PHILADELPHIA — After nearly four decades, Philadelphia has acknowledged that it was no accident when six adults and five children died in the MOVE bombing.
The Medical Examiner’s Office classified as “accidental” the deaths resulting from the city’s 1985 bombing of a West Philadelphia neighborhood where MOVE, a Black liberation group, had squared off with police repeatedly.
The decision to amend the death certificates followed an independent investigation released this summer into how victims’ remains from the MOVE bombing languished in a cardboard box on a basement shelf at the Medical Examiner’s Office until 2021. The negligence led to widespread outrage and resignations. Reclassifying the deaths as homicides was among the recommendations in a 257-page report released in June that traced the office’s failures.
Although just a matter of revising paperwork, the amended death certificates represent a step in the city’s longer journey to account for its errors.
“The fact that it said ‘accident’ or ‘accidental’ is just insulting,” said Daniel Hartstein, the lawyer for Lionel Dotson, the North Carolina man whose sisters, Katricia, 14, and Zenetta, 12, died in the bombing.
The city requested the Pennsylvania Department of Health amend the death certificates’ cause and manner of death over the summer, officials said. Pennsylvania does not make death certificates public, but a spokesperson for Mayor Jim Kenney confirmed that the manner of death for all victims had been amended and the causes of death changed to “homicidal violence.”
Mike Africa Jr., a MOVE member, said more accountability is needed for people still alive who played a role in the bombing, and those in the Medical Examiner’s Office and University of Pennsylvania who kept the remains for decades.
“I think the word that comes to the top of my head is infuriating,” he said of the city’s handling of the tragedy’s aftermath.
An explosive standoff, then decades of fallout
More than 37 years ago, conflict between police and MOVE led to an hours-long standoff at the organization’s Osage Avenue headquarters. Seeking to arrest group members, police cut off water and electricity to the building, fired tear gas and water cannons, and exchanged gunfire with MOVE members, but couldn’t dislodge the people within the heavily fortified structure.
The standoff ended when officers detonated an explosive on the roof, which started a fire that police allowed to burn, destroying blocks of rowhouses and displacing dozens of neighbors.
At the time, a medical examiner’s investigation concluded that the 11 deaths were accidental, the result of smoke inhalation and thermal injuries.
An independent review, commissioned by the city last year, found this determination wasn’t consistent with facts. A report released this summer audited the “grossly inadequate investigation” conducted by the Medical Examiner’s Office after the bombing, and its mishandling of victims’ remains in the decades since.
The city’s medical examiner in 1985 described the police and MOVE members’ decisions that day as “horribly misjudged” but not intended to kill.
But the independent review called the children’s deaths a direct result of the actions of others, regardless of intent, and determined the adults’ deaths were likely also homicides.
A finding of homicide means a death was caused by the actions of another, but doesn’t necessarily mean they were criminal, the recent report stated.
City officials said some victims’ remains did not show clear evidence of smoke inhalation, leading them to change the cause of death.
Death by gunshot, blunt force, or the explosion itself could not be ruled out in some cases.
Accounting for the MOVE remains
The city disclosed in 2021 the discovery of a box of remains in the city’s possession since 1985 without the families’ knowledge. The resulting outrage spurred the resignation of the city health commissioner, Thomas Farley, who had ordered the remains cremated.
For reasons that remain unclear, the report stated, the commissioner’s orders were not followed. Dotson has confirmed he received the remains of his sisters, but the city declined to confirm whether it had returned all remains, saying its discussions with victims’ relatives are confidential.
Africa Jr. also said he was not free to discuss whether the city still has any remains but said officials effectively “stole a corpse.”
“I think they should be given the same punishment I would be given,” he said.
Dotson, meanwhile, has stayed informed about efforts to correct the errors and bias that marred the original investigation of the deaths, said his lawyer, Hartstein, who has been in contact with the city about plans to commemorate the victims.
“He wants to make sure his sisters are never forgotten,” Hartstein said.
Staff writer Aubrey Whelan contributed to this article.
