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How a rogue body broker got away with it
Recycled parts
Guyett also pursued a related business — recycling titanium screws, implants and pins left over after cremation. Randy Bright, owner of Covenant Cremation Service in Wake Forest, N.C., was among those who let Guyett take these materials.
“There’s no money exchanged at all,” Bright said. “What are we going to do with them? We had no idea. It didn’t cost the family or anything for that. And we didn’t really have a way to dispose of them. ... It sounded like a good situation.”
When Guyett proposed expanding the recycling business through the Cremation Association of North America, he made business claims that have come into question. He gave Jack Springer, the group’s executive director, a list of 10 mortuaries that he said he dealt with regularly. Reached by AP, at least two — Miller-Jones of Hemet, Calif., and Serenity Mortuary Service of Phoenix — said they didn’t know Guyett or his company.
“He had never done anything with us,” said Timothy Hassett, owner of Serenity.
Likewise, Mike McGhee, general manager of Forbis & Dick Funeral Service in Greensboro, N.C., said he had no idea why Guyett listed his company as one of his business affiliates.
“I have been here for 27 years, and I can assure you that our firm has never had any dealings with this gentleman,” he said. “This is abhorrent and repugnant to me,” McGhee said of the concerns about Guyett. “I intend to find out why he used our name.”
Guyett even claimed a relationship with the federal government, telling the seminar crowd: “Over the last six months, we’ve recovered over 1,000 tissue specimens that were sent to the National Cancer Institute for research. Eighty percent of those donors were also accepted for transplant allografts.”
A cancer institute spokeswoman said neither Guyett nor his firm has been a supplier.
The FDA closed Guyett’s Raleigh operations down on Aug. 18.
Altered paperwork
According to the FDA’s order, Guyett altered paperwork on the health history and age of at least five dead donors, eliminating mention of factors like cancer and drug use that might make them ineligible.
In a brief interview last week at his two-story brick home in Wakefield Plantation, a new and upscale subdivision in north Raleigh, the goateed, slightly balding Guyett said the FDA did not force him out, and that he had done nothing wrong.
“I closed on my own free will to pursue other ventures. I’m out of the tissue recovery business as of December,” Guyett said.
Yet as recently as three months ago, Guyett repeated requests to David Campbell, owner of Cape Fear Crematory in Stedman, N.C., to use his facility on the outskirts of the Fort Bragg Army base to harvest tissues and medical implants. As he had in the past, Campbell declined, and said, “I’m kind of glad from what I’m seeing in the press these days.”
The Guyett case follows that of Biomedical Tissue Services, a now-defunct New Jersey company accused of plundering corpses for tissue without families’ permission, including the body of “Masterpiece Theatre” host Alistair Cooke. A former dentist, Michael Mastromarino, and three others face charges in that scandal.
Under-the-radar brokers
That company, like Guyett’s, was not accredited by the tissue bank association. There are more under-the-radar tissue brokers out there than the FDA would like to think, said Areta Kupchyk, a former FDA attorney who helped write tissue regulations and consults with tissue companies.
“He’s probably an example of many small-timers around the country,” Kupchyk said of Guyett. “They’re the ones that are the most dangerous. They get a small niche and they can cause a lot of trouble.”
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