Penn says it has found more human remains from the MOVE bombing at its museum

PHILADELPHIA — The Penn Museum says it is in possession of more human remains from the MOVE bombing — three years after it was first revealed that university researchers had kept remains from the 1985 tragedy.

Penn Museum officials disclosed Wednesday that they had uncovered the remains during an “ongoing comprehensive inventory of our biology section.” The remains matched records for Delisha Africa, who was 12 when she was killed with 10 other members of the Black liberation and activist group MOVE, the museum said.

The revelation provides new insights into a long dispute over identifying the remains stored at the West Philadelphia museum dedicated to archaeology and anthropology. It’s the latest development in the decadeslong saga surrounding the MOVE bombing and its aftermath — widely considered one of the most outrageous acts of government violence in Philadelphia history, whose effects still reverberate among survivors, family members and the city at large.

After the bombing, two researchers at Penn were asked to help identify the remains of bombing victims whose identities were in dispute. For decades, they kept some remains at the museum — an open secret first publicized in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2021.

A subsequent news report in Billy Penn said the museum could have remains from two children killed in the bombing, Delisha and 14-year-old Katricia Dotson, but independent investigators contracted by the university said in 2022 that the school had remains from a single victim who could not be conclusively identified.

Those investigators also said they had no “credible factual or scientific evidence” that the museum possessed the remains of Delisha Africa.

But now, the university says, it does appear that Delisha’s remains were kept at the museum. The Penn Museum’s short statement, posted on a page of updates about the MOVE victims, did not say how the remains ended up at its museum, or which staffers originally obtained them. It also did not elaborate on the nature of the remains or say how they were identified as consistent with Delisha Africa.

A spokesperson for the museum said that it has reassessed its practices around human remains and is currently relocating items in its Biological Anthropology Section to upgraded, secure storerooms.

The museum has thousands of human remains, including some from archaeological excavations, and is conducting a “rigorous” inventory in order to continue research on their provenance.

“The second set of MOVE remains was found during the course of this inventory,” the spokesperson said.

Penn said it had informed the Africa family of the findings.

“Confronting our institutional history requires ever-evolving examination of how we can uphold museum practices to the highest ethical standards,” the spokesperson said. “Centering human dignity and the wishes of descendant communities govern the current treatment of human remains in the Penn Museum’s care.”

A call to representatives of the MOVE organization was not immediately returned. But lawyers for Lionell Dotson, the brother of bombing victims Katricia and Zanetta Dotson, said in a statement that they were “disgusted” by the news that more remains had been found at the museum.

“For nearly 40 years, the City of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Museum have refused to treat the MOVE Bombing victims or their families with the even most basic level of respect and decency and this latest revelation is just the most recent in a long line of atrocities Black folks in America have had to live with,” attorneys Daniel Hartstein and Bakari Sellers wrote.

Years of errors

For years, activists and MOVE family members have sought to understand what happened to the bodies of the MOVE victims, which in some cases had been kept for years at the Penn Museum and the city Department of Public Health.

Problems began almost immediately after the May 13, 1985, bombing, part of the Philadelphia police’s attempt to evict the Africas, whose activities and fortified home had stirred a string of complaints in their West Philadelphia neighborhood.

During a daylong confrontation, police dropped explosives on the house from a helicopter. The city allowed the subsequent fire to spread to the surrounding blocks, gutting 61 houses and leaving hundreds homeless. Six children and five adults in the MOVE house were killed.

After the fire was extinguished, the city medical examiner’s office did not immediately secure the scene, leaving the Fire Department and police to excavate the ruins with cranes — destroying crucial evidence and damaging remains of victims in the process.

The remains were then shuttled between city pathologists, outside consultants, and anthropologists from the University of Pennsylvania, who all disagreed on the identities of the remains. Bodies were not returned to their family members for months.

Searching for answers

Janet Monge, a former curator of the Penn Museum, had worked to identify MOVE victims in the 1980s with her mentor, Penn anthropology professor Alan Mann.

The MOVE Commission, which investigated the bombing in its immediate aftermath, and the city medical examiner’s office disagreed on the identities of two sets of remains: The commission believed one set of bones, labeled “B1,″ were those of Katricia Dotson, and another set, labeled “G,” belonged to Delisha Africa. Mann and Monge were asked to examine them to resolve the dispute.

An independent review later commissioned by Penn found that Mann and Monge then took possession of the bones suspected to belong to Katricia. They were unable to find credible evidence that Mann and Monge had the set of remains suspected to be Delisha and concluded that those bones were never at the museum.

The review established that Mann and Monge never returned the B1 bones, moving them between Penn and Princeton University, where Mann later worked. As recently as 2019, Monge used those bones, a pelvic bone and part of a femur, as teaching aids in an online video titled “Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.”

In 2021, activist Abdul-Aliy Muhammad reported in the Inquirer that anthropologists had kept some of the remains and used them in videos, and called for the school to “apologize and make restitution.”

A month later, the city health department revealed that the medical examiner’s office had also kept remains of MOVE victims, abandoned in a box in the office for decades.

The health commissioner at the time, Thomas Farley, resigned after admitting that staff had found the box in 2017 and that he had ordered it cremated to spare the Africa family pain. The order was never carried out, and the box was found shortly after Farley’s resignation.

Penn returned the remains displayed in the 2019 video to the Africa family in 2021.

“After consultation with some MOVE members, and unsuccessful attempts to reach possible relatives, the Penn Museum arranged to have the remains that were displayed in the video returned to MOVE members on July 2, 2021,” the independent review read.

The university’s independent review said that the identity of those remains were “a matter of legitimate dispute.” Lawyers for Dotson believe that his sister Katricia’s remains had been kept at Penn.

The city medical examiner’s office did ultimately identify the remains found in the box at their office as his sisters’, and they were returned to Dotson in 2022.

In 2023, Muhammad and several surviving family members of the victims held a news conference alleging that they had photographic proof that Monge kept more bone fragments from the investigation than she previously said she had.

Monge had told investigators hired by Penn and Princeton University, both working on separate, independent reports on the handling of MOVE victims’ remains, that she had been in possession of only one victim’s remains.

But Muhammad distributed to reporters a photo of Monge next to several bone fragments, saying two people “trained in human osteology” had independently agreed that the remains were those of two victims — Katricia Dotson and Delisha Africa.

At the time, Monge’s lawyer said the claims were “nothing new” and declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation that includes a civil complaint Monge filed against The Inquirer, Muhammad, and other media outlets, alleging defamation.

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(Inquirer staff writer Ximena Conde contributed to this article.)

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