Slain Woman's Mom Tried in Vain for Years to Recover Daughter's Body. Then She Learned Parts Had Been Sold

Mar. 15, 2025

Aurimar Iturriago Villegas.Photo:Aurimar Iturriago Villegas/Facebook

Aurimar Iturriago Villegas/Facebook

After an NBC News investigation revealed the names of hundreds of unclaimed bodies in the Dallas area sent to a local university for scientific research, one Venezuelan mother’s grief deepened: She says her mourning continues because she’s lost the chance to properly bury her daughter.

NBC News’published an investigative storythis week about Arelis Coromoto Villegas and her desperate, years-long attempts to repatriate her murdered daughter’s body back home to Venezuela after her daughter’s death in October 2022.

Her daughter, 21-year-old Aurimar Iturriago Villegas, was killed during a violent road rage incident that fall when a man fired a gun into the rear window of a car she was riding in, striking her in the head.

NBC published the names of hundreds of deceased people whose bodies were sent to the science center. Aurimar’s body was one that had been sold to private companies, which her family only discovered when they read NBC’s story. This was more than two years into their exhaustive efforts to try to ensure that Aurimar’s body — which they believed was still intact in the U.S. — sent back to Venezuela for a funeral.

“It’s a very painful thing,” Arelis, the mother, told NBC News during an interview from her home in Venezuela. “She’s not a little animal to be butchered, to be cut up.”

Aurimar Iturriago Villegas.Aurimar Iturriago Villegas/Facebook

According toTelemundo, which worked in partnership with NBC on the larger report, Aurimar’s family had raised thousands of dollars they believed they needed to have her body sent to Venezuela for a proper burial.

But Arelis told NBC News she and her family stopped receiving communications from Dallas County officials and were shocked to see their loved one’s name listed in NBC News’ report.

“Every night I say, ‘My God, why did you take my daughter?’” Arelis told the outlet. “I don’t accept my daughter’s death. Not yet.”

Aurimar was always “fighting for a better future” for her family, her brother Yohandry Martinez Villegas told NBC News, which documented how the Venezuelan woman left school when she was 16 to begin working odd jobs to make money for her family. After moving to Colombia and working a delivery job, Aurimar told her family she and six other migrants were planning to make the treacherous journey to the United States.

After a several month trip, according to NBC News, Aurimar made it to Texas in September 2022, turning herself in to border authorities who subsequently released her into the U.S. where she stayed with friends in the Dallas area. She was killed a month later.

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The outlet said Arelis was “outraged” after discovering what happened to her daughter’s body but she now feels there’s little chance she’ll retrieve her daughter’s remains because, she says, communication with local officials continues to be fractured and infrequent.

“Even though it hurts my soul,” Arelis told NBC. “I think I’m going to throw in the towel and leave things in God’s hands.”

source: people.com