The Penn Museum announced Wednesday that it has located additional human remains related to the MOVE bombing.

On November 13, the Penn Museum published a statement – titled “Towards a Respectful Resolution” – where they said an “ongoing comprehensive inventory of (the museum’s) biological anthropology section” led to the discovery. The statement confirmed that the remains matched Delisha Africa’s records and noted that the findings had been communicated to her family.

“As we promised the Africa Family and our community in 2021, we have acted with speed and transparency in returning the remains and will continue to do so with all human remains in our care,” the statement said.

In 1985, Philadelphia City Govt bombarded a house on Osage Avenue that housed MOVE, a black liberation advocacy group. The attack killed 11 people — including five children between the ages of seven and 13 — and destroyed 61 houses in the neighborhood, leaving 250 residents homeless.

The remains include a pelvic bone and a femur that were previously in the custody of now-retired anthropology professor Alan Mann, who received the remains from the city of Philadelphia in the 1990s after being asked for assistance in identifying them.

Mann studied the remains in collaboration with Penn Museum Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Physical Anthropology Janet Monge before taking them to Princeton University for further research. They were shuttled back and forth between Penn and Princeton for over 35 years.

At a 2023 press conference, Ramona Africa, the only living adult survivor of the MOVE bombing, said the Penn Museum “abused those remains, they refused to give us those remains, the bones.”

In 2021, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that a forensic anthropologist hired by the MOVE Philadelphia Special Investigative Committee identified some remains as belonging to a 12-year-old victim, known as Delisha, and a 14-year-old victim, known as Tree. The location of the remains was unclear at the time, but Penn Museum Director Christopher Woods said The New York Times that the remains were sent to Mann in April 2021.

As of 2023, the location and status of the remains of Delisha Africa had not been confirmed to the public.

Ramona Africa said at the 2023 press conference that he cannot trust the Penn Museum. Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, a local community activist who also spoke at the event, presented claims of new evidence that the museum holds additional remains of two MOVE bombing victims. The evidence came from photos on an online photo-sharing site of a public event that was hosted in 2014.

The Princeton lecture series titled “Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology,” in which Monge and an undergraduate student examined the remains and tried to determine the age of the bones, also previously provided evidence of the remains.