City settles lawsuit with relative of MOVE victims over mishandling of their remains

Philadelphia has settled a lawsuit with the brother of two young girls killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing, resolving one aspect of an ongoing court battle over the mishandling of victims’ remains by both the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office and the University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel Hartstein, an attorney for Lionell Dotson, confirmed the settlement on Friday. A city spokesperson said Philadelphia has not admitted liability under the settlement and will pay “an undisclosed amount” to Dotson.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022, marked a turning point in a controversy that reopened wounds over the city’s aerial bombing on Osage Avenue that killed 11 members of the MOVE Black liberation group, including five children, and devastated an entire neighborhood.

In the lawsuit, Dotson accused both the city and Penn of tortious interference with a dead body, a legal term that refers to the contractual violation around mishandling the remains.

After the MOVE bombing, families of the victims, like Dotson, eventually received what they thought were all of their loved ones’ remains.

In 2021, he and other relatives were shocked to learn that Penn anthropologists had kept some bones for more than three decades, in some cases displaying them in online lectures. Soon after came a second revelation: The city medical examiner’s office had also kept bones from bombing victims.

The bones had apparently been kept at the medical examiner’s office since the bombing, and were rediscovered in 2017. The city health commissioner at the time, Thomas Farley, ordered that the bones be cremated, without notifying families of the discovery. An office employee disobeyed the order, and the bones were found in cold storage in the office in 2021, days after Farley conceded he’d ordered them cremated and resigned.

Remains found in the box that the city identified as Katricia and Zanetta Dotson, Lionell Dotson’s older sisters, were eventually returned to Dotson and his family.

» READ MORE: The brother of two MOVE victims finally got their remains back from the Medical Examiner’s Office

The family’s lawsuit against Penn is ongoing. The bones kept at Penn, labeled “B-1″ by the medical examiner’s office, were the result of a bungled recovery effort after the bombing in West Philadelphia. The medical examiner’s office did not send adequate staff to the scene to ensure bodies were recovered properly from the charred remains of the home, according to an independent report commissioned by the city in 2022. Instead, the bones were extracted with cranes and other heavy machinery, causing damage that compromised forensic investigation.

Some of the bones were later sent to two Penn anthropologists for help with identifications, where they remained for years.

The lawsuit alleged that members of the independent forensic team investigating the remains had identified the B-1 bones as belonging to Katricia Dotson. Penn anthropologists Alan Mann and Janet Monge disagreed with them, the lawsuit says, contending that the bones instead belonged to a much older, unidentified woman.

» READ MORE: Penn says it has found more human remains from the MOVE bombing at its museum

The city’s then-assistant medical examiner, Robert Segal, worked with the anthropologists to “disprove the findings,” according to the suit. Dotson’s lawsuit contended that Penn kept the B-1 bones for years but made little progress in identifying them. (Monge has since sued the city, Penn, The Inquirer, and other outlets for their characterization of her role. A judge dismissed defamation claims against The Inquirer in 2023.)

Dotson described the lawsuit as a way to seek justice for his family — to be a “voice for the voiceless.” His mother, Consuewella Africa, died of COVID before he filed the suit in 2022, not long after learning her daughters’ remains had not been fully returned to the family.