After a 21-year-old migrant was murdered, her body parts were harvested as her family fought to bring her home
Aurimar Villegas’ family fought to bring her body home to Venezuela. Instead, it was sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where it was cut up for science.
This article is part of “Dealing the Dead,” a series investigating the use of unclaimed bodies for medical research.
Every day for two seemingly endless months, Arelis Coromoto Villegas repeated the same prayer: From her small, cinder-block home in Venezuela, she asked God to protect her 21-year-old daughter as she trekked thousands of miles through treacherous jungle and desert terrain to reach America’s southern border.
Her prayers were answered in September 2022 when Aurimar Iturriago Villegas crossed safely into the U.S. and continued north with her own prayer — to land a job and eventually earn enough money to help her mother build a new house.
But within two months of her arrival in Texas, Aurimar was dead, shot in a road rage incident near Dallas as she sat in the back seat of a car.
And then, for her mother, the unthinkable somehow became the unimaginable.
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