Photo:AP Photo/Jack Dura
AP Photo/Jack Dura
Monarch Waste Technologies (MWT) is suing Sanford Health and its subsidiary Healthcare Environmental Services (HES) for allegedly delivering a human torso to their facilities in March.
“And especially when it’s done under cover of us not knowing. It’s just disturbing,” MWT CEO and co-founder David Cardenas told theAssociated Press.
ABC Newsreported that MWT issued a complaint, claiming that HES “brazenly” hid the alleged human torso in a plastic container in March, which was reportedly discovered four days after an MWT employee “noticed a rotten and putrid smell.”
At that point, MWT reportedly “rejected the remains and notified North Dakota’s Department of Environmental Quality, which is [actively] investigating.”
MWT claimed that a HES employee “deliberately placed and then took photos of disorganized waste to suggest that Monarch had mismanaged medical waste, part of a scheme that would allow the subsidiary to end its contract with the facility,” per the outlet.
“You can clearly see it’s a torso,” Cardenas told ABC News.
He referenced astate lawin which bodies are required to be buried or cremated after they are dissected, the publication reported.
Cardenas also claimed a “lack of training for people at the hospital level” contributed to the alleged incident, per the outlet. “It’s so far from a teaching hospital, it’s ridiculous."
“Put simply, this relationship has turned from a mutually beneficial, environmentally sound solution for the disposal of medical waste, and a potentially positive business relationship, to a made-for-television movie complete with decaying human remains and staged photographs,” the MWT complaint reads, according to ABC News.
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According to MWT’s complaint via ABC News, the remains “simply disappeared at some point,” but Sanford Health’s legal team attests that HES “never removed body parts” from MWT and that the facility “must have disposed of them.”
A Sanford Health spokesperson also told AP News that the lawsuit “demonstrated [MWT’s] inability to perform waste disposal services it had contractually agreed to perform.”
The alleged human torso was such a specimen “used for resident education in hip replacement procedures” and “clearly tagged” as “Human Tissue for Research,” the lawsuit states.
Sanford Health claimed in the lawsuit that “MWT guaranteed it would safely and promptly dispose of” the “routine biological material.”
source: people.com
