Their Granddad, a World War 2 veteran, was autopsied before a live audience in a Marriott ballroom. Folks paid $500 apiece to watch.
A family who thought their grandfather’s body would be donated to science learned that he ended up as a sideshow for an “oddities” event, dissected in front of a paying public audience in the middle of a hotel event room across the country.
The body of David Saunders, a 97-year-old WWII veteran, ended up in the ballroom of a Portland, Oregon Marriott hotel, where people paid up to $500 for tickets to see a live autopsy in person.
The family discovered what happened to their grandfathers’ body only after an undercover journalist from Seattle news outlet KING5 attended the October event and spotted the man’s name on a tag hanging from his body.
Mike Clark, a funeral director in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, handled Saunders’ body after his death. Clark told KING5 that he passed the body to a private company called Med Ed Labs, which claimed to solicit corpses for medical research purposes. That company then sold the body to Jeremy Ciliberto, the founder of DeathScience.org, who partnered with the Oddities and Curiosities Expo to hold the cadaver autopsy event. Ciliberto said he bought bodies for this event for more than $10,000.
“We truly have something weird for everyone at our shows,” the expo’s website says. “All items you see at our shows are legal to own and sustainably sourced.”
No mention of ghoulish fraud and profiteering, I guess. Though the folks who popped for $500 apiece to watch are at least as creepy as the slimeballs running the show.
Eideard 
‘Where’s the body?’ Widow of man dissected at autopsy event wants remains back
DeathScience.org, which hosted the live autopsy, recommends attendees get tested for COVID-19 as a precaution. The man whose body was dissected died of the disease. https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/david-saunders-portland-autopsy-event-widow-wants-remains/281-5f7ad657-f3fb-443b-b022-d8039edecc67
After Dr. Colin Henderson cut into 98-year-old David Saunders chest cavity, head, and limbs, and removed organs like the brain, ticket holders to the pay-per-view event were invited to closely inspect the corpse https://allthatsinteresting.com/david-saunders
(Nov. 21, 2002): In a former brewery in east London on Wednesday night, the television cameras turned, a paying audience squirmed and gaped and Britain’s first public autopsy in 170 years since the days when the practice was banned to discourage body-snatching was under way. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/21/international/public-autopsy-leaves-londoners-squirming-and-gaping.html