BOSTON (Legal Newsline) - The major plaintiffs firm Morgan & Morgan has stepped into litigation against Harvard Medical School after an organ-harvesting scheme there was revealed.
Garrett Lee and Ryan Lang of the firm's Boston office filed a proposed class action lawsuit June 28 in Suffolk County Superior Court. They name eight individual plaintiffs suing over allegations Cedric Lodge and four others at Harvard sold heads, brains, skin, bones and other human remains.
The Keches Law Group in Milton beat Morgan & Morgan to the courtroom, filing its own class action 12 days earlier. According to plainff John Bozek's class action, prior to her death in February of 2019, his mother Adele Mazzone arranged to have her body donated to Harvard Medical School for the study of science and medicine.
He claims that his mother's body was among the donated cadavers that were mishandled by the Harvard Medical School morgue.
The allegations say cadavers were dissected and sold to third parties by Lodge, the former morgue manager. Bozek claims Harvard owed a duty to the families who entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to Harvard for the goal of furthering academic and medical research and were negligent in the hiring, training and supervision of its morgue manager.
Lodge and four others face federal indictments announced in June.
Morgan & Morgan's lawsuit says the defendants took advantage of "selfless gifts".
"(T)he 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," it says.
Harvard has not accepted its responsibility for what happened, it adds.