Jack Porter received a very troubling letter on Wednesday from Harvard, his employer, saying that his beloved late wife Raya’s remains “may have been impacted” in a body part trafficking operation.

“What bothers me is that there’s somebody in some basement somewhere in this country or elsewhere fondling my wife’s body parts,” Porter told the Herald. “It could be her brain, her skin, her bones. This is disgusting and this is why there should be a severe punishment.”

The shocking letter came the same day that a former employee, Cedric Lodge, 55, of Harvard Medical School’s Anatomical Gifts program — which receives bodies donated to the university to teach medical students anatomy — had been indicted in federal court in Pennsylvania on charges related to stealing and then selling organs and other parts of human bodies before they were to be cremated. In all, seven people were named in court papers as participants in the ring.

“We have been working with information supplied by federal authorities and examining our records, particularly the logs showing when donor remains were sent to be cremated and when Lodge was on campus, to try to determine which donors may have been impacted,” Dr. George Daley, the dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard Medical School wrote.

“At this time, we cannot rule out the potential that Raya Porter’s remains may have been impacted. Federal authorities continue to investigate and as additional information emerges, we will be in touch with you,” the dean added.

Jack Porter, an associate of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, was shocked. He remembered receiving the cremated remains of his wife, Raya, in Feb. of 2019. He had parceled the remains out into two boxes, one scattered in the Ocean and one he took with him to Kyiv to give to his wife’s family there.

He said that Harvard — who is the defendant in a new lawsuit seeking class action certification for “negligence” for its role — had handled the donation “very respectfully,” and that the program had paid for his wife’s funeral costs. He did add, though, his concerns that maybe their security protocols were not adhered to as faithfully as they should have been.

“Most of the families are in deep anger or deep anguish,” Jack Porter said, adding that to his knowledge he is one of the few who has agreed to interviews.

He added that a “couple of things are mitigating” the shock for him: that his wife passed away six years ago and not as recently as some of the other victims’ families, he’s a sociologist so he’s trying to look into the minds of people who could do this, and that he is a son of Holocaust survivors.

“I don’t have hatred for Mr. Lodge, I pity him,” he said.

Raya Porter had died on Nov. 24, 2017, at a hospital in Needham following a battle with colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver, according to a death certificate. That means, Jack Porter said, the university had possession of her body for about year and three months — “and that fits into the time period about when Lodge had the ‘bright idea’ of making money.”

The federal indictment says the ring operated from sometime in 2018 until this past March. Harvard said they terminated Lodge’s employment on March 6 as the federal investigation had uncovered the alleged operation.

Lodge had worked there since Feb. 6, 1995, according to a Harvard facts page set up in the wake of the charges. His duties including “preparing for and intaking anatomical donors’ bodies, coordinating embalming, overseeing the storage and movement of cadavers to and from teaching labs, and, when studies were complete, preparing remains to be transported to and from the external crematorium and, when appropriate, for burial.”

Raya Porter, “a beautiful Ukrainian woman” and a “wonderful doctor,” Jack Porter said, had been gynecologist in her native country, but was unable to work as a physician in the U.S. because of the country’s “strict rules of hospital residency” so took on other jobs like being a nanny.

But the importance of medical training wasn’t lost on her and she took the opportunity to donate her body to Harvard Medical School to further science and medical training for future doctors. Now her husband, and other bereaved family members like him, are left only with questions because of that decision.

“I believe that they can recover some of these parts,” he said. “All of us who are family members believe it’s a horrible thing that happened.”