Harvard University will pay $53 million to settle a ghoulish class-action suit brought by families claiming an imprisoned former morgue manager at the Ivy League institution mishandled the bodies of their loved ones donated to its medical school and even sold their body parts on the black market.
A state court judge in Boston preliminarily approved the eight-figure settlement Tuesday in the suit stemming from the 2023 arrest of disgraced former Harvard Medical School’s morgue manager, Cedric Lodge.
Lodge, who worked at Harvard’s morgue for nearly 30 years, was arrested in 2023 and ultimately sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school for medical research purposes.
As far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts — including “heads, faces, brains, skin and hands” — which he’d then bring to his home in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
In one horrifying example heard during his trial, Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin called a “deeply horrifying reality” in a court filing.
“In another, Cedric and Denise Lodge sold a man’s face — perhaps to be kept on a shelf, perhaps to be used for something even more disturbing,” Martin said.
His wife was sentenced to just over a year in prison for assisting him.
The dozens of family members involved in the suit accused the school of negligence, contending it knew of Lodge’s grotesque side business but ignored it until his 2023 indictment.
A judge initially dismissed the cases, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court revived them in October, saying the families’ claims were sufficient to indicate the university acted in poor faith in handling the bodies, which were subjected to “horrific and undignified treatment” for years.
Harvard’s dean of faculty of medicine, George Daley, and Harvard Medical School’s dean for medical education, Bernard Chang, sent a message to the school community Monday calling Lodge’s actions “despicable, abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community.”
In addition to the cash component of the settlement, Harvard Medical School was required to provide a statement to the impacted families via webinar to confirm Lodge’s criminal acts were “morally reprehensible.”
The school will also establish an annual scholarship for medical schools in honor of those whose bodies were donated to advance its research starting in the 2027-2028 academic year.
“We hope that this resolution ensures that this never happens to another family ever again,” John Morgan, whose law firm Morgan & Morgan represented families in the suit, said in a statement to the outlet.
Harvard did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
With Post wires
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