Two Florida women have been arrested and charged with selling human remains for multiple years on their shop’s Facebook page.Orange City Police Department arrested 52-year-old Kymberlee Schopper and Ashley Lelesi in a case ‘not seen in the 17 years’ Captain Sherif El-Shami had worked at the department.
Schopper owns the store Wicked Wonderland, which first gained interest from police in December 2023, when a tip was received about the shop selling ‘human bones’.The store’s Facebook marketplace allegedly advertised ‘various’ human bones for sale, ranging in price from $90 to $600, according to the affidavit.
Lelesi co-owns the shop, and told police the bones were from ‘private sellers’ and said she had documentation for them, but ‘could not provide it’, also adding they were ‘educational models’.
Police later found the bone fragments belonged to one of ‘archaeological origin’, and the other of ‘anatomical origin’, prompting Schopper’s arrest.
It’s unclear if Lelesi was also arrested, but the shop’s Facebook page posted: ‘Wicked Wonderland is currently temporarily closed due to dedicating our time to the care of a beloved family member in their final moments.
‘While there may be a whirlwind of misguiding information and horrendous assumptions and opinions, we’re choosing to focus on what we always have: Life, love, death and Family.’
In 2020, Russian police launched an investigation after human bones, including a skull, were mixed with sand to de-ice a road in Siberia.
Locals spotted the remains mixed in with sand laid on Partisan Alymov Street in the town of Kirensk, in the south-eastern region of Irkutsk.
It’s thought they could belong to victims of the Russian Civil War, in which an alliance of anti-communist forces tried to topple Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik dictatorship from 1917 until the early 1920s.
The region’s Interior Ministry began looking into the matter after people posted pictures of the gruesome find on social media and soon confirmed the bones were human.
Russian news agency Interfax cited an anonymous source familiar with the matter as saying that the sand had been extracted from a site near an old cemetery.
The individual said: ‘The skull is probably about 100 years old. Experts are now studying it and the other bones to determine their exact age and possible origin.’
Local politician Nikolai Trufanov said at the time: ‘I can’t even describe how horrendous this is. I hope the law-enforcement agencies will investigate this as quickly as possible.’
