THE LOST

Her body — what was left of it — was found in the scorched basement on Osage Avenue.

Parts of a pelvis and a length of a femur, still in the victim’s charred Levi’s, were pulled from the rubble of the West Philadelphia rowhouse where the radical, Black-led, back-to-nature group MOVE made its headquarters.

It was May 14, 1985. The day before, six children had huddled against the back wall of the basement, hiding under wet blankets to block clouds of tear gas while police and the group’s members exchanged gunfire.

After a 12-hour standoff, city officials sent a police helicopter to drop explosives on the makeshift bunker on top of the MOVE house. When it ignited, they let the fire rage.

Eleven MOVE members died, five of them children. House to house the flames spread. More than 250 people lost their homes.

» READ MORE: Our MOVE podcast and archival coverage

Days later, the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office gave the remains in the Levi’s the designation “B-1.”

Over the next year, pathologists and researchers would debate whose bones they were. Independent scientists hired by the city as part of the MOVE Commission investigation into the bombing agreed they belonged to Katricia Dotson, a 14-year-old girl who had hidden in the basement.

But the city‘s assistant medical examiner and two anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania maintained that the remains belonged to an unidentified woman. And for decades after the bombing, the bones were kept at the Penn Museum, though the MOVE victims’ families didn’t know about their existence.

May 13 marks the 40th anniversary of the bombing, a notorious chapter in Philadelphia’s history that is not yet over. Relatives of the victims still wonder if they have buried all of their family members’ remains. Why were the bones kept so long, they ask, and why did Penn not do more to notify them of their existence?

“The callousness, the insensitivity — it’s almost like a movie. It’s surreal,” said Walter Palmer, a longtime West Philadelphia resident and Penn adjunct who negotiated with MOVE during multiple standoffs with the police.

“I always put myself in the place of other people. What would I feel if my mother and my father were treated like that?”

The Inquirer traced how the remains of a MOVE bombing victim were allowed to be shipped back and forth across the country and ultimately placed on display for Penn donors at museum events and exposed to thousands of viewers of an online, open-access course. A monthslong collaboration with Temple University’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting offers new details on the handling of the “B-1” bones and other remains from the bombing, drawing on archival evidence, interviews, and new legal depositions.

Katricia Dotson’s younger brother, Lionell, sued the university and the city in Common Pleas Court over their handling of what he says are his sister’s remains. Penn maintained in court filings that the B-1 bones that had been kept at the museum are unidentified and only “allegedly” or “possibly” those of Katricia Dotson, who was known within MOVE as Tree Africa.

But, last fall, Penn Museum officials did acknowledge having another set of MOVE remains they had previously denied ever possessing: those of 12-year-old Delisha Africa.

In March, the city settled with Dotson for $250,000 without admitting liability in the case. Last month, Penn settled as well.

Dotson, who was only 8 when Katricia died, says he continues his fight because of what little he knows about Katricia — she was protective of her younger sister, Zanetta, and stood up to bullies. He returns to these details again and again: “All I have are those memories,” he said in an interview in February.

“Katricia left something behind for me to grab hold of — being the person that speaks up,” he said. “If she was here, and I wasn’t, she’d be speaking for me.”

From the start, the city‘s investigation at the bombing site was riddled with errors.

With a clamshell crane, workers razed the MOVE house’s teetering walls to safely search the rubble — collapsing them into the basement where many of the home’s occupants had died, covering evidence in stones and ash, and, according to the MOVE Commission’s report, mixing human remains with those of animals.

Assistant medical examiner Robert Segal enlisted help from Alan Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to identify the bodies. Mann brought in his graduate assistant, Janet Monge, then working toward her doctorate.

Segal, Mann, and Monge examined B-1’s hip bones for clues.

As children grow, parts of those bones fuse, allowing experts to estimate a person’s age. The three concluded that the hip bones indicated the body of a young woman, probably between 18 and early 20s.

But Birdie Africa, later known as Michael Ward, the only child to survive the bombing, was already helping police draw up a list of potential victims in the house. None matched that description.

According to archival records, Segal also considered it impossible to identify the badly damaged remains of two children labeled D and G.

Two months later, scientists contracted by the MOVE Commission — the independent, investigative body that then-Mayor W. Wilson Goode appointed — came to a different conclusion.

The commission’s leading pathologist was Ali Hameli — Delaware’s head medical examiner, who had garnered headlines for identifying the body of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in a Brazilian graveyard earlier that year. He and his team identified D and G, respectively, as Zanetta Dotson and Delisha Africa.

And they identified the B-1 remains, along with a jawbone labeled E-1, as those of Katricia Dotson, based on her blood type and bone age — which they judged to be the remains of a young teenager.

The three girls’ mothers were in state prison at the time of the bombing — among the nine MOVE members convicted of the shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer, James Ramp, in a 1978 standoff.

They were not told about the disputes over their children’s remains, said Janet Africa, Delisha’s mother.

“The officers up there came to our [cell] door and said, ‘Janet, your child is dead,’ and walked out. We didn’t know anything other than that,” she said. “How do you take those remains and not say any of this to us?”

But the dispute was playing out in the public eye. Even as Segal, the assistant medical examiner, challenged Hameli’s findings in newspaper articles, his office was telling victims’ families that their children had been conclusively identified.

No records exist documenting the exact remains given to the families.

Segal signed paperwork releasing unspecified remains identified as those of Katricia Dotson and Delisha Africa to their families. He noted that the city was doing so based “solely” on the Hameli team’s identification.

No records exist documenting the exact remains given to the families.

Some remains from Katricia and Zanetta were buried in Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Delaware County, in December 1985 in a single plot.

Over a month after the burial, Segal and Hameli were still publicly debating the identity of the B-1 remains. A femur and pelvic bones were shipped across the country for review by other forensic anthropologists.

Five other experts, including MOVE Commission members, outside anthropologists, and a pathologist contracted by victims’ families, supported Hameli’s identification of the B-1 remains as those of Katricia Dotson.

And though Segal said in news stories that other anthropologists agreed with his, Mann’s, and Monge’s conclusion that the bones were not Katricia Dotson’s, he never named them. He eventually said he would accept Hameli‘s findings.

The MOVE Commission’s final report in March 1986 criticized the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office for not properly preserving bodies and for failing to identify nearly half the victims.

The office still held some remains from the bombing, and Segal maintained that certain remains were unidentifiable.

And on March 6, 1986, the day the MOVE Commission released its final report, Segal sent “skeletal material” from B-1 and G to Stephanie Damadio, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution, for another opinion on their ages.

On Sept. 22, 1986, some remains of Delisha Africa were buried with two other MOVE children in Eden Cemetery.

The next day, a box of remains arrived at the medical examiner’s office from Damadio at the Smithsonian. A receipt from the office dated the same day noted that Monge, the Penn grad student, “received from Robert J. Segal, M.D., the following material in the case of ‘MOVE’: Various bones for anthropologic examination.”

Then she walked the box from the medical examiner’s office back to her and Mann’s offices at the Penn Museum.

The box, and the bones inside, would be kept there for nearly 40 years.

Over the following decades, Monge was appointed curator at the Penn Museum. She was widely recognized for her work, received a major federal grant to curate an exhibit on human evolution at the museum, consulted on police investigations, and conducted anthropologic research at sites around the world.

Her lawyer, Alan Epstein, declined an interview on behalf of his client. Monge has sued The Inquirer and other news organizations for defamation over coverage of the handling of the remains, as well as her former employers at Penn. A judge dismissed the suit against The Inquirer earlier this year.

Epstein said that the bone fragments kept at Penn were not those of Katricia Dotson or Delisha Africa but did not say whom they could belong to.

Monge told investigators at Penn in 2021 that the Hameli team faced “much political pressure” to identify Katricia Dotson to “hide aspects of the tragedy.”

Three years later, she testified in a deposition in Lionell Dotson’s lawsuit against Penn that she believed the anthropologists who disagreed with her on the age of the B-1 pelvic bones were actually examining a completely different pelvis that had been held at the medical examiner’s office, remains that she claimed were eventually buried as Katricia Dotson in 1985, though no records exist documenting what was buried.

Thomas Holland, a forensic anthropologist commissioned by Dotson’s lawyers, wrote in a court filing that Monge’s claim about two pelvises “strained credulity.” Descriptions of the bones examined in 1985 and 1986 by the anthropologists who disagreed with Monge, Holland wrote, matched the remains kept at Penn.

At Penn, Monge showed the remains to visitors, students, and donors, including, she said, at least seven visiting anthropologists over the years. In interviews with city investigators outlined in a 2022 report, she claimed that all the anthropologists who examined the bones agreed with her assessment of their age.

Two of the seven anthropologists she identified as having viewed the remains have died, and the surviving five later told city investigators that they did not remember examining the remains.

That the museum was in possession of bones from the MOVE bombing was something of an open secret among staff. But Lionell Dotson’s lawsuit against Penn argues that his family had no idea the remains were kept there.

That the museum was in possession of bones from the MOVE bombing was something of an open secret among staff.

Penn has contended that a journalist working with Monge told Katricia Dotson’s mother, Consuewella Africa, about the remains as early as 2014, but Dotson’s lawyers say in court filings that there is no evidence his mother understood that Penn was in possession of remains that could belong to her daughter.

The museum’s deputy director, Stephen Tinney, testified in a deposition in the Dotson lawsuit that he had known about the bones’ presence since at least 2015, when Monge displayed them during a donor event. At the time, he testified, Monge told him that they might belong to Katricia Dotson.

Paul Wolff Mitchell, Monge’s former mentee, said he, too, saw remains at the museum in 2015.

“I noticed this box,” he said. “I asked Janet and I said, ‘What is this?’ She said, ‘Those are MOVE remains. Put them back.’”

(Monge also sued Mitchell for defamation, and alleged in court filings that Mitchell tampered with other remains at the museum during his time at Penn, threw objects at her during a meeting, and used her custody of the B-1 bones to wage a “smear campaign” against her. Mitchell denies these characterizations.)

In 2019, Monge filmed a video with some of the remains for an open-access video course, repeating the claim that they were unidentified.

Two years later, the footage would make international headlines.

In April 2021, newly appointed Penn Museum director Christopher Woods learned about the remains kept at the museum when Mitchell told him that The Inquirer was planning to publish an article on their existence.

Woods testified in a deposition in the Dotson lawsuit that he quickly asked his deputy, Tinney, to track down all of the remains at Penn. Woods said Mann and Monge had obtained the bones as independent contractors, and never formally added them to Penn’s collections.

Over the next several days, Monge told Penn officials that, since the bones had originally been entrusted to Mann, he should ultimately return them to the city medical examiner’s office, Tinney testified. Monge drove the B-1 remains — a femur and pieces of a pelvic bone — to Mann’s house in New Jersey, she testified in a deposition.

Days later, The Inquirer published an article by the West Philadelphia activist and journalist aAliy Muhammad, who had found the video of Monge and an undergraduate student displaying the remains. The piece, along with an article published in Billy Penn on the same topic, drew international attention.

“It shocked the conscience of a lot of people that anthropologists had been using one of the children’s remains in a video for teaching,” Muhammad said in an interview. Monge also sued Muhammad over their coverage of the case; the suit was dismissed.

The news was hard to comprehend, Janet Africa said. “It falls against your heart.”

Amid the fallout, Woods met with Janet Africa and Consuewella Africa. Penn arranged for Terry Funeral Home to take the remains from Mann.

As the museum spoke with the mothers, the city medical examiner’s office — which had given the fragmented bones to Monge and Mann nearly 40 years ago — was facing its own scandal.

In 2017, a city staffer had discovered a box of bones and tissue recovered from the bombing, forgotten in a back room. Health Commissioner Thomas Farley ordered them cremated without reaching out to the victims’ families. But another staffer had disobeyed the order.

On May 13, 2021, weeks after the revelations about the remains at Penn, and on the 36th anniversary of the MOVE bombing, Farley acknowledged his actions and resigned.

City and university officials issued apologies and pledged investigations.

Days later, Consuewella Africa arrived at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, suffering from breathing complications related to COVID-19. Within two weeks, she was dead.

As a boy, Lionell Dotson, who was raised by his grandparents, had watched on television news as the house on Osage burned. Learning in 2021 that Penn had possibly kept his sister’s remains, he said, sent him into mourning once again.

“How many times does my sister have to die?” he asked.

Dotson’s lawsuit contends he should have received the bones that Terry Funeral Home, in release forms dated July 2, 2021, identified as those of his sister Katricia. Instead, he says, the funeral home handed them off to unrelated MOVE members. Dotson has also sued the funeral home over the handling of the remains.

“How many times does my sister have to die?”

Gregory Burrell, the funeral home director, said in a deposition that he did not recall who told him that the remains were Katricia Dotson’s, but that a Penn lawyer had authorized him to release them. Lawyers for Burrell did not respond to a request for comment.

In court filings, Penn said Dotson had no rights to the B-1 bones, whose identity it disputed. The university contended his mother had been informed about them in 2014 and never tried to claim them.

MOVE members buried the remains under a tree in Bartram’s Garden next to Katricia’s mother’s ashes.

Dotson said he felt as if he was given no choice in the matter. “I felt powerless, useless,” he said.

In the summer of 2022, Lionell Dotson flew back to Philadelphia from his home in North Carolina. The medical examiner’s office, cataloging the remains kept there, had identified some pieces of muscle and a jawbone that belonged to Katricia, and muscle from Dotson’s other sister, Zanetta.

At a Mount Airy cemetery, he clutched the cremated remains to his chest and wept.

By then, Monge had been demoted from her position at Penn, locked out of her lab, and barred from teaching classes. It would be another year before she would leave the university. Penn has not commented on why she was demoted.

Months later, Muhammad, who had broken the original story about the B-1 bones, and Lyra Monteiro, then an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark, came across a Penn Museum Flickr account that showed Monge displaying bones at an open house event in 2014. The bones on the table, they said, matched descriptions of both Katricia Dotson’s and Delisha Africa’s remains.

“I was like, my God, I know these bones, even though I‘ve never seen them,” Monteiro said.

Muhammad and MOVE members held a news conference and protest demanding the return of the remains.

The university said it had already returned all known bones from MOVE victims to MOVE members.

Then, just over a year later, the school announced it had found more remains.

On Nov. 12, 2024, the Penn Museum announced that “a set of human remains that match records for those of Delisha Africa” was uncovered during an “ongoing comprehensive inventory of our biological anthropology section.” Museum officials promised to return the remains with “speed and transparency.”

It is not clear which specific remains were found, or how they were linked to Delisha Africa. It is also unclear how the university obtained Delisha’s bones — whether they, too, had been transferred to Penn alongside the B-1 remains in 1985. Monge has denied possessing Delisha’s remains, and Penn did not answer detailed questions about the discovery.

Janet Africa, Delisha’s mother, said she wants her daughter’s remains back. But she is wary of an institution that, she says, kept her and other victims’ families in the dark for years.

“They told us our children’s remains were put somewhere, taken care of,” Janet Africa said. “They come back with another story, then another story. … How do you trust someone that keeps doing that over and over?”