A museum in Las Vegas has addressed alarming claims made by a mother who accused them of exhibiting her son’s deceased body.
Kim Erick has claimed that the remains of her son, Chris Todd Erick, were plastinated for an exhibition titled Real Bodies.
Chris passed away in 2012 at the age of 23. He was discovered lifeless in bed at his grandmother’s residence in Midlothian, Texas, approximately 30 miles south of Dallas, where he had been living at that time.
According to CBS News, police informed Kim that her son had died in his sleep due to two heart attacks, which they linked to an undiagnosed heart condition.
While Kim was still engulfed in her sorrow, Chris’s father and grandmother arranged for his unexpected cremation, later giving Kim a necklace that contained what she was told were some of his ashes.
However, Kim had her doubts, which grew stronger when she received a collection of police scene photographs that she claimed revealed a number of concerning physical signs that were not mentioned in the initial report.
“Something very bad happened in that room!” she expressed in a Facebook post.
“They kept Chris in there for two days before he passed away. The medical examiner who conducted the autopsy stated that Chris experienced two distinct heart attacks. In my view, Christopher was tortured during the two days he was confined in his grandmother’s house in Midlothian, Texas. That is where Christopher took his last breath.
A homicide investigation from 2014 ultimately found no evidence of foul play, yet Kim refused to accept the findings of the investigation.
“This isn’t finished. There are far too many questions left unanswered. It’s a cover-up,” she remarked.
Fast forward to 2018, and Kim – who had conducted her own research – attended Real Bodies, a traveling anatomy exhibition famous for showcasing real human cadavers preserved through a method called plastination.
At the exhibition, she encountered a skinned, seated figure referred to as “The Thinker,” and immediately felt she was gazing at her son.
“I recognized him instantly,” she shared with The Sun.
“The pain was indescribable. My words can’t convey how deeply this affected me and my family. I was staring at images of my son’s skinned, butchered body. It’s heart-wrenching.”
The sculpture known as “The Thinker” seemed to show the same skull fracture on the right temple that she had observed in Chris’s medical files.
Moreover, she observed that the shoulder region – where her son had a tattoo – had been meticulously cleaned, which she suspects might have been a calculated effort to hide his identity. The physical similarity was too striking to overlook, and what started as a quest for closure swiftly evolved into a new phase of her investigation.
“I recognized it was him. It was incredibly painful to see. My words fail to convey how deeply this affected me and my family. I was genuinely looking at images of my son’s skinned, mutilated body. It is heart-wrenching,” she expressed, according to the Express.
After making this discovery, Erick initiated a public campaign calling for DNA testing of the specimen. The organizers of the Real Bodies exhibition dismissed her appeal, asserting that the figure had been legally obtained from China and had been exhibited for more than 20 years – well before Chris’s passing.
The owner of the exhibition, Imagine Exhibitions, Inc., was compelled to release a statement to Lead Stories that strongly refuted the claims.
“We offer our condolences to the family, but there is no factual foundation for these accusations. The specimen in question has been on continuous display in Las Vegas since 2004 and cannot be linked to the individual mentioned in these allegations,” they stated.
“All specimens are ethically sourced and biologically unidentifiable.
“We are dedicated to ensuring that all exhibits adhere to the highest ethical and legal standards.”
Alongside their article, Lead Stories included archived images of the specimen from before 2012, seemingly corroborating the museum’s timeline.
They also pointed out that the plastination process can take as long as a year, which makes it unlikely for Chris’s body to have been included in the exhibit so shortly after his passing.
Not long after Kim’s accusations became public, “The Thinker” was discreetly taken out of the Las Vegas exhibit. Kim alleged that it was subsequently moved to Union City, Tennessee, after which she lost all means of tracking its whereabouts.
“Chris was never left behind in life, and I don’t want him to be left behind in death either,” she expressed.
In July 2023, over 300 heaps of unidentified cremated human remains were found in the Nevada desert. Kim is now urging for forensic analysis of those remains to see if any contain plastination compounds that could be linked back to her son’s body.
