TN TN - MCEWEN, human heart found in salt pile - adult male - 16 Dec 2022

[airportwoman]

I'm wondering if some sort of medical context is behind it. Like some place being incredibly irresponsible with their transplants, just spitballin.

Doubtful!

I heard a story a while back about a human heart being found in the cargo hold of a plane at the airport in Des Moines, and at first, I thought it was just, like, laying out or something, but it was actually being transported for some kind of research, and properly packaged.

 

[bombardier]

Yea that’s too far. My guess is the salt mine unearthed some older remains—may end up being an archaeological find.

I don't know anything about construction and roadwork but the salt must get processed and refined somewhat before it gets used for melting ice (which is what I'm assuming it is used for here?), right? I'm guessing it might come from cheaper sources overseas and goes through some kind of big filter/sieve-type machines that get rid of dirt and debris. I am kind of doubting that something as big as an organ could remain in the salt through that process?

 

[bombardier]

Would like to know how clean the cuts to the arteries/veins were. Were they separated cleanly/cut close to the heart (which may indicate a medical specimen) or were the ends ragged (which may indicate foul play or animal activity)?

 

[iamshadow21]

Would like to know how clean the cuts to the arteries/veins were. Were they separated cleanly/cut close to the heart (which may indicate a medical specimen) or were the ends ragged (which may indicate foul play or animal activity)?

Yeah, the benefit of the salt is that it will have preserved it, and they should be able to see that still.

 

[Springrain]

A silly question but here we go. How is road salt chemically different from normal salt, and how does (if at all) the preservation of the heart in the road salt differ from normal salt.

 

[5W's]

Moo...where do they get the salt from? The heart could of come from where they load salt from..moo

The only thing with that I can envision is that the heart would be damaged and mangled up IMO because of the weight of the salt itself. Maybe even have some gashes in it due to being moved around in the salt. So I don't think it was from a load.

 

[5W's]

Good point! I wonder, did the heart have any medical conditions?

But then why not just throw it in garbage or somewhere discreet instead of somewhere it will be seen.

 

[5W's]

I wonder if the DNA is still useful for identifying the victim. @othram ?

I hope so.

 

[Oakie]

I've been reading stuff on WS for many years....this is the craziest headline I've read here. Wow.

 

[iamshadow21]

I hope so.

They've managed to get DNA from Egyptian mummies thousands of years old, and they were preserved using natron, a form of salt. Now, I know that's aDNA, but they just used aDNA to ID Joseph Zarelli, so they obviously can use the technique on much more recent remains. So, I don't think the salt is an insurmountable problem.

 

[GRT]

The fact that this was a single body part ( & the heart) placed in salt ( to preserve it) suggests to me the intention was for this to be found by someone……a warning perhaps

I thought that. Or, perhaps a hoax. Years ago some intestines were taken from a human medical cadavar and put in bucket or pail on the campus of KSU. It was kept pretty quiet and I only knew because I had a kid going to college there. Turned out to be a prank, but I don't think they ever pinpointed who did it.

I hope that's all this is, but it's pretty gruesome and scary to think it's likely something much worse.

 

[raja]

I have to admit this is a strange one.

 

[charminglane]

"There are rock salt mines all over the world, even in the United States. Believe it or not, one of the biggest mines in the country is found underneath the city of Detroit."

The Interesting History of Road Salt - Cope Company Salt

We've been using road salt to de-ice roads for as long as we can remember, but how did it come to be? Read more on the history of road salt here.

www.copecompany.com

Road Salt: Where Does It Come From, Where Does It Go?

An onslaught of snow means an onslaught of road salt. But where does the salt come from, and how do we get our hands on so much of it here in the Northeast? Where does all of it go after the winter thaws?

www.boston.com

Wondering where the salt might have originated, domestic or foreign.

 

[cutter99]

DNA was used to determine that the heart is human. If there was DNA for that, I would think there would be DNA for identification if possible.

 

[Laughing]

"There are rock salt mines all over the world, even in the United States. Believe it or not, one of the biggest mines in the country is found underneath the city of Detroit."

The Interesting History of Road Salt - Cope Company Salt

We've been using road salt to de-ice roads for as long as we can remember, but how did it come to be? Read more on the history of road salt here.

www.copecompany.com

Road Salt: Where Does It Come From, Where Does It Go?

An onslaught of snow means an onslaught of road salt. But where does the salt come from, and how do we get our hands on so much of it here in the Northeast? Where does all of it go after the winter thaws?

www.boston.com

Wondering where the salt might have originated, domestic or foreign.

Also in Kansas:

Salt mining | GeoKansas

geokansas.ku.edu

 

[tarabull]

FWIW, this news troubles me greatly knowing salt is the primary ingredient in curing/preserving meat.

 

[IceIce9]

"There are rock salt mines all over the world, even in the United States. Believe it or not, one of the biggest mines in the country is found underneath the city of Detroit."

The Interesting History of Road Salt - Cope Company Salt

We've been using road salt to de-ice roads for as long as we can remember, but how did it come to be? Read more on the history of road salt here.

www.copecompany.com

Road Salt: Where Does It Come From, Where Does It Go?

An onslaught of snow means an onslaught of road salt. But where does the salt come from, and how do we get our hands on so much of it here in the Northeast? Where does all of it go after the winter thaws?

www.boston.com

Wondering where the salt might have originated, domestic or foreign.

Surely there would be a record of where it was shipped from

 

[bombardier]

I'm also considering that this was a hoax/prank like @GRT suggested, or a threat (gang-related?) that was meant for a specific person who worked at the Department of Transportation. There's a ton of possibilities here but they all seem equally unlikely IMO

 

[scapa]

This sounds by far the most likely. When I dissected cadavers, we were solemnly lectured on professionalism and the privilege of having a person donate their body for us to learn. My classmates and I took it very seriously, but I could imagine an unprofessional prankster gaining access to a heart and it ending up smuggled out of the lab or morgue. I think that’s far more likely than murder with only a heart found? But that’s only my opinion, who knows?

Yes, that was my experience also. And I can't think of a situation where an organ might have easily gone missing during or after one of our sessions. There are logs, tags, photos, recordings and strict protocols for waste. And then harvested from and / or transported to a salt pile?

My FiL, who is a retired surgeon, has talked a few times about pranks at his uni but these involved old wheezes like a jaunty cap set on a skull in an anatomy theatre, not making away with stolen organs. This is bizarre.

I expect that they'll run tests on the tissue for embalming fluids, etc. Hopefully this is less creepy than it sounds.

 

[RememberingRyan]

MOO: The heart had to have been introduced to the salt only after the salt had already been mined AND processed - otherwise, the heart would have been broken down into small bits during the process of the salt being ground up - if the heart was intact, it makes no sense that it would have come from the salt mine.

Salt is not retrieved from the road and the salt delivery system does not pick up rocks or other debris from the road - it isn't like a sweeper... it's a swirling scatter device that hangs more than a foot off the ground.

Medical waste does not get accidentally or lazily disposed of at a salt processing plant or in a salt transport truck or in a salt storage location. Taking a heart to any of those places is a purposeful action with an intention.

I know of no scavengers nor predators (besides humans) that bury meat in salt. Presuming this was an intact heart that was not attached to other organs or remnants of a torso, it also seems pretty improbable that someone died of an accident and ended up with animals scavenging off every part of them except for the heart... though this seems like the only non-nefarious possibility to me at the moment, that someone at some salt processing plant somewhere died and was then dismembered by animals leaving only some small pieces to be redistributed to other salt storage facilities...possible, I suppose, but extremely unlikely.

The only thing that sounds probable to me given what I know of animals and humans is that somewhere out there we have a human who was excited by the idea of preserving a piece of another human for their own morbid thrills, be that thrill ritualistic, a prank, or intimidation. Whether that heart came from a victim who was murdered or whether the remains were harvested from a cadaver who died of something less sinister, I can't really come up with many scenarios that don't culminate in a human being deliberately burying a human heart in salt. Hopefully they'll be able to utilize the DNA to match this to a family somewhere and get answers. Without that I cannot imagine this one being solved anytime soon, unless more human parts start showing up in salt piles.