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Image by Getty / Futurism
Down in the wild and wonderful world of Florida, the owner of an oddities shop has been arrested for selling human remains on Facebook Marketplace.
As USA Today reports, 52-year-old Kymberlee Schopper has been charged with the illegal purchase and sale of human bones on Zuckerberg’s commerce platform.
At the end of 2023, police in the Daytona Beach suburb of Orange City received a tip that Wicked Wonderland, Schopper’s shop that also advertises pet taxidermy and animal “mummification” on its website, was selling various human bones and skeletal fragments.
From a $35 human rib to a $600 partial human skull, the store’s wares were valued at $850 in the tip authorities received. When they spoke with Schopper’s daughter and co-owner, 33-year-old Ashley Lelesi, the proprietress copped to the sale without hesitation. According to the affidavit viewed by USA Today, the mother-daughter team was unaware that selling bones was illegal in the state of Florida — one of only eight American states that broadly bans the practice, though dozens of other states have conditional prohibitions on it.
Lelesi told the cops that she and Schopper had purchased the bone lot from various private sellers. She provided police with five of the six specimens and told them the shop had already sold a piece of skull fragment for $50, even providing receipts for the purchase and sale of all the bones in question.
Later, both mother and daughter met with police and had, at that point, changed their tune. According to the affidavit, Schopper told authorities that the bones were “educational models,” which would place them in a legal loophole within the state’s ban on the sale of human remains.
Apparently, the cops didn’t buy it, and Schopper was charged with purchasing or selling human organs and tissue, a second-degree felony that can carry up to a 15-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. It does not appear that Lelesi was charged with any crime, and the mother posted her $7,500 bail following her arrest.
Nine years ago and 650 miles away, a similar debacle unfolded in New Orleans after Ender Darling, a member of a Facebook group called “Queer Witch Collective,” told their fellow magic practitioners that they had some local bones for sale. Per their initial post, Darling had taken to procuring bones from a “poor man’s graveyard” near their house that would rise to the surface during rainstorms in the notoriously stormy city — and would happily sell them to their fellow witches for the cost of shipping.
The Queer Witch Collective exploded in fury at Darling for not only collecting bones without consent from the families of the deceased, but also turning a profit off them. Though Darling’s ethnic background remains something of a mystery, they are decidedly not Black, and as speculation raged about which graveyard they got the bones from, many commentators on the increasingly-fiery — and now mythical — thread pointed out that the majority of people buried in a New Orleans potter’s field would be Black.
After this “bones discourse” spread to Tumblr and became a meme, people in power caught wind of the “Boneghazi” debacle. After being tailed by police, Darling was arrested in Florida — where else? — and charged with burglary and trafficking human remains, though those charges were minimized after they pleaded guilty.
As the investigation unfolded, Louisiana enacted its Human Remains Protection and Control Act, which called for harsher punishment for the trafficking of bones and other body parts and brought it into the fold of states that criminalize the practice.
Though it’s entirely plausible that the owners of Wicked Wonderland were unaware that selling bones is illegal in Florida, they could have done a quick Google search about what happened to the last person who got caught doing it — and saved themselves a world of trouble.
More on selling parts: Shop Scrutinized for Selling Human Bodies Out of a Strip Mall
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