when an unregulated trade in human remains is left entirely to its own operators — was documented in two federal cases that bracket the Reuters series. In December 2013, federal agents raided the Detroit warehouse of body broker Arthur Rathburn. An FBI agent testified that they found human body parts stored in paint cans, beer coolers, and plastic containers; severed heads in a cooler; body parts frozen together in a refrigerator beside sandwich ingredients. Rathburn had acquired bodies for around $5,000 and heads for around $500, and had at one point shipped a cadaver infected with HIV and hepatitis B to a medical convention. In 2014, the FBI raided the Biological Resource Center in Phoenix, a for-profit body-donation operation that took bodies from families in exchange for the cremated remains. Among the discoveries was a smaller body assembled from mismatched parts — a configuration a former broker theorized was created to produce enough material to cremate and return to a family that believed it was receiving its own relative's ashes.

The point of these cases is not their grotesquerie. The point is the supply chain. The bodies that fed this market came, disproportionately, from the same population that fed the dissection tables of the nineteenth century and the lease program in Fort Worth: the poor, who donated to science because they could not afford a funeral, or whose bodies were never claimed at all. The market did not create the vulnerability. The market monetized a vulnerability the law had already created and declined to close.

SECTION FIVEThe County Pipeline

Between the swept encampment of Section One and the dissection table of Section Three sits an administrative process that almost no one ever sees: the county system for handling the bodies of the dead who arrive without a family to claim them. This is where the consent vacuum is administered, case by case, by people working through caseloads under budget constraints — and it is where the decision to declare a body "unclaimed" is actually made.

The process varies by jurisdiction, but its skeleton is consistent. When a person dies and no next of kin immediately presents, the body goes to the county medical examiner or coroner. That office is responsible for attempting to locate and notify the family. The standard for what counts as a sufficient attempt is set locally, is rarely codified in detail, and is almost never independently audited. If the office's attempt fails — or is not seriously made — the body is declared unclaimed. At that point, depending on the state, it is routed to one of two destinations: a county-contracted indigent disposition, typically cremation or burial in a common grave, or, under the anatomy statutes, a medical school or willed-body program.

The Fort Worth case demonstrated where the process fails: the NBC News investigation found that death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties repeatedly failed to contact family members who were reachable. The failure was not in the law's instruction to notify. The failure was in the execution, in the absence of any enforcement mechanism, and in the structural incentive that runs against diligent notification. A body that is successfully reunited with its family becomes the family's financial and logistical responsibility. A body that is declared unclaimed becomes the county's problem to dispose of as cheaply as possible — and, under the anatomy framework, becomes an asset that a medical institution will accept at no cost to the county, and in some arrangements will pay to receive.

That is the quiet engine of the whole system. The notification step is the only thing standing between a person and the disposition pipeline, and the notification step is performed by an office with a documented incentive not to perform it too well. There is no parent to bypass here, as in Part II, and no statutory next-of-kin form quietly signed by a state official, as in Part I. There is only an administrative determination — "unclaimed" — made by a public office, reviewable by no one, that converts a citizen into available material.

SECTION SIXThe Architecture, Applied

The pattern that organizes this entire series applies to the unclaimed dead with less friction than to any other population, because the unclaimed dead are the only population for whom the consent vacuum requires no displacement of an existing guardian. There is no parent to remove, no next of kin to overrule. There is only the administrative determination that no one is coming.

What distinguishes the unclaimed dead from the prisoners of Part I and the children of Part II is the elegance of the vacuum. In the prison cases, a state official had to sign a next-of-kin authorization the actual next of kin never saw. In the foster and ORR cases, a parent had to be displaced by a court order or a federal apprehension. For the unclaimed dead, none of that machinery is required. The body becomes available the moment an underfunded county office decides, without review, that no one is coming to claim it. The determination is the entire mechanism. Everything downstream — the dissection, the lease, the shipping, the fee — flows from a single unreviewable administrative word: unclaimed.

And the population that word falls on is not random. It is the homeless veteran, the mentally ill, the indigent, the person who died alone in a city that had already, when it needed the sidewalk for a summit, demonstrated its capacity to make that person disappear. The same vulnerability that put them on the street put them on the table.

SECTION SEVENThe Constitutional Throughline

The legal claim available to the families of the unclaimed dead is the same one that anchored Part I: the next-of-kin property interest in the body of a deceased relative, protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The governing federal authority remains Newman v. Sathyavaglswaran, 446 F.3d 1090 (9th Cir. 2006), in which the Ninth Circuit held that the parents of deceased children had a constitutionally protected property interest in their children's corneas, removed without consent under a county arrangement, such that the removal could not occur without due process.

The doctrine, applied to the unclaimed dead, produces an uncomfortable question for every county operating an anatomy-act pipeline. The next-of-kin property interest does not evaporate because the county failed to find the next of kin. It is the failure to find them — or the failure to try — that is the constitutional defect. A property interest cannot be extinguished by the state's own decision not to perform the notification that would have identified the holder of the interest. The Fort Worth families who learned from reporters that their reachable relatives had been dissected and leased are not merely sympathetic. They are, on the existing federal authority, holders of a property interest that was taken without the process they were due.

That claim has not yet been litigated to a conclusion against the contemporary willed-body pipeline. The Texas Funeral Service Commission's 2024 investigation proceeds under state regulatory law, not constitutional law. But the constitutional vulnerability is precisely where the architecture is thinnest. The anatomy statutes assume that "unclaimed" is a stable category. Newman suggests it is not — that the category is only as valid as the notification effort behind it, and that a body declared unclaimed without a constitutionally adequate attempt to find the family was taken from someone who never lost their interest in it.

The architecture's defenders will say the law permits everything documented here, and on the books, in most states, they are correct. That is the point. The law was written, in 1831 and after, to keep the supply of poor bodies open. It has never been seriously revised. The constitutional claim is the instrument by which the two-hundred-year-old statute is finally tested against the Fourteenth Amendment — and it is the work that remains.

CLOSINGWhat Remains

The unclaimed dead are the architecture's purest case because they require the least machinery. No guardian to displace, no consent form to launder, no court order to obtain. Only a determination — made by an office with every incentive to make it — that no one is coming.

San Francisco showed, in November 2023, how a population is made to disappear from view: quickly, on camera, with no obligation to account for where it went. The anatomy acts show what happens to that same population at the end of the line, two centuries of law ensuring that the body of a poor person who dies unclaimed becomes available, by default, to whoever the state has designated. Fort Worth shows the line still running. The body brokers show the market that grew up beside it. The county determination shows the single word on which all of it turns.

None of this is hidden. The anatomy statutes are public law. The UNTHSC fee schedule was a document. The Reuters reporters bought the heads with their own names. The closing of the record, in this case, is not concealment — it is the simple fact that no one with standing is required to be told, and so no one looks, and the law that permits it has never been forced to answer for itself.

The harvest of the unclaimed does not require darkness. It requires only that the rest of us agree not to ask where the bodies went — the same agreement the city asked of its residents when it cleared the sidewalks for the summit, and the same agreement that, once refused, brings the whole architecture into view.

Part IV — The Detained — will examine the disposition of those who die in immigration custody, where the body, the record, and the family are separated by an international border.