By: Anna Chuang

Federal prosecutors reported on Wednesday, June 14, that the former manager of the Harvard Medical School Morgue, 55-year-old Cedric Lodge, and four other people including his wife are indicted on suspicion of illegally taking away human body parts and selling them for money.

Lodge and his accomplices, Katrina Maclean, Joshua Taylor, West Lawn, and Mathew Lampi, supposedly stole body parts that were dissected in the morgue. These body parts include skin, bones, heads, and brains. Additionally, they are believed to have allowed people to come to the morgue in order to obtain the body parts they wanted to buy.

The bodies in the Harvard Medical School Morgue were donated to HMS so that they could be temporarily used for research or educational purposes, and then they would typically be cremated and returned to the donor’s family in the form of ashes. The theft and the sale of the human body parts was upsetting, as the donations from these families were warmhearted acts, and the bodies should be treated with respect. According to the Los Angeles Times, Deans of HMS George Daley and Edward Hundert wrote a message posted on the school’s website and titled it “An abhorrent betrayal.” In the message they wrote, “We are appalled to learn that something so disturbing could happen on our campus—a community dedicated to healing and serving others. The reported incidents are a betrayal of HMS and, most importantly, each of the individuals who altruistically chose to will their bodies to HMS…”

Not only did Lodge and his associates steal from Harvard, they were also part of a group of people that stole and sold from a morgue in Arkansas.

It is shocking to know that there are people in the same world that we live on that have the impulse to commit such egregious acts like the theft and trafficking of human cadavers.