Then, this week, WHYY s
Billy Penn published a story saying that human remains from the bombing, believed to be those of two children, sat in a cardboard box on a shelf at Penn’s Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for years. Originally, they’d been entrusted to a Penn anthropologist, Alan Mann, so that he could verify their identities. Yet decades later, apparently because Mann was unable to conclusively identify them, they had had not been returned to family members.
Mann took a job at Princeton in 2001 and brought the remains with him. Janet Monge, Mann’s former student, reportedly reanalyzed the bones from 2016 to 2019 during her time as curator of the Penn Museum’s physical anthropology section. She also reportedly used them to teach an online course on forensic anthropology. But by 2019, Mann had retired and Monge left Penn, making the remains’ exact whereabouts a mystery.