What the photos from 2014 reveal about Penn Museum’s possession of the remains of multiple victims of the 1985 MOVE bombing
By Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro, Co-Convener of Finding Ceremony
CONTENT NOTE: Description of public display of the remains of Black people who were murdered by state violence, including images in which the remains are obscured.
In April 2021, it became public knowledge that the Penn Museum’s Physical Anthropology curator, Dr. Janet Monge, had used the remains of 14-y.o. Katricia Dotson (Tree Africa), who was murdered by the Philadelphia Police when they dropped a bomb on her home on May 13, 1985.
Dr. Monge insisted that she only ever had the remains of this one victim of the bombing (and, for that matter, she disputed their identification as Katricia); however, more than two years later, photographs surfaced that showed Dr. Monge displaying both the remains of Katricia and those of what appear to be at least two other victims of the MOVE bombing. These photos were taken as part of a free event, open to the general public, in 2014.
This Medium post endeavors to clarify what these images show, and why they are of such great concern to those who have worked for years to ensure that all stolen remains of victims of the MOVE bombing are returned to family.
If this horrifying situation is new to you, please start by reading this detailed New York Times Magazine article — all of the questions and answers below assume a basic familiarity with the information included in this article:
How did the remains of people murdered in the 1985 MOVE bombing end up in the Penn Museum?
In September 1986, the Assistant Medical Examiner for the City of Philadelphia, Dr. Robert Segal, gave the remains of some of the victims of the 1985 MOVE bombing to Dr. Alan Mann, then a curator of physical anthropology at the Penn Museum, and Janet Monge’s PhD advisor. At the time that he gave the remains to Penn Museum, the investigation into the bombing had been concluded, and family members of the victims believed their loved ones had been buried. The reason why Dr. Segal gave Dr. Mann the remains is unclear (both have refused to speak with investigators).
What are the newly surfaced images from 2014?
These images were posted on the Penn Museum’s Flickr account (the account was deleted in September 2023). They were located and brought to Finding Ceremony’s attention at the end of July 2023. There were three images from the same event, showing Dr. Janet Monge displaying the MOVE remains to members of the public who were on a tour of her newly opened lab in the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials in the basement of the Penn Museum.
Of the three images, this is the one that most clearly shows all of the MOVE remains:
The remains are covered in this image, but there appear to be at least a dozen bone fragments — at the angle the photograph was taken from, some of the fragments are partly hidden by others, so it is difficult to be sure.
Whose remains are in the newly surfaced images from 2014?
The photographs themselves do not show all of the remains clearly enough to firmly identify the remains; however, based on what can be seen, multiple trained physical anthropologists believe that the over a dozen bone fragments visible on the table next to Dr. Monge include:
- Blue (1–4): The four fragments of Katricia Dotson’s remains.
- Green (5–10): Bone fragments that seem to correspond with the remains of Delisha Africa (who was 12 years old when she was murdered).
- Orange (11, 12): Bone fragments that appear to be those of an adult, and hence cannot belong to either of the children named above.
How do we know these are the remains of victims of the MOVE bombing?
We believe that all of these remains are those of MOVE bombing victims for the following reasons:
- Three of the fragments of Katricia Dotson’s remains are easily recognizable, even to non-experts, from the free Princeton University online course video on the Coursera platform, in which Dr. Monge displayed Katricia’s remains. The first image is a still that circulated widely in April 2021:
The image below indicates where those same bone fragments are visible in the 2014 photos the Penn Museum posted on their Flickr page:
And here is another image in which the most readily recognizable of the bones, a portion of Katricia’s femur, is visible in another image from Flickr of the 2014 event:
2. Some of the bones indicated in Green (5, 6, and 7) appear to correspond to those that were labelled as Delisha’s in x-rays taken at the museum in November 2018; and all of them correspond to the bones that Dr. Mann included in his November 1985 report disputing the official identification of the “Body G” remains as those of Delisha Africa.
Prior to seeing the 2014 images, we had no reason to believe that these additional remains (8, 9, and 10) had ever been at the Penn Museum.
3. There are a number of other reasons why we believe these are all the remains of MOVE bombing victims, including the way that they are grouped together as a single “case” for discussion on her tour of her lab; the presence of labels that appear to say “Move,” as well as of the box that Janet Monge told the investigators for the City of Philadelphia report is the one in which she received the remains from the Medical Examiners’ Office in 1986; and the fact that Dr. Monge wore gloves to handle these remains but not the other sets of human remains that she shared on her tour. Additionally, the timing matches with the timeline we have for Dr. Monge’s interest in and use of the MOVE remains: according to her, she used them for an exam in 1988, and then did not share them again until the Fall semester of 2014.
Have any of these remains been returned?
Reportedly, yes: the bone fragments labelled 1, 2, and 3 (the ones that were in the Coursera video) were returned in July 2021. To the best of our knowledge, none of the other remains have been returned.
What does museum say?
The museum generally has told the press, as they did in response to inquiries about the photos from 2014, that “Penn Museum reunited all known MOVE remains with the Africa Family in July 2021.”
However, the fourth bone fragment of Katricia’s body (labelled 4 in the 2014 photos) was not among the three bones returned in July 2021. It does appear clearly in x-rays taken at the Penn Museum in November 2018 but was not used in Janet Monge’s demonstration in the Coursera video (filmed in January 2019). Lionell Dotson, Katricia’s younger brother, has specifically requested the return of this bone in his lawsuit against the City of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.
The Penn Museum and Dr. Janet Monge have repeatedly denied having ever had possession of the remains of more than one person. They continue to deny that they have Delisha’s remains, despite the evidence of eyewitnesses, x-rays taken at the museum by museum staff, photographs published on the Penn Museum’s Flickr page, and documents from the City of Philadelphia archives that attest to their presence at the museum from September 1986 until at least November 2018.
When aAliy Muhammad and I showed the photographic evidence from 2014 to the Director of the Penn Museum, Dr. Christopher Woods, he brushed it off, saying, “How do I know those are MOVE remains? All I see is Janet with a bunch of bones.” That was on August 31, 2023. A spokesperson for the museum told the press that they “will investigate the information they provided to the fullest extent.” As of October 16, 2023, the museum has failed to explain what has happened to these remains, or even to acknowledge the existence of the images. It appears that the only action they have taken is deleting their entire Flickr account.
We cannot say for certain whether Katricia’s 4th bone fragment, Delisha’s remains, or those of the adult or adults shown in the photos from 2014 are still at the Penn Museum. Dr. Janet Monge (who remained employed by the museum until September 2023) or someone else who knew they were in the museum may have done anything to them in the decade since those photographs were taken. But regardless of whether or not they are still at the museum, it is the museum’s responsibility to determine where they are, to recover them, and to return them to family members, including Katricia’s brother, Lionell Dotson, and Delisha’s mother, Janet Africa.
If the Penn Museum deleted their Flickr account, how can we confirm that that’s where the photos came from?
In July and August of 2023, a number of lawyers, journalists, scholars, and family members of the victims viewed the photos on the Flickr page; and some of them took screenshots or otherwise saved the pages to show the photos in their original context. Here is a screenshot I took (with the remains obscured by a black rectangle that I added to the image):
What are your sources for all of this information? Where can we learn more?
Most of the supporting information shared here can be found in the “Final Report of the Independent Investigation in the City of Philadelphia’s Possession of Human Remains of Victims of the 1985 Bombing of the MOVE Organization,” Part Two of Three: The MOVE Victim Remains in the Custody of Drs. Alan Mann and Janet Monge, which begins on page 134 of the PDF of the full report, available at this link.
Additional details come from documents contained in MOVE Commission records at Temple University.
If you are interested in the source for a specific statement, please leave a comment below.
If you have a question that is not answered here, please add it in the comments.
