After speaking with an NBC News reporter, Leggett reached out to the Health Science Center for answers. Officials gave him a letter indicating his brother’s body was used to train anesthesiologists — omitting that the training was held in Kentucky by a for-profit medical education company, details that were spelled out in documents obtained by reporters through public records requests.
An official at the center also handed Leggett a box containing his brother’s remains. The letter thanked him for his brother’s sacrifice: “We now return him to you with humble gratitude and appreciation.”
Leggett took the remains to Oklahoma last month and spread them on their grandparents’ graves. He was glad to finally give his brother a dignified tribute, he said, but he can’t shake the sense that his last wishes had been violated.
One reason Dale was so private: He had a deep mistrust of the government and the health care industry.
“That’s just one more reason why I believe he never would have agreed to or wanted anything done with his body,” Leggett said.
Nika Michelle Hodges
When she was healthy, Nika Hodges loved to write poetry and sing. She was fascinated by astronomy, often gazing up at the stars in wonder. But the 54-year-old mother of three also struggled with addiction and severe schizophrenia, leading to fractured relationships and periods of homelessness.
Her biggest paranoia, according to her children, was that medical professionals would take her away and conduct experiments on her.
“I know 100% for a fact,” said Abigail Willson, her daughter, “she would not have wanted what happened to her.”
Family members had been searching for Hodges since 2021, after she stopped returning messages and disappeared from her apartment. They redoubled their efforts this summer, after the death of Hodges’ father, a longtime police officer in Tarrant County. The private investigator they hired contacted hospitals and homeless shelters before eventually finding her on the list published by NBC News.
Willson and her siblings have struggled to determine how this could have occurred. All they know for certain is that Hodges died at a Fort Worth hospice in May 2023 before being declared unclaimed and donated to the Health Science Center.
The family went to the center in November to demand answers. They left with a box containing Hodges’ remains and a letter indicating her body had been used to train first-year medical students. “UNT Health Science Center and the medical students involved in these types of courses value the selfless sacrifice made by your family,” it read.
But there’s no indication in records obtained by NBC News that Hodges’ body was studied by students in Texas. Instead, another medical school, Touro University, paid the center more than $16,000 to have Hodges’ body and five others shipped to its campus in Great Falls, Montana, in August 2023.
A Touro spokesperson said the school no longer relies on the Health Science Center for bodies needed for student training. Officials at the Health Science Center didn’t answer questions about failures to fully disclose to families how their relatives’ bodies were used.
Willson and her siblings say they have other unanswered questions, including why nobody contacted them when Hodges died. They said they had several family members living in the area who wouldn’t have been difficult to find.
“It was really, really heartbreaking to read the words ‘unclaimed body,’” Willson said. “Because she would have been claimed. She had a family.”
Carl Robert Yenner
Fran Moore has fond memories growing up in New Jersey with her father, Carl Yenner. An Army veteran who worked at a junkyard and later as a hospital janitor, Yenner used to toss a football around the backyard with Moore and her brothers and take them on long day trips through the countryside.
But the siblings struggled to stay in touch with Yenner as he aged. He moved to Texas years ago and didn’t have internet or phone service at his home in Wichita Falls. Yenner died at a Dallas hospital in May 2021 at age 79, but nobody at the hospital or medical examiner contacted his survivors. His son filed a missing person report in Wichita Falls and the family hired a private investigator to try to locate him.
They learned Yenner was dead when an estate lawyer contacted them later in 2021 about selling his home, Moore said.
For years, nobody could tell them where his remains had gone — until Moore got a call this year from an NBC News reporter who’d found Yenner’s name in records obtained from the Health Science Center.
