New York students find friend’s brain in jar, New Mexico family gets brain in the mail

Seventeen year old Jesse Shipley of Staten Island, New York died in a car crash in 2005. Three months later, on a field trip to the local morgue his classmates were horrified to see his brain, floating in formaldehyde in a glass jar.

Some classmates broke down in tears; others whipped out their cell phones and took pictures. Jesse’s girlfriend was among the group. “There was a case that you could see through, and there were brains in jars and names on the jars. One said ‘head trauma, Shipley, J.,’” recalled one classmate. “The best friend went outside and was flipping out…she started crying and called her mom and said, ‘Mom, Jesse’s brain is here!’”

The teacher cut the visit short. Back at school, students told Jesse’s younger sister, who had survived the car crash that killed her brother, what they had seen. She started screaming and had to be picked up by her parents. The family then attempted to get their son’s brain back. Their priest explained that without a brain, the first burial was considered improper; the body would have to be exhumed and reburied with the brain.

The city doctor who handled Jesse’s case said that separating the brain from the body in a bad car accident was normal operating procedure and that the brain was kept at the morgue because it was still awaiting certain autopsy tests. The family claims it was unaware the brain had been removed. A judge recently ruled that the family has the right to sue the city: “[W]hile the medical examiner has the statutory authority…to remove and retain bodily organs for further examination and testing in connection therewith, he or she also has the mandated obligation…to turn over the decedent’s remains to the next of kin for preservation and proper burial once the legitimate purposes for the retention of those remains have been fulfilled.”

It took a bizarre coincidence for Jesse’s family to get their son’s brain back but earlier this year a New Mexican family simply received a bag in the mail that contained among other things, their mother’s brain. The woman had died months earlier in a car accident. The family is suing the two different funeral homes involved. According to the complaint, the woman’s relatives “smelled a foul odor coming from the bag” they had received. “[We] did absolutely nothing wrong,” claimed the funeral home that shipped the brain.

The woman’s brain went into a bag because “the brain is about 75 percent water” said a spokesperson for the Ohio-based shipping company that transported the brain to New Mexico. “Rather than try to reinsert the brain into a damaged head, it is common practice to ship it inside a bag,” explained the spokesperson. “If we put it back in (the head), it could have been a soggy, leaky mess.”

Of course, the process of taking a brain out of the head has been practiced for millennia. One step in the Egyptian’s mummification process involved making a cut on the left side of the abdomen and removing organs such as the stomach, lungs and liver. These organs were preserved in special jars called canopic jars and were later buried with the mummy. The heart was left in place, as it was believed that it was the center of a person’s being and intelligence. The brain was removed in bits with a hooked instrument that was carefully inserted up through the nostrils. The operation was considered very delicate, done wrong it could easily disfigure the entire face.

During an Egyptian funeral, priests performed a ceremony called the “Opening of the Mouth”. A priest would touch various parts of the mummy with a special instrument, in order to ‘open’ those parts of the body to the senses enjoyed in life that were needed in the afterlife. A dead person would thus be able to speak and eat in the afterlife. That is, assuming the priest remembered to put the jar with the brain back in with the body.