Museum issues response after mom claims she saw sons skinned body displayed!

A Las Vegas museum is pushing back against a Texas mother who has spent more than a decade convinced that one of its plastinated human bodies is actually her son. The dispute isn’t new, but it refuses to die. What began as a mother’s unease after an unexpected death has grown into a long, painful pursuit of answers she has never believed she received.

Kim Erick lost her son, 23-year-old Chris Todd Erick, in 2012. According to police, Chris suffered two sudden heart attacks caused by an undiagnosed heart condition while staying at his grandmother’s home in Midlothian, Texas. His father and grandmother moved quickly with arrangements, choosing cremation. Kim wasn’t part of the decision. She was handed a necklace that supposedly contained some of his ashes, but even in her shock, something about the whole situation scraped at her instincts. The timeline felt rushed. The explanations felt thin. And nothing about the official version matched what she believed she knew about Chris—his health, his habits, the way he lived.

Her doubts deepened after she saw the police photos taken after his death. She swore she saw bruising on his limbs, patterns she thought looked like restraints or rough handling. She pushed authorities for answers. Eventually, in 2014, they reopened the case as a homicide investigation. Detectives reviewed everything. Their conclusion didn’t budge: no sign of foul play. The bruising, they said, lined up with normal postmortem changes and the physical efforts made during attempts to save him. The cause of death stood—natural causes.

But Kim never accepted that. Grief doesn’t always fold neatly into official reports, and unanswered questions rarely fade on their own.

Years later, the whole nightmare reignited. In 2018, Kim visited Real Bodies, a Las Vegas anatomy exhibit filled with plastinated cadavers preserved and displayed for education. One of the showcased figures—a fully skinned, seated male known as “The Thinker”—hit her like a punch to the chest. She became certain she was looking at her son.

It wasn’t just the posture or a vague feeling. She believed this body carried distinct markers. She said the skull had a fracture identical to one in Chris’s medical history. She noticed that an area where Chris had a tattoo appeared deliberately removed. She sensed similarities in bone structure and proportions she knew as well as a mother knows her child’s face. To her, this wasn’t an eerie coincidence. This was Chris.

She demanded DNA testing. She wanted a straight answer. Instead, the museum shut the door immediately. They claimed the body was obtained legally in China, years before Chris was even born, and had toured since 2004. They pointed to documentation and photographs they said proved its origin. In their view, her request wasn’t necessary because the theory made no sense.

That refusal didn’t calm her. It did the opposite. In her eyes, if the museum was truly confident, why deny a simple scientific test? Why not settle the matter conclusively? She didn’t trust their timeline because plastination can take years. And she didn’t trust their paperwork because donated bodies from China have long histories of controversy, opaque sourcing, and inconsistent chain-of-custody records. Every time she pressed for transparency, she felt more shut out.

Then the exhibit piece disappeared. “The Thinker” was quietly removed from the Las Vegas display. The museum said it was a routine rotation. Kim didn’t buy that. The timing felt too clean, too fast, too convenient. She began trying to track where the figure went next and hit dead ends. To her, it felt like the moment she started raising real questions, the body was whisked away to avoid further scrutiny.

Nothing was proven, but it added more fuel to her fear.

In 2023, a new twist kept her obsession alive. Hundreds of unidentified cremated remains were found abandoned in the Nevada desert, believed to have come from a mortuary mishandling bodies. While unrelated, the discovery jolted her. If ashes could be mislabeled, misplaced, or dumped, she argued, why couldn’t a cadaver be misdirected or misidentified before ending up in a museum? To her, it was evidence—not of her son’s fate, but of how chaotic and flawed human-remains systems can be.

Throughout all of this, the museum has stayed firm: her claim isn’t grounded in reality. They cite records showing the body came through Chinese medical donation programs years before Chris’s death. They point to old photographs documenting its plastination process. They reference the science—how long preservation takes, how many steps are involved, and why the timeline doesn’t match. Investigators repeat that Chris’s death was thoroughly examined. No foul play. No missing remains. No link between Texas and a Las Vegas exhibit.

But grief doesn’t bend around institutional certainty. Kim keeps going because she never felt included in the most critical decisions about her son. She didn’t approve the cremation. She didn’t see the body before it was gone. She was given a necklace instead of an urn. She saw photos she couldn’t forget. Then she saw a plastinated figure that looked too much like him for comfort.

For her, the possibility—no matter how small others say it is—can’t be ignored. She has said more than once that any mother would fight if she believed she recognized her child in a display case.

To the museum, this is simply a heartbreaking misunderstanding. They see a mother connecting details that don’t align, driven by the kind of pain that refuses to sit quietly. They stand by their documentation. They insist the removal of “The Thinker” was routine, not reactive. They don’t dismiss her grief, but they reject her conclusions.

But Kim hasn’t slowed down. She reaches out to journalists. She contacts investigators. She follows every lead she can find. It’s not about attention. It’s about a story she never believed from the start, a series of decisions made without her, and a decade of questions with no satisfying answers.

At this point, the conflict is locked in place—official records on one side, a mother’s conviction on the other. The museum believes the case is closed. The police consider it settled. Kim believes neither has ever truly listened.

Her story is raw, tangled, and unresolved. Closure isn’t something she was given. It’s something she’s still chasing, and after more than ten years of pushing for the truth as she sees it, she isn’t backing off.