PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A law firm hired by the University of Pennsylvania Museum has concluded that staff members who handled human remains from the 1985 MOVE bombing violated no “professional, ethical or legal standards.”
However, they accused those staff members of “extremely poor judgement and gross insensitivity.”
The Tucker Law Group says its investigators spoke with more than 40 people and reviewed thousands of pages of documents.
Their 217-page report establishes the chain of possession of the remains from the time they arrived from the Medical Examiner’s office in 1985 until they were turned over to MOVE members in July.
It dispels false reports that the bones have been positively identified, that the Museum had other MOVE remains and that no effort was made to return the remains to MOVE before this year.
The report says that the Medical Examiner’s office gave the bones to Penn anthropologist Alan Mann for identification.
He kept them until he left Penn in 2001, without ever trying to reach potential relatives.
His assistant Janet Monge, who later became a curator at the Museum, unsuccessfully attempted to reach family members.
The report says she reached out twice to MOVE members but they refused to help her.
Despite not getting consent, she used the bones in an online course at Princeton in 2019.
The remains have since been returned to MOVE members.
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Museum Director Christopher Woods says new policies, including a full inventory of what the Museum has, should prevent such incidents in the future.
"Part of the issue here is, we’re dealing with unaccessioned remained that weren’t formally part of the collection, so they didn’t fall under the same types of policies that accessioned artifacts fall under," Woods explained. He also said how he appreciated the work of the investigators.
"There’s an opportunity for us to be leaders in the ethical stewardship of human remains, and I think the Museum will be in a much stronger place once we put into effect all that we’re working on right now."
The group also recommended measures, such as a MOVE exhibit and scholarships for public school graduates, to address what it called “the lingering sense of injustice” over the MOVE bombing that made the matter a public issue.
The Museum houses the controversial Morton collection of 1,300 human skulls, including many that were looted from African-American cemeteries.
The consultants found that the Museum’s connection to Morton, the inventor of scientific racism, is one reason its possession of the MOVE bones generated so much controversy.
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