The alleged human remains were discovered four days later after an employee “noticed a rotten and putrid smell”
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.
In a lawsuit filed by the medical waste facility in Valley City, North Dakota, on Monday, MWT claims that HES performed “surreptitious activities,” as the site reportedly “delivered unauthorized waste, including hazardous waste and what it alleges to be a human torso.”
“And especially when it’s done under cover of us not knowing. It’s just disturbing,” MWT CEO and co-founder David Cardenas told the Associated Press.
ABC News reported 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 a state law in 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.
Bismarck, North Dakota, news outlet KFYR-TV reported that Sanford Health responded to the allegations on Thursday.
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.”
Sanford Media Relations manager Paul Heinert claimed to KFYR-TV that “the specimen was in Monarch’s possession when they locked Sanford out of their facilities.”
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.”
According to the lawsuit, Sanford Health “is a Level I trauma center with robust research and academic mission,” which includes teaching its staff to perform procedures on medical specimens donated by people after they have died via licensed companies.
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.”
But by rejecting the specimen, the company claimed that “MWT’s failure to not only perform its contracted duty, but to actually twist its failures into a public allegation of wrongdoing to smear Sanford, starkly demonstrates the bad faith with which MWT has approached this relationship.”