His sisters died in the MOVE bombing. Now, 37 years later, he’s still waiting to lay them to rest

Lionell Dotson’s family didn’t often talk about MOVE, about the May afternoon in 1985 when police dropped a bomb on the house in West Philadelphia.

He was 8, and images of flames engulfing Osage Avenue filled TV screens across the country. He remembers a family member telling him that his sisters were in that house.

Nearly four decades later, the girls, ages 12 and 14, still have not been laid to rest. Dotson still is plagued with unanswered questions, despite an extensive investigation released earlier this month detailing how the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office mishandled the Dotson sisters’ remains — and those of other victims — from the beginning. But the probe provided few answers on why and how the sisters’ remains had languished at the office for decades.

“The city’s not owning up to any of their faults. It still takes a toll on me — how can people’s remains be in three, four, five, six, seven different places?” Dotson, now 45, said in a video call from his home in North Carolina.

The children’s mother, Consuewella Dotson Africa, was a prominent member of MOVE, the Black liberation group with a back-to-nature message that for years had been involved in a series of increasingly tense confrontations with Philadelphia police.

Consuewella was imprisoned with eight other MOVE members after a 1978 shootout that killed a Philadelphia police officer; Lionell had lived with his grandmother since his mother’s arrest. Though his family had hoped to also get custody of his sisters, Dotson said, Katricia and Zanetta remained in the house on Osage Avenue, where Lionell often visited them.

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.

The Dotsons were shattered by the girls’ deaths.

There was one thing Dotson had been certain of — that he and his family had properly laid his sisters to rest.

But even that small certainty was upended last spring, when the Dotsons learned that skeletal remains, likely Katricia’s, had been kept by University of Pennsylvania anthropologists since the investigation into the bombing — and even displayed in online courses viewed by thousands of students. Then, just a few weeks later, the city’s health commissioner resigned after conceding that the city Medical Examiner’s Office, too, still had remains of MOVE victims.

» READ MORE: Six key takeaways from the report on the mishandling of MOVE victims’ remains

Dotson — whose mother died shortly after the revelations about her daughters’ remains came to light — wants answers.

“They did an extensive investigation — I think it was a little drawn out — but some of it’s still inconclusive, as far as why they had my sisters’ remains, and who gave permission to keep those remains,” he said.

Dotson’s lawyer, Daniel Hartstein, says he and his client are exploring “all options” for legal remedy in the case of his sisters. Last fall, he and Dotson met on a Zoom call with lawyers from Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads, one of the legal teams hired by the city to investigate the mishandling of the remains. On the call, Dotson was shown remains that the city believes to be — but have not conclusively been identified as — Katricia and Zanetta. For decades they had been stored in plastic bags in a cardboard box.

“What I saw was horrendous,” he said. “These were my loved ones, my sisters. They showed me a tooth, a part of a bone. I’m like, Am I really witnessing these things? And to hear them called ‘specimens’ — that was a slap in the face.”

» READ MORE: Philly’s medical examiner’s office is understaffed and struggling to investigate deaths. Fixing it might take years.

Hartstein said that discussions around returning the Dotson sisters’ remains to his client stalled late last year, but since the release of the report, he’s expecting those talks to begin again. Earlier this year, activist Abdul-Aliy Muhammad reported that the city had declined to pay for Dotson’s travel to Philadelphia to receive his sisters’ remains in person. (A city spokesperson declined to comment on the process to return those remains.)

For now, Dotson is working to process the new grief grafted onto his family’s 37-year-old tragedy. His mother was always guarded when she spoke to him about MOVE; since her death, he says, he’ll never know the full story of her life, and his sisters’ lives, in the house on Osage Avenue.

He wants his sisters to be remembered as individuals, he said. “They were little girls, and they had no say in this. They perished together through no fault of their own — just by the city’s negligence and stupidity and ignorance and callousness.”

This article has been updated to reflect that Lionell Dotson and his lawyer met with lawyers from Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads to view remains believed to be that of his sisters.