Albinos Being Murdered in Tanzania for Body Parts

September 22, 2009

For quite some time now, members of the albino population in the East African nation of Tanzania have been being brutally murdered, literally slaughtered, by people who believe that potions and charms made from their body parts, usually created by witch doctors, will make them wealthy and cause their lives to be filled with good luck.  Albinism is a genetic condition that causes the absence of pigmentation to a person's hair, skin, and eyes.  In many parts of Africa, albinos are commonly spurned and singled out because of their condition, often because people believe their condition was caused by a curse having been placed on them by an enemy.  Many of the unfortunate victims have been children, who have been left to die after having their arms and legs crudely cut off, usually with a machete or similar cutting device.  It is a common practice for witch doctors to grind the victim's bones, one of the ingredients of the potions they sell as good luck charms for big bucks.

"They are cutting us up like chickens," one albino said.  "Our biggest fear now is the fear of living.  If you leave work at night as an albino you are unsure of reaching home safely.  When you sleep, you are unsure of waking …."

One sad case involved that of 13-year-old Elizabeth Hussein, who left her home to walk to the village to watch a film about Jesus.  However, she never made it home.  After watching the film, she was attacked along her route by a mob, wielding machetes, who literally hacked her to pieces.

Since 2007, fifty-three known albino children and adults have been murdered in a manner similar to that of Elizabeth Hussein, so that their murderers can obtain money, often thousands of dollars, for their body parts.  In one instance, a man was accused of attempting to sell his 24-year-old wife to a Congolese businessman for $2,000, and in another instance a woman was accused of selling her albino baby daughter to a group of men who butchered her and drank her blood.

"My experience working with victims suggests that the perpetrators are greedy people who want to get rich quick," said a volunteer who works with a British charity.  "In rural areas, people can sacrifice their own child.  In urban areas, educated and rich people will look for somebody else's child."

Because the Tanzanian government seems to be doing very little to stop the senseless slaughter of innocent people for what most westerners would consider ridiculous nonsense, thousands of Tanzanian albino citizens are literally living in a state of "fear and abandonment," according to Peter Ash, the founder of the British Columbia non-profit group, Under the Same Sun, which is dedicated to help bring the slaughter of albinos in Tanzania and other African nations to an end.

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Nurse in Texas Accused of Killing Patients with Bleach Injections

April 08, 2009

Kimberly Clark Saenz, now 35, a nurse at a dialysis center in Lufkin, Texas-located about halfway between Tyler and Beaumont on the east side of the Lone Star State, was arrested on Friday, May 30, 2008 and initially charged with intentionally injecting two patients with bleach at the DaVita Dialysis Center located in that city. 

Two witnesses told police that they had seen Saenz draw bleach into syringes and inject it into the dialysis lines of the patients in question on Monday, April 28, 2008.  Fortunately, both of those patients survived their encounter with the cleaning substance.  Subsequent tests showed the presence of bleach in the syringes and the patients' dialysis tubing. 

Saenz was booked into the Angelina County jail and was charged with two counts of aggravated assault, and bail was initially set at $250,000.  Authorities also closed the dialysis center pending the conclusion of their investigation, and the dialysis center in turn fired Saenz the following day.  The center did not reopen until July 2008.
 
Saenz had been employed at DaVita, a very busy dialysis center, for eight months when a number of patients suddenly and inexplicably began getting sick-with some of them dying-in April 2008.  A number of patients that month were rushed by ambulance from the dialysis center to area hospitals, with many enduring excruciating pain.  Now, a year after the strange and unusual deaths and the numerous emergency calls from the dialysis center, investigators have built a case against Saenz accusing her of deliberately injecting 10 patients with bleach, five of whom died as a result of her unspeakable and atrocious behavior whose lives had hung in the balance anyway due to the illnesses that caused kidney failure for which they thought they were being treated.

"How can someone that sick walk around and appear to be a normal person?" asked a relative of one of the victims. "This many people?  It's blowing my mind.  I mean, we live in Lufkin."

One of the patients who survived was rushed to a local hospital last April when her arm would not stop bleeding.  Saenz had been her nurse during the dialysis treatment, which patients with kidney failure must endure three days a week for several hours each day so that a machine, instead of their kidneys, can cleanse their blood.  The patient also complained of having chest pain, and could not stop vomiting.  Three others, that same day, had also been rushed to a hospital.  All-in-all, there were 34 emergency calls from the dialysis center in April 2008.

Update on No Respect for the Dead-or the Living

October 02, 2008

The Ghouls Who Sold Stolen Body Parts

Back in May of this year I wrote about a group of ghouls that made substantial big bucks by selling stolen body parts (see No Respect for the Dead-or the Living) in a bizarre case that spanned three states.  Now, Louis and Gerald Garzone, ages 66 and 48, respectively, two brothers who ran a Philadelphia funeral home and were deeply involved in the scheme masterminded by New Jersey dentist Michael Mastromarino, pled guilty to a body snatching scam on September 2, 2008.  In their guilty plea, the two brothers admitted to selling as many as 244 corpses to Mastromarino's company, Biomedical Tissue Services, after raking in $245,000 for their efforts in the colossal chop shop rip-off.  A week earlier Mastromarino, already serving 18 to 54 years in prison for his part in the operation that had been ran in New York, pleaded guilty to hundreds of charges that could potentially keep him in prison for the rest of his life.  The Garzone brothers pled guilty to conspiracy, theft, corpse abuse, and welfare fraud, and a partner, James McCafferty, earlier pled guilty to similar charges.

"They couldn't and wouldn't permit the dead to go to their graves with a shred of dignity," District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham said.  "They were motivated by greed.  No penalty is too harsh for these guys for the unbelievably craven nature of what they did."

Relatives of several of the victims sat in court, gasping and crying as they listened to the gruesome details of how their loved ones' bodies were unflinchingly sold to Mastromarino, who sent cutting teams to funeral homes to hack and carve up the bodies to harvest skin, bones, tendons, and so forth, which Mastromarino's company then sold for use in various medical procedures such as knee and hip replacements, dental implants, and other procedures.  Many of the victims had diseases such as hepatitis, cancer, and AIDS at the time of their deaths, and the sales of their diseased body parts, it was feared, had put healthy recipients at risk.  Sometimes all that was left of the bodies, after the hacking and cutting was done, were torsos.

Many of the victims' families were left wondering what had actually become of their loved ones, sadly realizing that they would likely never know whether the ashes they received from cremations were those of their departed family members or whether their deceased relatives had received a proper burial.