Wesley Medical Center employee stole and sold human body parts, fetuses. He’ll go to prison
A Wichita man who stole human body parts and fetal corpses when he worked at Wesley Medical Center and sold them to someone he met online was sentenced Thursday to spend 18 months in prison, court records show.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania sought a 60-month sentence for Angelo Pereyra because of the “unusually heinous nature” of the crime, court records show. Pereyra’s attorney had asked for three months in prison.
He pleaded guilty in June to one count of interstate transport of stolen goods; co-defendant Andrew Ensanian of Montgomery, Pennsylvania, pleaded to the same charge the same day. A date for Ensanian’s sentencing has not been set.
Pereyra had met Ensanian on eBay and then communicated on Facebook Messenger. The sales happened between May 2, 2018, and July 17, 2022, while Pererya worked in the pathology department at Wesley.
“Facebook communications establish that Pereyra sold multiple fetal corpses to Ensanian, as well as a partial foot, a human heart, slices of liver, brain, and kidneys, a spleen, a foot, intestine pieces, a testicle, a jar of toes, skin, and fat, dried toes, and miscellaneous other organs ... The transactions totaled over $5,000 in the aggregate,” court records say.
Pereyra, who was 39 when he was charged in May, shipped the body parts through the United States Postal Service. Ensanian, who was 38, paid for them over PayPal, court records show.
Court records say Ensanian “purchased numerous so-called ‘wet specimens’ from Pereyra” but don’t say why he did. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania did not immediately respond to a call for more information.
Wesley spokesperson Dave Stewart said Pereyra was fired immediately when the hospital was alerted by law enforcement last year.
“This disturbing behavior by a former employee is a betrayal of all Wesley Medical Center represents and we appreciate the actions law enforcement took throughout the investigation,” Stewart said in a statement.
Wesley did not respond to additional questions.
As part of the plea, “Pereyra stipulated that the offense involved a loss of $6,500 to $15,000 and agreed to make full restitution,” court records show.
“And Pereyra stole body parts and remains, including, most egregiously, stillborn and miscarried fetal corpses, and sold them for monetary gain,” court records say. “Weighing in his favor is that he admitted his guilt upon being confronted by the FBI and his trafficking was limited to a single customer.”
The two men were charged as part of a multi-year investigation into the trafficking of stolen human remains, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania said in a May 15 news release.
“Multiple defendants have been charged previously in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and three have thus far entered guilty pleas,” the release says. “An additional defendant has been charged and convicted in Arkansas.”
A June story by WBUR in Boston talks at length about the market for human remains and about the charges brought against a former Harvard Medical School morgue manager and his wife after they stole and sold parts of bodies donated in the name of science. The article talks about how the morgue manager’s case was discovered from another case where an Arkansas woman sold body parts to a Pennsylvania man who had also been charged or pleaded guilty in the case.
“There is no federal law against buying or selling human remains and only a patchwork of state laws that go largely unenforced,” the article says.
Pereyra will have to surrender to serve his prison sentence by Feb. 3. After that, he will have to complete 50 hours of community service within the first six months of three years of supervised release, court records show.
