[INDYSTAR] The details sound like the plot of a bad horror movie: Desperate for cash, a young man breaks into a warehouse to steal the brains of dead mental patients, and the body parts are later sold on eBay.This story line, however, is real.
Authorities say David Charles, a 21-year-old Indianapolis resident, is accused of breaking into the Indiana Medical History Museum multiple times this year and stealing jars of human brain tissue and other preserved material. A tipster who paid hundreds of dollars on the online auction site helped bring the organ entrepreneurism to an end.
The museum, 3045 W. Vermont St., is the site of the former Central State Hospital, which served patients with psychiatric and mental disorders from 1848 to 1994. Indianapolis police had investigated several break-ins at the museum's storage facility before a California phone call led police to Charles.
A San Diego man who had bought six jars of human brain tissue off eBay for $600, plus $70 shipping, called the museum after noticing labels on the containers and suspecting some kind of skulduggery, according to court documents.
Detectives with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department used that tip to trace the transactions, eventually speaking to the eBay seller who provided the brain tissue to the San Diego man. That seller had obtained the brain matter from Charles, police said.