TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas man already serving a federal prison sentence for running an illegal autopsy scheme also has been sentenced to serve an additional year in jail on state criminal charges.
The Kansas attorney general's office announced Wednesday that Shawn Parcells, 43, was ordered by a state-court judge to serve his 12-month sentence in Wabaunsee County, west of Topeka, after he finishes a sentence of nearly six years in federal prison on a wire fraud charge.
Parcells is housed in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, after pleading guilty in May to the wire fraud charge. Parcells also has been banned from doing business in Kansas.
Parcells has no formal education in pathology but made more than $1.1 million in Kansas between 2016 and 2019 from autopsies for more than 350 clients, most of which he did not perform, according to federal court records. He gained national attention in 2014 by assisting a privately hired pathologist in an autopsy of Michael Brown, the unarmed Black 18-year-old from Ferguson, Missouri, who was fatally shot by a white police officer.
In Wabaunsee County, he was convicted of three felony theft charges and three misdemeanor charges of illegally obtaining control over bodies, stemming from three autopsies he performed for the county in 2014 and 2015, the attorney general's office said.
