Son of Saugus woman who willed her body to Harvard Medical School sues over body-parts sales

The son of a Saugus woman who willed her body to Harvard Medical School in 2019 today sued Harvard University and its former medical-school morgue director - who now faces federal criminal charges that he ran the morgue as a supermarket for people who liked to collect brains, heads, faces, hearts and other parts from bodies that were only supposed to be used for medical education and research.

In his suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, John Bozek of Tewksbury is seeking to become lead plaintiff in a class action for as many as 400 families against the university and Cedric Lodge - who was arrested this week along with his wife, the owner of a Peabody store specializing in creepy objects - including, allegedly, actual human parts - and other people in Pennsylvania and Arkansas:

The law recognizes that human beings are entitled to be treated with decency and dignity after death, including by not having their bodies mishandled, viewed, dismembered, and/or sold by those entrusted with them. Families who lose loved ones find solace in temporarily entrusting the bodies of their loved ones to an institution such as Harvard Medical School with the goal of furthering academic and medical research. The actions of the Harvard Medical School morgue manager in mishandling and selling the body parts of cadavers donated to the school was a reprehensible tragedy that should never have happened.

Bozek's mother, Adele Mazzone, died at 74 on Feb. 5, 2019, leaving behind her husband and five children, after a career as a hair stylis and colorist on the North Shore. She grew up in Marblehead and moved to Saugus from Revere just two years before her death.

Prior to her death, Adele Mazzone arranged with Harvard and HMS to temporarily donate her body to Harvard and HMS to further the study of science and medicine.

Adele Mazzone's deceased body was delivered to Harvard and HMS shortly after her death.

Upon information and belief, the body of Adele Mazzone was one of the many donated cadavers mishandled at the HMS morgue by Defendant Cedric Lodge. ...

The purported ashes of Adele Mazzone were delivered to her next of kin and surviving family in or around April 2021.

Bozek accuses Harvard of negligence for failing to keep somebody like Lodge from stripping and selling off loved one's body parts, in violation of both common human decency and more specifically a state law that bars the desecration of bodies, of causing the families emotional distress on learning what might have happened to their loved one's bodies at the hands of a ghoulish sales ring. The complaint makes similar complaints against Lodge.

The suit seeks an end to dissecting, let alone selling, any bodies or parts for profit at Harvard Medical School, that Harvard show how it's going to keep this sort of thing from ever happening again and that it set up a fund to remunerate affected families, in amounts to be determined at trial.

In a message to the Harvard Medical School community after news broke of the arrests, George Daley, Harvard's dean of the faculty of medicine and Edward Hundert, dean for medical education, wrote they were doing more than just being appalled by the whole situation:

Harvard University has appointed an external panel of experts to evaluate our Anatomical Gift Program and morgue policies and practices, with the goal of providing constructive feedback and recommendations to improve security for the program and for the generous whole-body donations it receives.