- A man is suing Harvard and a morgue manager, accusing them of mishandling his mother's body.
- The lawsuit alleges that up to 400 donated cadavers could have been involved in a black market scheme.
As many as 350 to 400 human cadavers donated to Harvard Medical School were dissected and sold on the black market at the hands of the morgue manager, according to a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts on Friday.
The civil complaint, which aims to represent other families as part of a class-action lawsuit, is the latest development in the macabre saga of the Harvard morgue manager's alleged human remains trafficking scheme.
Federal prosecutors indicted Cedric Lodge earlier this week, along with his wife and four other people accused of conspiring to transport and sell human remains. The remains came from people who volunteered for Harvard's anatomical gifts program and agreed to donate their bodies for education, teaching, or research purposes.
But instead of being used by medical students, Lodge and his alleged co-conspirators trafficked in "heads, brains, skin, bones, and other human remains," according to a federal indictment filed Wednesday.
For instance, Lodge once sold two dissected faces for $600, the criminal complaint said. Another criminal defendant who worked alongside Lodge shipped human skin to a man in Pennsylvania and hired him to "tan the skin to create leather," according to the complaint.
Investigators also found financial records of the transactions, including one $1,000 payment labeled "head number 7" and a $200 payment described as "braiiiiiins."
The civil lawsuit was filed Friday by the son of a woman whose body was donated to Harvard for medical research following her death in February 2019. The complaint says Adele Mazzone's son recently received information that his mother's body was "one of the many donated cadavers mishandled at the HMS morgue."
One of Mazzone's daughters told NBC Boston she received ashes from Harvard Medical School, as per her mother's agreement with the school, but now questions whether the ashes are truly her mother's.
"We want to know what happened," she told the station. "We want to know how it happened, why it happened, why there weren't more security measures taken."
The lawsuit names both Lodge and Harvard administrators as defendants and says the school was negligent in hiring and supervising Lodge as the morgue manager.
"Harvard owed a duty of care to the families who entrusted it with custody of their loved one's deceased bodies by taking reasonable measures to ensure that the cadavers were properly handled and maintained for their intended purpose of scientific study and not improperly mishandled, dissected, and/or sold to third parties," the lawsuit said.
Lodge's attorney declined to comment on the lawsuit. Harvard representatives also declined to comment.
An attorney who filed the lawsuit against Harvard and Lodge also did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.