Austin funeral home owner charged with abusing corpses, fabricating death certificates
An Austin funeral home owner has been charged with multiple felonies after police accused her of tampering with bodies and fabricating death certificates.
Adeline Bui was arrested and charged with abuse of a corpse and tampering with a government record. Her Travis County Jail records and police affidavits became public Wednesday. She could not immediately be reached for comment.
Bui's arrest comes after police seized cremated remains, funeral documents, digital devices, anatomical specimens, and tools bearing suspected human tissue from Capital Mortuary Services in Northeast Austin earlier this month, as detailed across three coordinated warrants.
Police accuse Bui of falsifying death certificates and conducting unauthorized experiments on human remains, according to the search warrants.
A former employee of the funeral home shared screenshots with investigators from a message thread named 'Freedom Art Experiment' that contained evidence of severed arms being used for chemical testing with embalming fluids.
The message thread shows several pictures of severed arms going through various states of decomposition with messages detailing experimental procedures, the warrant said. Bui told an Austin police detective that these arms were evaluated over the course of months.
Bui admitted to police that she conducted experiments to study the effects of embalming fluid on up to 15 bodies, including tests on heads, arms and spines, according to the warrant. Bui claims the experiments were authorized by the client and that they were updating the company on the experiments.
Scott Bingaman, executive director of the Texas Funeral Commission, told police that Capital Mortuary Services was never approved to conduct experiments on bodies and had not applied for the required status as a non-transplant anatomical donation program. The commission, which licenses and regulates funeral industry professionals and facilities, must approve such programs under state law.
According to the warrants, Bui also fraudulently used the name of a man who previously worked at the funeral home as a crematory operator, driver and embalmer to certify death certificates.
Bui acknowledged that she used the man's name on notarized Death Certificate Amendment Forms, according to the warrants. Bui said the man never completed any paperwork at Capital Mortuary Services and that he wouldn't even know how to. When asked by police about using his name, Bui said she "had to put someone's name in there" and that Tuttle's name was still available as a "drop down" option on the form.
Bui also owns and operates Eternal Peace Funeral and Cremation Services in Round Rock, where police also executed a warrant as part of the investigation.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Austin funeral home owner charged with abusing corpses
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