The murdered woman’s mother was horrified to learn that parts of her daughter’s body were being sold

After an NBC News investigation revealed the names of hundreds of unclaimed bodies in the Dallas area sent to a local university for scientific research, a Venezuelan mother’s grief deepened: She says her grief continues because she has lost the chance to bury her daughter properly.

NBC News’ published an investigative story this week about Arelis Coromoto Villegas and her desperate, years-long attempt to repatriate her murdered daughter’s body back home to Venezuela after her daughter’s death in October 2022.

Her daughter, 21-year-old Aurimar Iturriago Villegas, was killed during a violent incident on the road when a man fired a gun into the rear window of a car she was riding in, hitting her in the head.

Aurimar, who was an American migrant, had just arrived in Texas about a month earlier after briefly living in Colombia. She later turned out to be one of hundreds of people Texas officials described as being unclaimed after their deaths: This triggered a process in which their bodies were sent to the University of North Texas Health Science Center, where the bodies were then cut up by students or sold to private companies that use the organs to help develop products or train their own private medical staff. NBC News discovered the practice as part of a broad survey into unclaimed bodies earlier this year.

NBC released the names of hundreds of deceased people whose bodies were sent to the science center. Aurimar’s body was one that had been sold to private companies, which her family only discovered when they read NBC’s story. This was more than two years into their exhaustive efforts to try to ensure that Aurimar’s body – which they believed was still intact in the United States – was sent back to Venezuela for a funeral.

“It’s a very painful thing,” Arelis, the mother, told NBC News during an interview from her home in Venezuela. “She is not a little animal to be slaughtered, to be cut up.”

According to Telemundowho worked with NBC on the larger report, Aurimar’s family had raised the thousands of dollars they believed they needed to have her body sent to Venezuela for a proper burial.

But Arelis told NBC News that she and her family stopped receiving communications from Dallas County officials and were shocked to see their loved one’s name listed in NBC News’ report.

“Every night I say, ‘My God, why did you take my daughter?'” Arelis told the broadcast. “I do not accept my daughter’s death. Not yet.”

Aurimar “always fought for a better future” for her family, her brother Yohandry Martinez Villegas told NBC News, which documented how the Venezuelan woman left school when she was 16 to start working odd jobs to earn money for his family. After moving to Colombia and working a delivery job, Aurimar told her family that she and six other migrants planned to make the treacherous journey to the United States.

After a journey of several months, Aurimar reached Texas in September 2022, according to NBC News, and turned herself in to border officials, who subsequently released her to the United States, where she stayed with friends in the Dallas area. She was killed a month later.

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NBC News discovered that Aurimar’s torso was one of 18 from unidentified bodies sold to a private biotech company, Relievant Medsystems, which trained medical staff in back procedures. Her leg was cut open by students at North Texas’ Health Science Center, an investigation revealed, and the ashes of her other remains were delivered to the Callas County medical examiner, NBC discovered.

The business said Arelis was “outraged” after discovering what happened to her daughter’s body, but she now feels there is little chance she will retrieve her daughter’s remains because, she says, communication with local officials continue to be broken and rare.

“Although it hurts my soul,” Arelis told NBC. “I think I’m going to throw in the towel and leave things in God’s hands.”