Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  On September 11, 2001, it quickly became clear to us, from what we knew of the Trade Center’s population during a business day, that the death toll would be far in excess of anything we had ever expected. Although the initial estimates of up to 30,000 fatalities quickly and happily plummeted—what a blessing that the strikes had come before the full complement of workers had arrived at the towers that morning—we were still faced with a task of monumental proportions: processing and identifying the remains of those thousands who did die. Not only was the scale of the disaster unique, but it set for us a series of logistical challenges that would change forever the way OCME conducted its business—the way New York City counted its dead.

  Within an hour of the second tower’s collapse, I began trying to wrap my head around these challenges.

  I realized, almost at once, that we were about to be flooded with what amounted to information from two different sources: the postmortem (data from the remains themselves) and the antemortem (descriptions and details about the victims provided by their family members). As in a death investigation, it would be our job to combine everything we learned from both those sources to enable us to identify each victim. Only now we would be doing so with thousands of victims at once.

  The first thing we had to do, I knew, was set up a receiving area—really, a receiving system—for bodies and remains. The call went out for refrigerated trucks, and two came almost immediately, one from a vendor at the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, something that would have been funny on any other day. These first two trucks (eventually we would use twenty-four of them) were stationed right outside the office’s receiving bay on Thirtieth Street, east of First Avenue. Remains arriving from Ground Zero would first go into these trucks. When we were ready for them, they would be taken through processing.

  To complete the receiving system, I proceeded into the morgue, still accompanied by Dave Eibert, commanding officer of NYPD’s Missing Persons Unit, Mark Flomenbaum, the first deputy chief medical examiner, and Bob Shaler, head of OCME’s DNA lab. In addition, our group had swelled to include an entourage of around fifteen interested coworkers. Taking a marker, some paper, and tape, I began to designate areas around the mortuary for the various stations we would need by sticking signs on the walls designating a particular spot for each station, including Fingerprints, Evidence Recovery, DNA collection, X-rays, Dental, Examination/Autopsy, and Anthropology. Some areas didn’t have a room or niche of their own, just a wide length of hallway. And so the basic structure of the system was in place. We would receive and first examine the remains outside on the street and then take them into the building for processing.

  The OCME is fortunate to have a terrific working relationship with the NYPD, and within half an hour of the disaster, our agency’s liaison to the local precinct had made contact and was assured that uniformed officers were on their way. By 10:00 A.M., the NYPD had closed Thirtieth Street to pedestrian and vehicular traffic, so we were able to set up our triage station outside on the street near the refrigerated trucks.

  The first step in the identification process was what we thought of as triage. An ME and an anthropologist would examine the contents of each body bag as they came off the trucks—first to make sure that what had been sent to us were remains, and then to determine if the remains were human.

  Triage is a process commonly associated with hospitals, as doctors try to separate and prioritize patients before treatment. The situation we faced was similar: the material that arrived in our care after the attacks was so badly damaged and fragmented that firefighters and police officers working in the Ground Zero recovery efforts found it difficult to differentiate remains from other matter—from pulverized concrete, for example, which strongly resembles cremated human remains. “When in doubt, bag it and send it up,” we told them—and the result was that our triage table saw all manner of items arrive, some of them downright bizarre.

  One such item, rescued from the trash pile, sits on my desk to this day: a set of plastic novelty crooked teeth, yellow and gnarly, clearly from the desk of some office prankster. From time to time, I glance at the choppers and wonder about the person who owned them. Did he or she perish that day? Whoever it was must have had a juvenile sense of humor not unlike my own. I hope he or she survived; perhaps it’s you—in which case I hope you’ll give me a call.

  Once the triage team pronounced an item to be remains, the next step was to determine if they were human. Yes, human: there were a large number of restaurants and food service shops in the WTC complex, and several caterers. We received some “remains” that were soon labeled by our triage people as food items—poultry, pork, chicken, and beef.

  Some remains were so small or so badly damaged that triage was unable to verify by examination if they were human or not; in such instances, the remains were treated as human until the DNA lab could make a final determination.

  Looking back now from the end of the process, I realize that since not all the remains yielded usable DNA, there might still be a bone or two from a chop or steak mixed in among the unidentified remains. If that is the case, so be it—far better to have kept everything than to have discarded what might yet be identified as human remains, and with them the possibility of an identification that could bring comfort to a grieving family.

  The remains confirmed as human were brought from triage to stations within the building, and after processing to an ever-enlarging storage facility. Not all the remains, though, were stored together. Personnel from NYPD and FDNY who were stationed with us at the morgue demanded that any police officer’s or firefighter’s remains be lodged separately from civilian remains. I had reservations about this practice, on grounds of both practical requirements and social sensibilities; I was reluctant to accept a process that suggested that civilian dead should be treated with any less regard than the uniformed services.

  But my attitude slowly changed as I watched the cops and firefighters honor their fallen comrades by treating their remains with an almost religious reverence. There was a long tradition of such reverence in the uniformed services, I learned, dating back at least to the Roman Empire, whose fallen soldiers were brought home on their shields. Even during normal times in New York City, a police officer or firefighter who dies in the line of duty receives an elaborate funeral usually attended by thousands of comrades, sometimes arriving for the occasion from all over the country. Similar traditions exist in most large U.S. cities. As I’ve come to appreciate, these funerals are a way for surviving service members to say to the world, quite rightly, “What we do is dangerous; what we do is brave; we sacrifice ourselves for the greater good.”

  Certainly many of the service men and women who responded to the call of duty on September 11 did an extraordinary thing: they ran into the buildings while everyone else who was able was running out. It was this extraordinary, self-sacrificing behavior—which ended up killing so many of the uniformed service men and women—that my NYPD and FDNY colleagues were honoring by requesting special treatment for their fallen comrades: “Honor these brave men and women because they willingly gave their lives to help others. And honor our profession because we who remain could be similarly called to sacrifice.”

  However my own feelings on the issue may have changed, many of the civilian families never warmed much to the idea of this special treatment for the uniformed service members. They knew that whenever remains that might belong to a member of service (MOS) were found at Ground Zero, all work at the site came to a halt, a horn was sounded, and an honor guard was formed to salute as the remains were brought out. Then a police escort would escort the remains uptown to OCME where another honor guard would salute as the remains were brought in for processing. Civilian remains received no such treatment. The MOS families were notified immediately after verification of an identification, and sometimes family members were brought in by helicopter from outlying areas. Civilian families were notified by the NYPD at a more relaxed pace, and no helicopters were disp
atched to bring them in to the city.

  Not surprisingly, many civilian families rejected the notion that there were, or should be, two tiers of victims. It was a notion that began on the first day with the separation of the remains, and it created discord between the two groups of families that has continued until today.

  Regardless of how the remains were transported or whether they would end up being stored in MOS or civilian trailers, they all went through the same process on arrival. After triage, the remains were assigned a folder with a unique case number and what we called an “escort”—a dedicated person to attend each remain. The idea of an escort was an ad hoc procedure that I came up with that first morning, in an attempt to ensure that no remains would ever end up sitting on a gurney in a hallway without a responsible party available who knew what had been done with them or what yet needed to be done.

  At the first station, the Exam/Autopsy table, a gloved and gowned ME carefully went through the remains and described what he or she saw while a scribe, usually a medical student, wrote down the ME’s spoken descriptions. Also at the table was a cop from Missing Persons, who took his own notes, and a photographer, who shot both Polaroid and 35mm film. Also present were criminalists from the DNA lab, available to take specimens from the remains and bring them up to the lab.

  Together this team recorded all possible postmortem information, starting with the exact time and location where the remains were found, and the hour they arrived at OCME. The postmortem information included a detailed description of the remains, identifying features, type of trauma, and personal property (e.g., jewelry, eyewear, piercings, and any other objects that accompanied the remains).

  Our working relationships with many agencies and departments allowed us to have the Fingerprint station manned by NYPD personnel and the Evidence and Property station conducted by the FBI and NYPD. There was also a Dental station where OCME forensic odontologists were in charge. Personnel from various federal agencies roamed the stations, looking for clues to the identities of the attackers and for other evidence about the crime. Some of those agents worked for clandestine intelligence agencies; we learned not to ask them too many questions.

  Once we had set up the physical stations down in the morgue, I felt a huge sense of relief. Yet the feeling was fleeting; I was all too aware that processing the remains was only half of the postmortem work ahead of us.

  That first morning, before any bodies arrived, I left the morgue and headed back upstairs to the first floor (the administrative level) to start addressing the other half of the work—the paperwork—before the coming informational flood overwhelmed us. No one yet knew how many people had died, or how many remains we might have to identify. The initial rumors of 30,000 deaths were revised downward quickly, but even a month after the event, the predicted number of dead still hovered at 6,000. The eventual death toll, 2,749, was amazingly low, given that up to 50,000 people worked in the towers every day. For all the tragedy involved, it’s worth noting that the emergency response to the WTC attacks was also the greatest rescue of civilians in modern history—a fact that should bring pride and comfort to the families of the brave men and women who died during the effort.

  So, the paperwork was my arena, and as soon as I felt that the morgue process was under control, I began designing an information flow system that would meet the unique challenge of working with such a massive influx of new cases. Each remain would be given its own disaster folder, containing every possible piece of information connected with that remain: intake forms, evidence and property forms, body charts and diagrams, and requisition forms for sending specimens up to our various laboratories. From the outset, we constructed the process in a way that insisted on zero tolerance for anything getting lost or shunted aside. We even included checklists to help ensure that each remain went through the appropriate stages of the identification system. We set up an assembly line for producing the folders, but even when it was working at top speed, WTC remains were arriving at the office so rapidly that they sometimes outpaced our new-folder bucket brigade.

  Of course, OCME’s regular work did not stop just because of 9/11, and we were also keenly aware of the need to distinguish the WTC remains from the unrelated cases that still arrived, in normal fashion, every day. For that matter, especially in those early days, it was unclear whether the United States might be attacked again soon. So Tom Brondolo, OCME’s deputy commissioner for administration, came up with another innovation, a system that assigned a unique “Disaster Manhattan” (DM) case number to each remain, allowing us to differentiate the WTC remains from the other dead. The last thing we wanted was confusion in the morgue; the numbering system helped to prevent that. Tom printed a thousand sheets of color-coded stickers with DM numbers, and as I carried the first batch of stickers to the Identification Office, the numbers of dead represented by these sheets of labels made me feel sick all over again at the magnitude of the disaster.

  The next stage was to transfer the information we had gathered into a computerized system. All the precious information we were collecting by hand, and recording on paper, would be useless if it just lay in folders—especially when it came to the daunting task of collating dispersed remains and looking for possible clues that could lead to a positive identification. My mind raced with possibilities: I imagined a hand being found amid the rubble and that there would be a ring on that hand, a plain yellow band bearing the inscription “JD & JD forever.” I further imagined Jane Doe coming in, reporting her husband John Doe missing in the Trade Center disaster, and filling out a missing persons report mentioning that he wore such a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. Needless to say, the chances of solving that puzzle would be far greater if our team were able to search a computerized database of such clues—a convenience that was far less necessary under normal circumstances, but which became crucial with the volume of unsolved cases we suddenly faced after 9/11.

  But there was one hitch: as far as I knew, no one in the forensic field had developed such a database—certainly not at OCME. So Tom started the process from scratch, using a program called Dataease that was especially good for rapid development of “user interfaces”—the screens used to enter and view data. We set up four data-entry stations in our conference room; we knew we’d need more before long, but we had to start somewhere. I commandeered a hodgepodge crew of identification staff, MLIs, and even a forensic dentist to staff the stations; by the time the first folder came up from the morgue later that day, we were ready.

  As I ran around the building, fueled with adrenaline, I must have looked like a dervish to some of my coworkers, as I tried to be everywhere at once. I issued peremptory orders to staffers and volunteers who had begun to flood in: You go to this station. You enter that data. Here’s how you enter the information. Yet everyone was so willing to help that my commands met with few objections.

  And the help came from outside, too: We received unsolicited calls offering gloves, gurneys, office supplies, refrigerated trucks, food—anything they could imagine us needing—in addition to volunteers. I asked someone at the communications unit to keep a log of each one of the thousands of offers of help we received. You had to be careful what you asked for: One day, in an OCME hallway, I muttered to myself, “We need some decent copiers around here.” Someone overheard me, and presto, within a day or so, two $30,000 copiers appeared in our offices. I never found out who provided them, and I don’t think we ever received a bill.

  At one point during that day, I heard someone mention that OCME actually had an official Mass Disaster Plan, devised to help the office cope with high-fatality incidents—that is, events in which ten or more people were killed.

  I never even opened that document; it would have been useless in a tragedy of this scale. How quickly we despise today, I thought, the amateurs we were yesterday.

  As it happened, the first body to arrive was someone I knew of from news reports and by reputation. Case number DM-01-0001 was Father Mychal Judge, a F
ranciscan friar who was a chaplain to the FDNY. But only Father Judge and a few more of the first bodies through our doors were relatively intact. We very rapidly noted a horrifying change in the condition of the remains. Even seasoned MEs who had years of experience became dismayed as body bag after body bag of pulverized human remains came through. We saw every conceivable and quite a few impossible-to-imagine types of trauma: remains that ranged in size from whole bodies, to small pieces the size of a dime, in conditions that ranged from burned to blasted, shredded to crushed. That first day, some of the remains actually arrived still smoking and warm from the fires.

  I stationed myself in the intake area and personally logged in the first thirty-two remains longhand in a large bound record book. I handled these myself because I wanted to be sure the system was working properly, from the holding trucks to the triage to the various stations and on to the storage trucks. This processing system that we threw together in an hour worked well that day and would continue to function well until May 2002, when the last of the WTC remains were processed.

  After the first few days, we knew that the OCME effort would focus exclusively on identification. Other than the identity of the victims, there was not much mystery about the cause of death in this homicide investigation. Everyone in the world who owned a television had witnessed the crime, and within seventy-two hours, we also knew who had done it. All that was left was to determine who had perished. This one-dimensional aspect of the investigation thrust OCME into the forefront of public consciousness as never before in the agency’s history. So we turned all of our efforts toward a seemingly impossible goal: identifying every victim we possibly could, no matter how difficult it might be or how much time it might take. The public needed us to do this, Dr. Hirsch was determined to do it, and as director of identifications, I was committed to devoting all our energies and resources to the identifications.