On top of Philly news Remains of children killed in MOVE bombing sat in a box at Penn Museum for decades
Where are they now, and who is responsible for them? No one seems to know.
Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania Emma Lee / WHYY Apr. 21, 2021, 3:30 p.m. Love Philly? Sign up for the free Billy Penn email newsletter to get everything you need to know about Philadelphia, every day.
No one seems to be sure what happened to a set of remains thought to be two children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing.
For decades, the bones were kept at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. A Penn Museum spokesperson said the remains have since been transferred to the care of researchers at Princeton but an administrator at the New Jersey university was uncertain of their whereabouts. After this story published, a spokesperson said Princeton does not have them.
In a 2019 video tutorial produced by Princeton, students watched the smiling white anthropologist Janet Monge and a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate hold a human pelvic bone and a femur up to the camera as rows of human skulls, backlit and neatly lined up in wooden cabinets, rested behind them. The bones the two held, transferred between universities over decades, likely belong to Delisha Africa and Katricia “Tree” Africa, two Black children killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing, in which the city of Philadelphia dropped a satchel bomb on a row house occupied by the Black liberation group after a police standoff. Released soon after the bombing to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for forensic study, the remains will finally be collected from that professor’s home on Friday. How they ended up there, and where they’ve been in between, is something the institutions involved have struggled to explain.
Then, this week, WHYY s
Billy Penn published a story saying that human remains from the bombing, believed to be those of two children, sat in a cardboard box on a shelf at Penn’s Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for years. Originally, they’d been entrusted to a Penn anthropologist, Alan Mann, so that he could verify their identities. Yet decades later, apparently because Mann was unable to conclusively identify them, they had had not been returned to family members.
Mann took a job at Princeton in 2001 and brought the remains with him. Janet Monge, Mann’s former student, reportedly reanalyzed the bones from 2016 to 2019 during her time as curator of the Penn Museum’s physical anthropology section. She also reportedly used them to teach an online course on forensic anthropology. But by 2019, Mann had retired and Monge left Penn, making the remains’ exact whereabouts a mystery.