PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia medical examiner released the remains of two victims of the 1985 MOVE bombing back to the victims’ brother on Wednesday, ending more than a year of unanswered questions and fighting to put the two to rest.
Lionell Dotson traveled to Philadelphia from his home in North Carolina to receive the remains of his sisters, Katricia and Zanetta Dotson, at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office.
An assistant medical examiner apologized to him and his family, he said, speaking to reporters before taking the remains to be cremated at Ivy Hill Cemetery.
There, he clutched his sisters’ cremated remains to his chest.
“I got y’all. I’m gonna take care of y’all,” he said, tearing up. “Your little brother loves you.”
Katricia and Zanetta were 12 and 14 when police dropped a bomb on the Osage Avenue home, killing them along with nine others in the ensuing fire.
Their transfer to the family Wednesday ended a more than yearlong battle to find out what happened to their remains.
At Ivy Hill, the family briefly viewed the remains in a small chapel before they were taken to be cremated.
“It was very emotional, very sensitive,” Dotson said. “But I’m glad I got to physically see it, so I have a sense of what they endured.”
Dotson, who traveled to Philadelphia with his wife, three children and two-month-old grandson, said he could barely describe his emotions once he finally had his sisters’ remains in hand.
He said he wants Philadelphians to remember the pain he has endured — to prevent it from happening to another family.
“It’s mixed emotions — about the fact that I’m finally getting to take them from this wretched place,” he said. “The hardest part is now behind me, now that I know my sisters are going home with me.”
Last spring, the Dotsons learned that skeletal remains, likely Katricia’s, had been kept by University of Pennsylvania anthropologists since the investigation into the bombing and had even been used in online anthropology courses and seen by thousands of students without their consent.
A few weeks after the discovery, the city’s health commissioner, Thomas Farley, resigned after admitting that the city Medical Examiner’s Office also had remains of MOVE victims.
Katricia and Zanetta’s mother was Consuewella Dotson Africa, a prominent member of MOVE, the Black liberation group with a back-to-nature message that had squared off with police numerous times during its existence.
Consuewella was imprisoned with eight other MOVE members after a 1978 shootout that killed a Philadelphia police officer. Despite his family trying to get custody of his sisters, Katricia and Zanetta stayed in the house on Osage Avenue, where Lionell often visited them, he said.
Lionell had lived with his grandmother since his mother’s arrest.
Nine others were killed in the fire, including three other children. After police dropped the bomb, city officials let the fire burn, destroying blocks of rowhouses and displacing dozens of neighbors. No city official was ever criminally charged in the bombing.
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