A Las Vegas museum has responded to shocking allegations by a mother who accused them of displaying her son’s dead body.
Kim Erick has insisted the remains of her son, Chris Todd Erick, were plastinated to make up part of an exhibition called Real Bodies.
Chris died in 2012, aged 23. The young man was found deceased in bed at his grandmother’s home in Midlothian, Texas, about 30 miles south of Dallas, where he had been living at the time.
Police informed Kim that her son had died in his sleep after suffering two heart attacks, which they attributed to an undiagnosed heart condition, CBS News reports.
Chris’s father and grandmother arranged for his sudden cremation while Kim was still deep in her grief, later handing Kim a necklace containing what she was told were some of his ashes.
Kim, however, harbored concerns, and they were only intensified when she received a set of police scene photographs that she said showed a series of troubling physical signs never mentioned in the initial report.
“Something very bad happened in that room!” she shared in a Facebook post.
“They had Chris in there for two days before he died. The medical examiner who did the autopsy said Chris suffered two separate heart attacks. In my opinion, Christopher was tortured for the two days he was held in his grandmother’s house in Midlothian Texas. That is where Christopher died.”
A 2014 homicide investigation ultimately produced no evidence of foul play, but Kim did not accept the investigation’s results.
“It’s not over. There’s too many unanswered questions. It’s a cover-up,” she added.
Fast forward to 2018 and Kim – who had undertaken her own research – visited Real Bodies, a touring anatomy exhibition known for displaying real human cadavers preserved through a process called plastination.
There she saw a skinned, seated figure known as “The Thinker”, and instantly believed she was looking at her son.
“I knew it was him,” she told The Sun.
“It was unbelievably painful. My words cannot describe how this shook me and my family to its core. I was looking at pictures of my son’s skinned, butchered body. It is gut-wrenching.”
The figure labeled “The Thinker” appeared to display the same right-temple skull fracture she had seen in Chris’s medical records.
Additionally, she noted that the shoulder area – where her son had a tattoo – had been carved clean, which she believes may have been a deliberate attempt to conceal his identity. The physical resemblance was too specific to ignore, and what began as a search for closure quickly turned into a new chapter in her investigation.
“I knew it was him. It was so unbelievably painful to look at. My words cannot describe how this shook me and my family to its core. I was actually looking at pictures of my son’s skinned, butchered body. It is gut-wrenching,” she said, per the Express.
Following her discovery, Erick launched a public campaign demanding DNA testing of the specimen. Organizers of the Real Bodies exhibition rejected her request, stating that the figure had been legally sourced from China and had been on display for over 20 years – long before Chris’s death.
The exhibition’s owner, Imagine Exhibitions, Inc., was forced to issue a statement to Lead Stories that vehemently denied the allegations.
“We extend our sympathy to the family, but there is no factual basis for these allegations. The referenced specimen has been on continuous display in Las Vegas since 2004 and cannot be associated with the individual named in these claims,” they wrote.
“All specimens are ethically sourced and biologically unidentifiable.
“We remain committed to ensuring that all exhibits meet the highest ethical and legal standards.”
Along with their article, Lead Stories published archived photos of the specimen from earlier than 2012, appearing to support the museum’s timeline.
They also noted that the process of plastination can take up to a year, making it impossible for Chris’s body to have entered the exhibit so soon after his death.
Shortly after Kim’s allegations were made public, “The Thinker” was quietly removed from the Las Vegas exhibit. Kim claimed it was then transferred to Union City, Tennessee, after which she lost all ability to trace its location.
“Chris was never abandoned in life, and I don’t want him abandoned in death either,” she said.
In July 2023, more than 300 piles of unidentified cremated human remains were discovered in the Nevada desert. Kim is now calling for forensic testing of those remains to determine whether any contain traces of plastination compounds that could link back to her son’s body.