Stuff You Should Know

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The Hillsborough Disaster

Explore episode Jun 30, 2026
History
Treating Victims Like Evidence: The Morgue Experience

The Hillsborough Disaster · Jun 30, 2026 History

Victims' families were taken to a nearby gym converted into a morgue and handed unsorted stacks of Polaroid photos of dead bodies to search through for their loved ones. Parents of dead children were told they could not hold them — the bodies were 'property of the coroner.' These revelations, exposed in later reports, showed the institutional cruelty that compounded the disaster.

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