MOVE members call on Penn to return remains of a 12-year-old victim of deadly fire

Members of the MOVE organization on Monday called for the Penn Museum to return the remains of a 12-year-old victim of the MOVE bombing that had been kept at the museum for decades.

Delisha Africa was one of five children killed alongside six adults on May 13, 1985, when Philadelphia police dropped an incendiary device on the West Philadelphia rowhouse of the Black liberation group and activist group. For years, it was believed that the bodies of the victims had been laid to rest.

In 2021, however, a West Philadelphia activist revealed in The Inquirer that Janet Monge and Alan Mann, anthropologists at the Penn Museum enlisted to help identify remains, had kept the bones of at least one victim and used them as teaching tools, including in an open-access video course viewed by thousands.

Although some people had raised concerns that more remains were still at the museum, the university has long cited in response an extensive report by the Tucker Law Group, which held that the museum had not retained any other remains from the bombing.

But last month, Penn acknowledged in a statement on its website that it had found additional remains at the museum and identified them as those of Delisha Africa.

» READ MORE: Read more Inquirer coverage of the MOVE bombing

On Monday, MOVE members, who often take the common surname Africa, held a news conference at City Hall, asking that Penn to return the newly discovered remains to Delisha Africa’s family.

They also called for the arrests of Monge and Mann, who have both since left the university.

“I want you to take a moment to imagine your daughter, your sister, being cooked and burned alive, screaming, trying to get out of the house, balling up because there’s nothing else that she can do. And then when others tried to escape, [they were] shot back into that burning fuselage,” said Yvonne Orr, Delisha Africa’s older sister, referencing survivors’ testimony that Philadelphia police shot at MOVE members trying to escape the burning building.

Orr remembered her sister as a playful child with a streak of sarcasm who wanted to become a doctor or a teacher.

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who hosted Monday’s news conference at City Hall, said that City Council has not taken “any formal steps of accountability towards Penn” but that she is open to exploring that step.

» READ MORE: Penn says it has found more human remains from the MOVE bombing at its museum

“There is absolutely no possible justification for the museum’s barbaric treatment of a Black child’s body,” said Gauthier, whose district includes the site where the MOVE building was located on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue.

In a statement, a Penn spokesperson said that the university had immediately notified the Africa family after the discovery of Delisha Africa’s remains and have been in “direct contact” with the mothers of children killed in the bombing since.

“We are waiting to learn more about their wishes,” the statement said.

A lawyer for Janet Monge denied in an interview that the bones recently found at Penn were Delisha’s and said the city medical examiner had returned the child’s remains to her family in 1986.

Issues with the chain of custody around the remains of the MOVE victims began almost immediately after the deadly fire.

Philadelphia police had confronted MOVE members at their rowhouse headquarters, where their activities had stirred a string of complaints from Osage Avenue neighbors. During the daylong standoff, MOVE members fired guns from the house at police, who returned fire with 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Then police dropped explosives on the house from a helicopter.

Though firefighters were on hand, the city let the subsequent fire burn, killing 11 people in the MOVE house and destroying more than 60 houses overall, leaving hundreds homeless.

After the fire was extinguished, the city Medical Examiner’s Office did not immediately secure the scene, leaving the Fire Department and police to excavate the ruins with cranes — destroying crucial evidence and damaging remains of victims in the process.

Monge and Mann, then Penn researchers, were asked to help identify the remains of victims whose identities were in dispute. For decades, they kept some of those remains at the museum, and as late at 2019, Monge displayed bones of a victim in an online video.

An independent report commissioned by Penn said those remains were unidentifiable, and the university returned the remains displayed in the video to MOVE members.

But a lawsuit filed by Lionell Dotson, the brother of 14-year-old bombing victim Katricia Dotson, alleges that the bones were that of his sister and that Penn never made significant progress toward identifying them despite other experts agreeing that they were, in fact, Katricia’s.

In 2021, shortly after it was revealed that Penn had kept remains of a bombing victim, then-health commissioner Thomas Farley resigned after acknowledging that the city Medical Examiner’s office had also been in possession of the remains of MOVE bombing victims and that he had ordered them cremated to spare the Africa family pain.

A staffer in the ME’s office disobeyed the cremation order, and remains identified as those of Katricia Dotson and her younger sister Zanetta were later returned to their brother.

Last year, activist Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, who had first reported on Penn’s possession of MOVE victim remains in The Inquirer, held a news conference with several surviving family members of the victims alleging that they had photographic proof that Monge had kept more bone fragments at Penn.

Monge had told investigators hired by Penn and Princeton University, both working on separate, independent reports on the handling of MOVE victims’ remains, that she had been in possession of only one victim’s remains.

But Muhammad distributed to reporters a 2014 photo of Monge next to a table holding several bone fragments, saying two people “trained in human osteology” had independently agreed that the remains matched those of two victims — Katricia Dotson and Delisha Africa.

Through a lawyer, Monge said the allegations were “nothing new” and declined further comment, citing an ongoing defamation lawsuit over media coverage of the case.

Penn’s independent review of the MOVE victims’ remains was unable to find credible evidence that Mann and Monge had kept a set of remains suspected to be Delisha’s and concluded that the remains were never at the museum.

But last month, the Penn Museum updated a page on its website to state that it had found more human remains and identified them as Delisha’s during a “rigorous” inventory on the thousands of human remains kept at the museum.

At Monday’s news conference, Mike Africa Jr. said he had recently spoken to Christopher Woods, the director of the Penn Museum. He said Woods assured him that he would do “all he could” to find any remains of the bombing victims at the museum.

“He told me that it was hard to find Delisha’s remains because they were placed inside an unmarked box that was also placed inside another unmarked box that was tucked away in a corner of the museum,” Africa said. “He said that he believed it was deliberately hidden.”

A Penn spokesperson said that Africa was told that the remains had been placed in an unmarked box but that Woods did not say that the box was deliberately hidden.

Questions remain about other bones that Africa family members allege are still at the museum.

Yvonne Orr said that at some point in the past few years, Penn had given her a set of remains that they said were her sister Delisha’s. She said that she had the remains tested and that they instead were the remains of a dog.

She declined to say more on the incident, saying it was “not public record.” A Penn spokesperson said the university has “no information on record to validate this claim.”

Mike Africa also said that the MOVE organization has documentation that Penn had also been in possession of the remains of Zanetta Dotson. Penn did not comment on the allegation.

Janet Africa, a longtime MOVE member and Delisha Africa’s mother, said in a voice message after the news conference that Mike Africa does not speak on her behalf about her daughter’s remains, and that those who identify as members of MOVE do not necessarily engage in activism together or share beliefs.

Allison Beck is a Temple University student who has been reporting on MOVE for the Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting at the school’s Klein College of Media and Communication.