Harvard University has been ordered to pay $53m to settle a class-action suit brought by families claiming an imprisoned former morgue manager at the institution mishandled the bodies of their loved ones – which had been donated to its medical school – and sold their body parts on the black market, reports New York Post.
The settlement, approved last week, stems from the 2023 arrest of disgraced former Harvard Medical School’s morgue manager, Cedric Lodge.
Lodge, who worked at Harvard’s morgue for nearly 30 years, was arrested in 2023 and ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school for medical research purposes.
The court found that as far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts, including “heads, faces, brains, skin and hands”, which he’d take to his home and with his wife, sell and ship them off to buyers.
In one example heard during his trial, Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book, which Assistant US Attorney Alisan Martin called a “deeply horrifying reality”.
“In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s face, perhaps to be kept on a shelf, perhaps to be used for something even more disturbing,” Martin said.
His wife was sentenced to just more than a year in prison for assisting him.
The dozens of families involved in the lawsuit accused the school of negligence, contending it knew of Lodge’s grotesque side business but ignored it until his 2023 indictment.
A judge initially dismissed the cases, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court revived them in October, saying the families’ claims were sufficient to indicate the university acted in poor faith in handling the bodies, which were subjected to “horrific and undignified treatment” for years.
In addition to the cash component of the settlement, Harvard Medical School was required to provide a statement to the affected families via webinar to confirm Lodge’s criminal acts were “morally reprehensible”.
The school will also establish an annual scholarship for medical schools in honour of those whose bodies were donated to advance its research, starting in the 2027-2028 academic year.
Harvard’s dean of faculty of medicine, George Daley, and Harvard Medical School’s dean for medical education, Bernard Chang, sent a message to the school community calling Lodge’s actions “despicable, abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community”.
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