Daughter of doctor who went to Harvard Medical School then returned after his death is latest to sue over body-part thefts

If nothing else, Anne Weiss argues, the license plate on Cedric Lodge's car should have made officials at Harvard Medical School suspicious what their mortuary director was up to all those years. But they weren't, Weiss claims, and so they're as much to blame for the grief that has fallen over her and other people whose relatives willed their bodies to medical research - only to learn last month that Lodge was busy selling off brains, faces and other body parts to a ghoulish ring of collectors.

In a lawsuit filed today in Suffolk Superior Court, Weiss is seeking to become lead plaintiff in a class action against Harvard Medical School for what went on at the school's mortuary between 2018 and 2023 - when, federal officials charge, Lodge ran the mortuary as a parts supermarket.

Weiss says that before his death in 2018, her father, Dr. William Buchanan of Greenfield, asked that his body be donated to the medical school he attended, as "a logical extension" of his devotion to medicine and education. Buchanan had spent 40 years as a pediatrician in the western Massachusetts community following his graduation from Harvard Medical School.

According to Weiss's complaint, her father's body was delivered to the school within a day after his death - the family held a funeral without his body "where they celebrated his life and memory."

Then, last month, the complaint continues, the school notified her that her father's body "may have been impacted" by Lodge's actions.

This ghoulish black market was allowed to flourish in plain sight operated by an HMS morgue employee whose lack of respect for the dead was obvious to anyone who scrutinized his behavior; it is alleged that he drove to work each day and presumably parked in the HMS parking lot with a license plate identifying him as the "Grim-R" - as in, the grim reaper.

The Grim Reaper posted images of himself dressed up in the garb of the undertaker in a Dickens novel with a black top hat and overcoat. His license plate and open association with macabre hobbies revealed his view of his job at the morgue as a backdrop for his fantasies instead of a place of reverence and respect. This "undertaker" invited his cohorts who fetishized human body parts to the morgue to shop. The Grim Reaper publicized his mocking moniker all while treating the morgue as an amusement park attraction for his friends and customers. Despite these tell-tale signs of malfeasance, he continued to have unfettered access to the remains donated to the morgue.

Also:

A basic routine interview with Lodge about his vanity plate may have led to the revelation that he and his wife frequented social media sites focused on macabre hobbies associated with the occult, including the collection and trading of human remains ...

It is apparent that no such background interview ever happened.

Weiss's suit alleges intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence and interference with a corpse.

Her suit is at least the third by survivors seeking to become the lead plaintiffs in a class-action suit against Harvard.