Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  During a week of all-nighters, Adrian Jones and I had come up with a series of computer screens that would allow us to enter affidavit data and use it to generate a death certificate. The software worked, but when we tried to teach a large group of volunteers and clerical temps how to use it, things quickly went awry. After a few moments of confusion, a hand went up in the back of the room, and a pleasant-faced, supremely calm lady, looking for all the world like the Pacific Northwest “granola girl” that she was, stood up and said, “I teach computers for a living; I get what you’re trying to do here. Can I take over?”

  Adrian nodded, and I said, “Yup. It’s all yours.” I stuck around for a few minutes to watch her, became completely impressed, and then got out of her way. By the next day, she was telling me how many workers she needed on each shift. By the third day, she was recommending which workers to retain and which could not do the task. On the fourth day, I placed her in charge of the entire affidavit-entry process. Katie’s unique combination of computer skills, sociological training, and willingness to work made her invaluable. She was the quickest study I’d ever met in my life, and when DMORT finally refused to “re-up” her, OCME hired her to be my assistant director. Her husband and cat came to join her in New York, and she kept working.

  That appointment allowed me to deal with another developing problem having to do with the DX certificates. Some victim families initially did not want nonphysical remains certificates because they thought that accepting one would mean that we would stop searching for their loved one’s remains or stop trying to identify remains as belonging to their loved one.

  I talked with many such families, trying to reassure them that we would not stop searching, and that if we did eventually make an identification, we would hasten to replace the nonphysical remains certificate with a physical remains certificate. I stressed that insurance companies and other property guardians would just as readily accept one kind of certificate as the other. Can you imagine any mortgage company in America at that moment in time, refusing to accept a New York City nonphysical remains death certificate, or not granting a WTC-victim family a few months grace on a mortgage payment?

  My friend Dr. Steve Schwartz, registrar of the city of New York and head of vital statistics (the division of the Department of Health that issues death certificates), set up an auxiliary shop at our office precisely for the purpose of hurrying along the issuance of the judicial-decree death certificates. We all knew the importance of this matter. Still, some problems remained in the system, stemming from the Surrogate Court’s refusal to identify the decedent on the court order beyond using his or her name. For example, we had four decedents named Michael Francis Lynch, two of them firefighters. I tried everything I could to have the Court use our ID numbers—or any other recognizable ID numbers, such as a Social Security tag—to more precisely identify the person for whom the decree was being issued, but it was to no avail. We had to scramble every time a court order came in on a duplicate name.

  Eventually, we issued 2,347 nonphysical remains certificates to families of the victims, most of them during a frantic, three-month marathon. Overall, there were 2,749 victims of the mass murder at the WTC, which means that 85 percent of the victim families benefited by receiving a judicial decree certificate. By the time the identification shop shut down, we had identified more than 1,600 (roughly 60 percent) of the victims. In other words, many of the victim families received both kinds of certificates, but a large proportion of the identifications happened years after the DX certificates had been issued.

  I exclude from these numbers four bodies that we identified and listed as suicides: those remains belonged to the terrorists. This fact is not well-known to the public: four out of the twelve or thirteen terrorists aboard the two planes were actually identified through our process. The positive identifications of the four were made by matching postmortem DNA obtained from body parts found at the site with DNA samples provided to OCME by the FBI. Federal investigators had taken swabbings from places the terrorists were known to have been, such as motel rooms and airport gates. As soon as these remains were identified, the terrorists’ remains were segregated from other remains and turned over to Dr. Hirsch. I don’t know precisely what was done with those remains, but Dr. Hirsch told me that he would make sure they would not be interred in a place where people sympathetic to the terrorists could make a shrine of their bones. My understanding is that they were taken off U.S. soil. The four identified murderers and their unidentified criminal companions are not listed among the WTC dead, and no death certificates have been issued for any of them. But then again, none of their relatives have ever come forward to attempt to claim their bodies or request a death certificate. Let ’em try.

  TWELVE

  LONG BEFORE 9/11, my training and experience had taught me a great deal about the grieving process. I learned that mourners traverse through at least seven distinct phases, some of whose names have made their way into popular culture; today, most people are aware of the existence of the grieving phases of anger, bargaining, denial, and acceptance and are aware that each is a step along the healing process. My training also taught me though that having this knowledge doesn’t make it any easier for the mourner to take those steps.

  That is why nearly every religion, ethnicity, race, and social stratum creates complex rituals surrounding a member’s death to provide structure and to ease the transitions through the stages of mourning. Wakes, funerals, memorial services, headstone unveilings, the Jewish post-burial ritual of sitting shiva, funeral masses, and the like are all examples of such death rituals. The rituals are so pervasive in our society that even non-relatives who have in some way been involved in a person’s life expect to participate in the rites observed when he or she dies.

  Normally, even when a family member’s demise is sudden and violent, surviving relatives and friends derive benefit from rituals that help people to mourn and then to move on. But the WTC families were robbed of these normal rituals. For all those many survivors, it was as though their loved ones had simply left home one day bound for the Twin Towers and simply never returned, not even as a body to be buried or cremated. These families could not attend wakes for their son or daughter, or sit shiva, or take part in funerals, cemetery visits, or any of the social rituals that might have helped them make the transitions to a life after mourning.

  The nature of these deaths, coupled with the absence of traditions designed to help families cope, led directly to the fifth major task the Incident Command Center handled: the development of a unit to interact with the victims’ families, both at OCME headquarters and at the Family Assistance Center. Through our regular (non-WTC) case load, we were already dealing with the families of the more than twenty-four thousand dead each year, so we were well practiced in interacting with a decedent’s next of kin. The WTC families, however, presented challenges related to the unique nature of their grieving processes.

  I hate the word closure and try never to use it. My experience at OCME taught me that there really is no such thing. The notion of closure is almost insulting—you cannot tell a parent who just lost a child, “Hey, don’t worry, you’ll get over it.” The wound of the death of a close relative or friend never completely heals; there is always a scar. We do, however, transition through the various phases of the healing process. The WTC families’ unique situation was created in part by the prolonged process of the extrication and identification of the remains. It meant that months or even years might pass before their loved one was found, if ever. To make matters worse, the families were grieving under the harsh glare of the brightest media spotlight imaginable. Every reference to the WTC seen on television, heard on the radio, or read in newspapers, magazines, and web pages was like a dagger in the hearts of these families. They had no respite, no escape from being reminded of their loved one’s death in the tragedy. As a result, many families kept spinning in an endless circle of grief, unable to break out of it and move on.

  T
heir unending grief, in turn, placed a great deal of stress on the OCME employees who were interacting with them. In our regular, day-to-day work, OCME functions more like an ER than any other institution of medical care in that we tend not to have prolonged relationships with the families with whom we interact. In most instances, we meet the “patient’s” family once and likely never again.

  From the immediate aftermath of the attacks onward, we could see that our relationship with the WTC families would entail interacting with them repeatedly. In doing so, we would inevitably develop relationships with them that would interfere with an OCME employee’s normal defense mechanisms for dealing with grieving individuals. It became difficult to keep a professional shell in place when the decedent’s family member that you’re talking to has become a dear friend.

  We quickly realized that both OCME and the WTC families needed a special unit to handle this unique interaction. Having already seen quite a few WTC families at OCME headquarters, we understood that this was not a suitable place for repeated interactions. Moreover, our agency was not the only city or federal agency that needed to interact with the families. In was in this spirit that we set up the Family Assistance Center to appropriately house us as well as police, relief agencies, the Social Security agency, and nongovernmental organizations like the Red Cross. Because those agencies would be in residence there, the Family Assistance Center would also be able to help other New Yorkers—those who had not lost family members but were seeking assistance; for instance, people displaced when the collapse of the Towers destroyed or rendered their homes uninhabitable, and people whose businesses had been wiped out, throwing them and all of their employees out of work.

  The Family Assistance Center was initially established across the street from the OCME office in an auditorium inside New York University Medical Center. It moved shortly to larger quarters at the Lexington Avenue National Guard Armory, a few blocks away. When that venue also proved not capacious enough, it was moved to Pier 94, which juts out into the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side at Fifty-Seventh Street. Pier 92, next door, held the Emergency Operations Center, the headquarters for all the governmental organizations at work on the WTC disaster. Once situated at Pier 94, the Family Assistance Center really began to function seamlessly, as New Yorkers began to stream through the tight entrance security by the thousands.

  I must admit that while I cared a great deal about the devastating ripple effect the attacks had created among those who had lost residences or businesses, my focus was on people who had lost a family member. As the person responsible for the Incident Command Center and the identification process, I quickly became the main person interacting with the families regarding OCME’s identification of the victims. Meetings with the families were of two types. The easier ones, it may surprise you to learn, were those in which I told families that we had not yet identified their loved one but were working on it. Much more difficult were the interviews that followed a positive identification.

  The “not-yet” interviews were easier but could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered easy. One such interview was particularly tough for me, because I had to tell the widow of my dear friend Jeffery Weiner, the assistant cantor of my synagogue, that we would probably never find any remains or identify anything of her husband. It was about a month after the attacks when Heidi Weiner came to see me at the office. Jeff had worked for Marsh & McLennan, and his office was on the north side of Tower One on the ninety-fourth floor. The nose of the plane had likely come through his office window. I wanted more than anything in the world to tell Heidi that we would absolutely find him, that I would work around the clock, move heaven and earth, and not rest until we did, but I couldn’t in all honesty tell her that. Instead, during that interview in late October—the first time I had seen her since the disaster—I cautioned her that the overwhelming likelihood was that Jeff ’s remains would never be identified. A human body, I told her, can be fully cremated at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit in as little as forty minutes. This was a month after the disaster, and the fires were still burning at the WTC (and would continue to burn for months more). That interview was agonizing for both of us.

  I did hundreds of such “not-yet” interviews, many of them with foreign nationals who had flown into New York from as far away as Japan and Australia hoping to claim the bodies of their loved ones, and who felt they had to stay here until he or she had been identified and the remains released to them. The “not-yet” interviews were the easier ones because the information that I had to impart was straightforward: “We have not yet identified him, but we’re working on it, and we’ll tell you the second that we’ve made the identification.” As with Heidi Weiner, the families by and large understood the difficulties involved in making identifications under these extraordinary circumstances and were for the most part content to know that we were trying as hard as we could to identify the victims.

  I say for the most part, because thanks to television, not every family came in to our office with realistic ideas of what we were able to do. I recall one interview with an elderly woman who wished to know why our efforts to identify her son were taking so long. She querulously pointed out that on a recent episode of the television show CSI, a “forensic scientist” had been able to obtain DNA results from a dead body in a matter of minutes. The hero just put in the sample, pushed a button, and out popped the identification, complete with a very nice photo of the victim. Why, she demanded, did we not have such a machine? Was it for lack of money?

  I resisted the impulse to tell her that the same prop “DNA machine” would probably be used to make coffee in a later CSI episode. Instead I reassured her, as I did with countless other families, that OCME was in fact receiving adequate financial support for its WTC operations—which was true at least in that first year of operations—and that we had access to all the best computer equipment and programmers available. I explained, however, that obtaining DNA from severely damaged remains was a slow, laborious process, and even though the best minds in the country were working on the problem, it was going to take a long time before all the possible identifications could be made.

  As time went on, I was able to become more optimistic with the families to whom I had to say, “not yet.” With each passing week, our ability to identify remains was growing. When the Victim Identification Profile information sheets were all finally entered into the computer, we all received a collective boost; when our new DNA-matching software program came on line, another boost. And, of course, our own learning curve was steeply increasing with each passing day. All of these things added to the hope that many more victims would be identified than the two to three hundred we had initially (and privately) thought that we would be able to positively identify.

  The other sort of family interviews, those that occurred when a decedent had been identified, were much more emotionally difficult for the families and for me. “We’re about to have the most difficult conversation you’ll ever have,” I would often say as I began to speak with them and go on to explain precisely what remains had been found, in what condition, and what OCME had done to identify the person from whom the remains had come. For these individuals, this was the first confirmation that their loved one was definitively dead and had been identified. Although expected, it was nonetheless a blow because it eliminated any possibility that their loved one might be alive somewhere in a hospital. Although unrealistic, this hope reflected a universal wish. In 2005, after a WTC victim’s remains were identified, a family member told a reporter, “Well, that’s it, I guess he’s not running around New Jersey somewhere with amnesia. I guess he really is dead.” We received many, many similar responses during the course of the WTC identification effort.

  On the other hand, a great many family members, after receiving notification that their loved ones had been found, sagged with relief, because at least now they knew. During the difficult times at OCME, this type of response served to bolster our conviction that we were
doing crucial work. Families yearned for positive identification, if only so they could have certainty about the death and something to bury. As one firefighter’s widow expressed it to a reporter, in a sentiment I heard in a thousand variations from grieving relatives, “If he’s not laid to rest, it’s like he never was. I want something that marks that he was alive. It makes him real. It says he was.”

  Some families only wanted the reassurance, in our interviews with them, that we had made a definite, absolutely positive identification—that, and no more. Other families wanted to know precisely what we had done, what body parts we’d had to work with, what condition they were in, and where and when the parts were found. These latter families were personified for me by the relatives of James Cartier. James was twenty-six at the time he died, a newly minted member of the electricians’ union, and he had been working at the WTC only a few months before the attacks. He was the youngest of six siblings, and his close-knit family became very active in a group dedicated to helping other families through the tragedy. When at last we identified some of James’ remains, two of his brothers showed up to claim him. Michael Cartier donned a pair of gloves and held and cradled his brother’s remains. It was as touching a scene as I’ve ever witnessed.

  Not every family had the Cartiers’ courage to touch the remains of their loved ones, but many families did ask to see the remains. We at OCME did not encourage this, because many of the remains were relatively small fragments, not even recognizable as human let alone as someone’s sibling, parent, child, or spouse. If a family asked to see the remains, we first showed them the Polaroid photos that we kept in each decedent’s folder. Most people were content with that. If they still insisted on personally viewing the remains we would suggest that they do so at the funeral home. Only as a last resort would we take the family down to Memorial Park and show them the actual remains.