After our mistaken identification of the torso with the ID card, we decided that three points of matching information would be required for making an identification on any given remain. If we were unable to obtain three—for instance, if the remains were so small that we could not even verify which bone of a body it might have come from—we might still make a positive identification using DNA, but only after administrative review of all the evidence ensured that there was no conflicting data.
Fortunately, the bags of remains brought in to our office contained not only human flesh but also objects such as clothes, watches, rings, and other items that helped us narrow our search.
There were many propinquity clues—pieces found in proximity to one another. If you had a hand here, and six inches away there was a watch, there was a good chance that the hand and the watch had belonged to the same person, although you couldn’t say so definitively without having a third clue that verified the first two. Such propinquity clues gave us a place to start. We called them hunches or vectors toward an identification and made sure to keep a wary eye out for any indication of conflicting data. If the slightest doubt surfaced that a particular identification wasn’t 100 percent certain, it was shelved until more data and points could be obtained. Also, I had discovered to my chagrin that it was a lot easier to explain to a family why we had waited so long to make an identification, than to have to apologize to a family for having moved too quickly and having made an error.
So, more often than not, “composite identifications” were the rule. We had many partial fingerprints that by themselves were inconclusive as identifiers, but when combined with other clues, the partial print could edge us toward an identification. Eventually, we used more than forty different combinations of modalities to make identifications. We’d have a bit of DNA, a partial fingerprint, another partial hit from a fragment of teeth; each of these, by itself, would not suffice as a sole identifier, but if there were enough overlaps among all three, we could make a definitive match. Sometimes we’d need more than three clues to satisfy ourselves that our match was completely correct. We needed both “belts and suspenders,” as Dr. Hirsch so often suggested.
One of our more esoteric identification modalities involved using X-rays of the feet of victims, as evaluated by Dr. Rock Positano, perhaps the only forensic podiatrist in the world. Rock heads the division of podiatric medicine at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Rock began his association with OCME in 1974 when as a high school student he convinced Dominic DiMaio, then the chief medical examiner, to allow him to intern one afternoon a week assisting and observing at autopsies. He went on to become the unofficial curator of the office’s Black Museum, a collection of medical curios started by the fabled CME Milton Halperin. In 1989, as a freshly minted podiatrist, Rock convinced Dr. Hirsch that podiatry X-ray was a viable tool for body identification. Within a few months, he proved his mettle on a case of a female labor leader whose chopped up and burned body was found in a dumpster in Harlem; Rock was able to identify her, when no one else could, by comparing her remains to X-rays of her feet taken some time before she died.
Rock pointed out to us MLIs that mobsters never chop off a victim’s foot at the ankle, because the interlocking web of twenty-six bones and many sinews at the ankle is too strong to be severed easily—and that feet left on the body can help provide a positive identification. Another interesting fact pointed out by Rock was that by the age of forty, 75 percent of all Americans will have had an X-ray of one or both feet.
During the 9/11 identification effort, Dr. Rock Positano’s expertise, and the pool of available foot X-rays, proved invaluable, enabling him to identify a handful of victims that we might not have otherwise identified.
Once we were past what we at OCME referred to as the low-hanging fruit of the tree—the group of identifications that were fairly easy to make because of the size of the clues such as the 174 remains that were in the category of “whole body,” the 55 remains that could be identified solely by means of dental X-rays, and the handful from foot X-rays—the task of identifications became much more difficult and therefore slower.
By December 2001, we no longer thought there were ten thousand or even six thousand victims, but we still believed our potential universe of victims could be as large as several thousand people. Shortly, we would narrow the list of the missing and the already-identified dead to 2,749 victims. Of these, we had only identified a few hundred. There were an awful lot of WTC victims waiting to be identified and many families anticipating our efforts.
Accordingly, the DNA effort loomed as even more important to the identification process. It was critical, in fact. Without DNA evidence, it was obvious to us at OCME that we would be able to identify only a few more of the victims. It had taken several months for a new software program for identifying DNA matches to be built (by an outside vendor, Gene Codes, in cooperation with OCME’s DNA lab). The previous system, which had been developed for the FBI, couldn’t handle the volume of remains and samples that we were dealing with. That was understandable because it had been developed to compare the DNA of one suspected felon with what was on file, and make a match. By December this system had identified 203 remains that belonged to 105 different people. On December 13, when the new Gene Codes system began work formally, that very day fifty-five new matches were made.
To our dismay, however, it turned out that this was about as far as either system could go, because we had a terrible problem. We discovered that the first collection effort of the antemortem DNA evidence was severely flawed. The errors appeared after Bob Shaler sent some of our DNA work to the New York State police crime lab at Albany for completion. When Albany showed us their results, though, it was clear that the samples taken from the families were inadequate for making the identifications.
DNA strands are made up of literally billions of individual bits of four chemical bases known by the letters A, T, G, and C. Because there are so many repeats, experts in matching DNA need to see unique patterns at thirteen different areas (loci) on the strand to make a match. If you can match, say, ten out of the thirteen loci, you can be pretty certain about your identification, but if you only have, say, six out of thirteen, you simply cannot make a positive identification.
Since much of the postmortem DNA—what we could get out of the body parts—was in bad shape, very degraded, it was even more important that the premortem DNA (brought to us on such things as toothbrushes, hairbrushes, razors) be in good shape. We also needed proper samples from the victim’s relatives to add the necessary genetic information with which to make possible matches. Of the thousands of toothbrushes and other items collected, however, it turned out that hundreds had been mislabeled. In legal terms, their “provenance”—that is, where they came from—was unclear. Moreover, we lacked enough samples from family members to resolve the mystery of who, exactly, had used a particular brush. For example, if a brush contained the DNA of two people, when the family had thought it had only been used by the victim, whose was the second DNA? It could belong to a relative or, for that matter, to a visitor who had forgotten to bring along his or her own toothbrush and surreptitiously used one sitting in the bathroom instead. How could we know? In the absence of samples from all the people in the house, we were unable to figure out easily whose DNA was on that brush.
When we added up the figures, we were horrified: only 35 percent of the families had given us sufficient antemortem DNA samples. The police department team collecting the samples had simply done a lousy job of collecting the samples from the civilian victims’ families, as well as from NYPD victims’ families. The fire department had done not much better in collecting samples from its own service families—no surprise, since it had attempted to collect evidence from more than two hundred families of missing firefighters in a single day.
The decree from City Hall that placed the cops in charge of the effort to obtain DNA from victim families had turned into a debacle, and so had the effort by the firefighter
s to collect samples from two hundred families of firefighters. If only the cops and firefighters had not been so territorial and had permitted people with the proper medical and scientific training—people whose daily job it was to collect such samples—to have sat at the tables when they collected material from the families, many of these mistakes could have been avoided.
Mislabeling of hundreds of items was a calamity, but perhaps the worst things about the situation were the tremendous missed opportunities. In one instance, a foreign family had come in, from a great distance away, to give samples so their loved one could be identified. The cop taking the samples looked at the decedent’s photo and at the family in front of him and decided that one brother looked almost exactly like the decedent and opted to take a DNA sample only from that brother, not from other members of the family. The cop’s ignorance of how genetics works, and where DNA comes from, trampled that golden opportunity.
There are literally dozens of ways to get DNA samples from decedent’s lives—but to obtain them you have to ask the right questions. For example: a medically savvy professional at the collection table might have asked a husband when his late wife had had her last menstrual period, and if by chance there might still be a used tampon in the garbage—such an object, if available, would have given us a very good sample of the decedent’s DNA. Had there been a recent hospitalization during which the victim’s blood was drawn? Perhaps a recent biopsy? Medically untrained cops didn’t ask such questions, and few such samples were collected where surely more could have been. (I actually went to a dermatologist’s office and picked up a skin biopsy that helped us identify a WTC victim.)
It was clear that we needed better samples, ones whose provenance was clear and direct. We would also need more next-of-kin samples from more family members.
At first we were uncertain how we should go about collecting these. To me, the answer was clear. “We’ll have to issue a press release saying that we need more samples from the families and set up a hotline so that the families can call in and give them to us directly,” I explained to Dr. Shaler and then to Dr. Hirsch. This way there would be no need or call for immediate finger-pointing because the job had been done improperly the first time. We would, of course, have to take some heat from the families for the delay, and for the problems caused by having to locate more items from the dead family member, as well as exemplars from the live ones, but as I saw it, we had no choice but to do this if we ever wanted to make the identifications.
While Dr. Hirsch understood the need and agreed about the remedy, he was initially reluctant about the path to obtaining the new samples through the use of a hotline. He thought we didn’t have the personnel to staff it, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I showed him, in detail, that we did, that it would not be difficult to set up six phone lines and have them staffed by MLIs and people from our DNA lab. Dr. Hirsch then agreed, and we began the process of setting up the hotlines and readying the press release.
After consultation with city hall, the press release went out right after New Year’s, in January 2002, accompanied by articles in the newspapers and so on, asking the families to call us because we needed more samples. There was yelling. There was screaming. There was dismay. But very quickly these emotions yielded to a flood of calls from families to the hotline—calls that soon numbered in the thousands. We were soon obliged to ask peak-hour callers to call back at a less crowded hour—any time, in fact, since the hotline would be staffed twenty-four hours a day. By this method, we got a lot of good information at 2:00 A.M. as well as 2:00 P.M.
Some families who called in were asked to come down to our office, bearing more objects from the decedent and giving additional DNA samples. With other families, especially those who lived far from New York, we were able to send them a collection pack, together with explicit instructions on collecting and bagging their own samples, so that they could ship the required samples to us. For those families who lived abroad, the system was more complicated. Federal law prohibited commercial carriers without a special license from shipping biological materials across borders from any country into the United States. This led to our arranging for families from abroad to be able to “smuggle” in their samples via their countries’ diplomatic pouches.
During this period, a woman showed up at the OCME office intent on seeing me. I was busy, and our staff kept her at bay for a while, but eventually I saw her because she insisted on talking only to the head of the identification program. In my office, with the door closed, she told me that her grown children were coming in to give DNA samples to help identify their father who had died in the WTC attacks. She instructed me that the samples should be taken but absolutely not used in the identification process, because the man her children thought of as their father was not their biological father. Her husband’s sperm had been deficient, so they had used donated sperm and decided together never to tell their children. She was adamant that the children not find out at this inopportune moment that their father was not their biological parent. Of course we complied with her request. This case was not unique; other women came forward to confide that they had had an affair, or that there had been an adoption and the child who wanted to provide a DNA sample was not biologically the offspring of the deceased man.
The hotline eventually fielded around thirty thousand calls, and led to the collecting of ten thousand additional samples. The percentage of families giving us sufficient DNA to make identifications rose from 35 percent to more than 80 percent, and the samples led directly to the hundreds and hundreds of additional identifications we made over the course of the next several years. Among those were many of the 214 firefighters whose remains were eventually identified. As though to make up for its initially poor job collecting samples from the families, the FDNY discovered that it had even better samples for us, in the form of blood many of the firefighters had donated to a bone-marrow transplant organization, which had been stored away for later use. These pristine samples from the victims themselves helped us make many positive identifications of fallen firefighters.
I had never expected my friend Jeff Weiner’s remains to be identified, because we had figured that the first plane had come right in the window of the North Tower office in which he and his colleagues at Marsh & McClennan had been working. In February 2002, however, a match was made between a small piece of bone found on the roof of WTC Building 5, more than a block away from the North Tower, and a sample of Jeff ’s DNA brought in by Jeff ’s widow, Heidi. Moreover, examination of Jeff ’s bone fragment revealed forensic evidence corroborating my suspicion that he had been caught in the initial impact of the plane and the subsequent explosion. What must also have happened—something I had not anticipated—was that the explosion hurled this fragment of Jeff ’s body out of the cataclysm and that it landed on the roof of a building far enough away from the epicenter to survive the collapse and the fires.
Identifying Jeff reinvigorated my own dedication to the task. With permission from Heidi Weiner, I used Jeff as an example in almost every “not-yet” interview I did, as proof that anything was possible and that no family should lose all hope.
The month of March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, or so the saying goes, but that could also have described my physical and mental condition in early 2002. By March of that year, the WTC identification process was well under way, and a steady daily routine had developed in the Incident Command Center. At that point, we had identified hundreds of victims from thousands of body parts. I was still working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, as March began, but by the end of the month, I found that the work was catching up with me, and I became ill. Just how ill I didn’t even know at first—until one critical meeting approached, and I suddenly grew worried that I might not be able to attend it as the OCME representative.
The fire department had arranged for all the families of the fallen firefighters to meet in an auditorium on Staten Island, to be updated on the identifications proces
s and have the opportunity to talk to city officials responsible for the recovery effort. Fire Department Operations Chief Sal Cassano, who had become a fast friend, had relayed an invitation to me from the newly appointed fire commissioner, Nick Scopetta, to join them on the podium, representing OCME and the identification effort.
Though I felt increasingly ill, I also felt I couldn’t ask Dr. Hirsch to go in my place because he’d had such a negative experience at the first firefighter’s family meeting that he swore he would never do it again. I understood why: when they got together, the FDNY families tended to show great hostility toward the city government. This greatly pained beleaguered city officials like Dr. Hirsch, who felt they were doing all they could but were nonetheless vilified.
In the weeks leading up to the firefighter families meeting, I began to develop night sweats, and eventually severe joint pain and crushing fatigue. The symptoms progressed to headaches, nausea, and finally, a pain on my left side that at times took my breath away. For years I had been a dedicated consumer of four or five daily cups of coffee, but now I developed a strange aversion to this happy addiction and felt even worse as I went into caffeine withdrawal. I dragged myself around the office until, one afternoon, Dr. Hirsch stopped me in the hallway and said, “Shiya, I’ve autopsied people who looked better than you do. Go home!”
Instead of going home, I went to see Sidney Stein, the best internist in New York City. My family doctor and a friend for many years, Sidney took some blood, sent me for a sonogram of my side, and commanded me to get some rest. I went home, but returned to work the very next day. Shortly, the diagnoses came back: a severe case of mononucleosis and an alarmingly enlarged spleen (the cause of the pain in my side).
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