Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe, Susan Carroll, Liz Kreutz, Anagilmara Vilchez, Tyler Kingkade, NBC News and Noticias Telemundo

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In a year-long investigation, NBC News and Noticias Telemundo discovered that Texas officials failed to conduct diligent searches for family members of some of the hundreds of corpses sent from two large Texas medical examiners’ offices to the University of North Texas Health Science Center. The corpses were supposedly people with no family to claim their bodies. In fact, NBC and Noticias Telemundo found that some of the bodies belonged to people whose families had been actively searching for them.

NBC and Noticias Telemundo grappled with privacy concerns but ultimately opted to publish a list of more than 1,800 people whose bodies had been sent to the health center. About two dozen families subsequently contacted the news outlets to say their loved ones were on the list. In about a dozen other cases, it fell to journalists from NBC and Noticias Telemundo to inform families that their loved ones had died and that their corpses had been dissected by the health center or passed along to the private companies it supplied with bodies. NBC and Noticias Telemundo disclosed their investigation to the University of North Texas Health Science Center early in the reporting process. The center at first defended its practices, but when journalists sent a detailed query after months of reporting, the center announced that it was suspending its body donation program and firing the executive who had run it.