With a box that is said to contain the ashes of her mother, Mary Louise Powell is shown in her condo in Southwest Washington. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

George Washington University officials learned in the fall of 2015 that there might be problems identifying cadavers that had been donated to the medical school to train future doctors.

But for months afterward, GWU continued to cremate unidentified bodies and give the ashes to loved ones who were unaware of the mix-up — and who in some cases got the wrong cremains, according to a class-action lawsuit initiated by three families Tuesday.

The lawsuit, filed in D.C. Superior Court, alleges that the continued cremation of cadavers after problems came to light was part of a plan to cover up the school’s negligence and that it hampered genetic testing that might have helped identify the bodies.

“There has been no intent on the part of the university to mislead affected families,” GWU spokeswoman Candace Smith said.

The medical school announced in early February that it had lost track of the identities of as many as 50 bodies donated for training first-year medical students. It suspended the body donor program at the time. University officials said that the problems surfaced internally in November and that they believed the sloppy record-keeping may have gone back seven years, affecting an untold number of families.

A family photograph of Mary Louise Powell’s late mother, Fidelia Ridgeway, during her 80th birthday. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

[Unidentified cadavers in GW program point to years of problems]

In many cases, the donors or their families had requested that the cremated remains be given to loved ones.

The three plaintiffs, Eileen Kostaris, Alex Naar and Mary Louise Powell, allege that their relatives’ remains have been lost, possibly given to the wrong family or buried in a cemetery without authorization. They each seek $10 million from GWU.

University officials have said that identification tags attached to the toes of the cadavers were removed and not replaced when the bodies were moved between the university morgue and student labs. The person in charge of that process stopped working at the university when the problems became known in November, school officials said.

Naar’s mother, Ruth W. Kurle, died in October 2013, and her body was donated to the medical school.

A body that GWU initially said was Kurle’s was cremated on Jan. 21 this year. The university told Naar that it was sure the body was Kurle’s because the school found during a 2015 inventory that the cadaver did not have a larynx and Kurle had undergone a laryngectomy. But the school’s records also indicated the body they believed was Kurle’s was donated in 2015, two years after Naar’s mother’s body was donated.

The lawsuit alleges that Powell received the remains of the wrong person last December, citing conflicting information provided by the university about the timing of her mother’s cremation. What became of the remains of Kostaris’s grandmother is unknown, the suit alleges, adding that a university official told her that the remains may have been buried or given to the wrong family.

After the problems were discovered but before it notified families, GWU began collecting genetic samples of bodies it sent for cremation. Families were not told of these samples, the lawsuit alleges, until the plaintiffs’ attorney, Cary Hansel, threatened a lawsuit. And GWU has “ignored repeated requests” to make the samples available to families for testing by hired experts, the suit alleges.

The cremations took place in Maryland. State regulations forbid the cremation of unidentified bodies, the lawsuit alleges.