Three families file lawsuit over body parts stolen from Harvard Medical School

As a Massachusetts man was dying of lung cancer, he decided he would donate his body to Harvard Medical School in the hopes he “could save someone else from the kind of suffering he was enduring,” according to a lawsuit filed in Suffolk Superior Court.

On June 1, 2019, Glenn Wilder Sr. died and his body was donated.

After two years, the family was given remains of what they were told were Wilder’s, according to the lawsuit. The remains sat in the garage office of the family business, “so that Glenn, Jr. could still go to work with his dad every day.”

But in June, the lawsuit reads, Wilder’s family learned his remains had been involved in the Harvard Medical morgue scandal. Harvard Medical School morgue manager Cedric Lodge, 55, is accused of stealing dissected portions of cadavers that were donated to the school, such as heads, brains, skin and bones, according to court documents.

Lodge took them to his home in New Hampshire, officials claim. And using social media, Lodge and his wife, Denise Lodge, sold the stolen body parts, court documents read.

The indictment, which was filed June 14 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, stated it started in 2018 and continued until March 7.

The new lawsuit filed by Morgan & Morgan is on behalf of three families, Glenn Wilder Sr., Marshall Jolotta and Joseph Gagne.

The lawsuit states the families, along with hundreds of other families, “generously entrusted the remains of their loved ones, per their wishes, to Defendants in the hope and expectation that this final act of service and kindness could help others by training a new generation of doctors, and by supporting the opportunity for new medical and scientific discoveries and a greater understanding of human life, anatomy and disease.”

“However, to their absolute shock and horror, the families who placed this deep trust in Defendants have learned that, instead of caring properly for and protecting the remains entrusted to them, Defendants abandoned them in a facility that was a place of freakish desecration, where, according to the indictments, criminals were allowed to roam and pick over loved ones’ remains for bits like trinkets at a flea market,” the lawsuit reads.

Court documents claim Katrina MacLean, 44, of Salem, Joshua Taylor, of Pennsylvania, and others purchased the body parts and they were shipped through the mail. Although sometimes, court documents said, MacLean and Taylor were allowed inside the morgue to “choose what remains to purchase.”

The investigation has led to charges against multiple people in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Overall, six people have been indicted on charges of trafficking stolen human remains.

Harvard called the crimes “morally reprehensible” and that the school was “appalled.”

“These remains were not mere ‘cadavers’ to which no respect was owed,” the lawsuit states. “They were the last physical remnants of beloved fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, sisters, wives.”

The lawsuit also details the “horror” from the families of Marshall Jolotta and Joseph Gagne.

Jolotta served in the Navy and “wanted to entrust his remains after death to science,” the lawsuit states.

“He felt that, through this generous gift, he could help others, and he wanted to help make young doctors better,” it read.

He died Nov. 25, 2017.

“Harvard took possession of the remains and held them for nearly two years, after which Harvard returned what it claimed to be the cremated remains of Mr. Jolotta,” the lawsuit reads. “Per Marshall’s wishes, those remains were comingled with his beloved wife’s cremated remains and scattered on family property, so that they could rest in peace together.”

Gagne was a plumber and taught his children the “importance of making the right decisions in life, and of living a life of compassion, doing what you can for others.”

His body was donated to Harvard Medical School in 2018, the lawsuit states.

All three remains “were among those abandoned in and subjected to a horror house of desecration and disrespect at Harvard and left in the unsupervised and unrestricted hands of a criminal,” the lawsuit reads.

Jonathan Sweet of Keches Law Group claimed between 350 and 400 bodies are believed to have been involved.

Keches Law Group also filed the class action lawsuit on behalf of the families involved. It was filed against the President & Fellows of Harvard College (the legal name for Harvard University) and Lodge.

“Medical schools like Harvard have a duty to ensure [donated remains] are handled properly and with decency and to ensure they are used for their intended purpose of scientific study,” Keches Law Partner Jeff Catalano said.

After the trauma of losing a loved one, Catalano said “sometimes the only thing they can latch onto, is that their loved ones’ remains are going to be used for an important scientific purpose.”