Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  It is unfortunate that this great nation of ours, willing to spend huge amounts of money responding to a mass-fatality event, won’t spend more then a pittance on properly preparing for such an event. Perhaps it is the very enormity of such events that prevents us from adequately preparing for them; perhaps it’s just a lack of political will. After all, what savvy politician wants to stand up in front of constituents and say, “Yes, it’s not a matter of if, but when we’re going to get hit; and when we do, there will be thousands of fatalities. So we’d better start preparing for that.” No one has the courage to take such a stand, because conceding the possibility of another mass disaster would mean admitting that any prevention efforts already underway may well prove to be failures. For instance, in 2004 OCME applied for a grant from the federal government for money to beef up our agency’s disaster response capabilities. They turned us down flat with one sentence: “We don’t pay for autopsy tables.” The federal government might like to believe this, but it’s not actually true: when we were cleaning up after 9/11, the federal government did pay for “autopsy tables,” and for the work associated with them, to the tune of close to a hundred million dollars.

  As I’ve pointed out, eventually all therapy fails; sooner or later, from whatever cause, every patient dies. Similarly, this country will eventually have another event in which all prevention efforts fail and there are mass fatalities. Whether it comes in the form of a natural disaster like Katrina, or a terrorist act like 9/11, we will get hit again; and next time tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, could die.

  We must prepare along two parallel paths: Do everything in our power to prevent such an event, while simultaneously preparing to deal with the inevitable.

  Although the stories of heroism and sacrifice will always remain with me, the months that followed 9/11 were also marked by a few scattered instances of cynical and appalling exploitation.

  During the time I spent working on the WTC identifications, I testified in two fraud cases prosecuted by the Special Fraud Unit of the Manhattan DA’s Office. In the first, a retired FDNY fireman was accused of taking home souvenirs from Ground Zero. The theft was discovered in an unusual way: The man in question lived upstate, and when he put his house up for sale, an off-duty New York state trooper went to see it as a potential buyer. When he stepped into the firefighter’s living room, he was shocked to see a large blown-up picture of the retired firefighter holding up a piece of human remains at Ground Zero as though it were a hunting trophy. Clearly oblivious to the cop’s disgust, the firefighter went on to brag about his important role in the recovery effort—including how he had taken many other items away from the site. The trooper reported the incident to his commanding officers, and shortly thereafter investigators posing as a young couple looking for a home entered the firefighter’s residence and found other souvenirs from Ground Zero—a piece of a radio, a credit card, and more. After the state police arrested him, they transferred the case to New York City, where the theft had occurred.

  Before the trial, the assistant DA showed me the stolen items and the large photo, complete with a date-stamp. The remains were so clearly visible in the picture that we decided to determine if we could locate them, and if they had ever been identified. Using an extremely detailed description produced from the photo by anthropologist Amy Mundorff, we searched the database for any remains matching that description that had been brought in to OCME between ten days before the date on the photo and twenty days after the date. There were no matches. In desperation, we hand-checked each remain that arrived during those thirty days, but still there was no sign of the remains so clearly seen in his hands in that photo. The remains had evidently never been brought in to OCME. Now we had another concern. Had this man actually stolen the remains as a macabre souvenir of his brief stint at the site? If he didn’t, where was the body part?

  On the witness stand, I laid out for the court how identifications were made, and gave my expert-witness opinion that the fireman’s behavior constituted more than theft, because it could have interfered with the making of identifications. (There was no way to say positively that it had interfered with any specific identification.) For technical reasons related to the type of crime the man was charged with, my testimony was not allowed into evidence; in the end, he was convicted of petty theft, but not of obstruction of justice, which I felt would have been a far more just decision. To me, this case was an awful example of the necessity of leaving crimes scenes pristine and untrammeled. The convicted thief was questioned repeatedly, but he always denied taking the remains seen in the photo. I would like to believe him, but will always wonder what happened to those particular remains.

  In the second case, the same fraud unit prosecuted a man from Nigeria who had invented a dead wife who supposedly had died in the WTC. Her remains had not been identified, and the documents he had brought to the Family Assistance Center were in bad shape; the church back home had burned down, he said, and all he could obtain were copies of copies. Before his fraud was exposed, he did obtain some money from the Red Cross, but he was stopped before he got his hands on the larger pot of money for the families of victims.

  This and other such cases raised my indignation, because I knew how much the real families of the WTC dead needed the money that was being amassed to assist them. Yet the defrauders were penny ante, small-time criminals compared to what is alleged to have happened right in my own office. In the summer of 2005, two longtime employees of OCME—the director of Management Information System and his girlfriend, the director of our medical records unit—were arrested and charged with stealing millions of dollars earmarked for the development of WTC computer systems, specifically for DNA matching software. When Bob Shaler, the director of the DNA lab, learned of this, he told the New York Daily News that the theft must have interfered with the WTC identification effort. He was in a position to know that, but I must report that the official position of New York City and OCME was that the alleged theft and the loss of millions of dollars in no way impeded the WTC identification effort. All I can say is that while the missing funds did not directly impact my work in the Incident Command Center, I’m inclined to share Shaler’s view. Looking back, the alleged theft may explain why some DNA identifications took so long to make, or were never made—the computer systems simply were never developed.

  Ultimately, even if this theft is proven to have occurred as alleged, and further proven to have impacted the identification effort, I believe that it will only have been a delay rather then an irrevocable stoppage. The OCME is committed never to cease its efforts to identify the remains of 9/11 victims. And if OCME keeps at the identification effort as promised, sooner or later every possible identification will be made. It’s just a matter of technology and time.

  Around eighteen months after the disaster, in early 2003, the crew working on the WTC identifications was sharply reduced. It had become more difficult for the agency to obtain funds for the task from New York’s City Hall, and OCME had its regular work to deal with; death had not taken a holiday. Dr. Hirsch decided it was time to start returning OCME to normalcy. The first step was to reclaim the agency’s conference room that I was still using as the Incident Command Center. A diminished Incident Command Center staff of about fifteen, including Katie Sullivan and other stalwarts, was moved out of the conference room and into a doublewide trailer parked on Thirtieth Street alongside the OCME headquarters. Some additional staff members like Amy Mundorff returned to regular work but spent at least half their time on WTC-related work, while about twenty additional people continued to toil on WTC matters in the OCME DNA lab.

  There was still plenty of WTC identification work. New identifications were still being made, though considerably fewer of them, and because these identifications were more difficult to confirm, they required more intense scrutiny and administrative review before the families could be notified. Also, secondary or additional remains identifications were constantly coming in, and famili
es had to be notified of them.

  And there was another complication: for many of the families, life was moving on. Once I notified a widow that we had finally identified her husband, only to learn that she had already remarried. I remember feeling somewhat shocked, until I realized that it was almost two years after the event. Why shouldn’t a young person have moved on and remarried? Still, such second marriages required a shift in our approach: henceforth, in talking to such widows and widowers, we used a look-before-you-leap conversational strategy.

  We made a point of raising such issues at our regular meetings with the family groups. We reported to them on our progress and used them as a sounding board for ideas on how to handle such sensitive situations. Interestingly, some families kept coming to our regular meetings after their own loved ones had been identified, although most of those who had received an identification eventually drifted away. Those who remained offered increasingly sophisticated questions about, say, the efficacy of mitochondrial matches, or the number of loci necessary to make us feel certain enough of a match to issue an identification.

  “So what are you doing still to find my loved one?” a family member would ask at an individual session. I’d sometimes use little yellow sticky notes to demonstrate by analogy how we were working with composite DNA methods. Covering a portrait of the deceased with a dozen or more of the sticky notes—enough to obscure the face of the person in the photo—I’d tell a family that a mitochondrial match might allow us to remove three of the dozen sticky notes, revealing some of the face; another technique would allow us to remove another two sticky notes; and so on, until enough of the portrait had been uncovered so that the face was recognizable and identifiable.

  While working with the families, I took part in the making of two documentary films about 9/11 and its aftermath. One was put together by the organization of families from Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that had suffered the greatest personnel loss in the disaster. Danielle Gardner, who had lost a brother in the disaster, was the principal in making that documentary about the event and the work of identifying the victims. In this effort, she was supported by Edie Lutnick and Howard Lutnick, who had also lost their brother. Howard, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, behaved in an exemplary way; he and Edie formed Cantor Relief, an organization (which he funds) dedicated to helping his company’s families cope and recover as best they can from the tragedy. No company did more for its employees than Cantor Fitzgerald.

  A second documentary was spurred into being by a chance encounter. Several months after the disaster, filmmaker Marc Levin was riding in a New York City taxi when its driver, a man from a Middle Eastern, predominantly Muslim country, began pontificating that the WTC disaster was the result of a Jewish conspiracy, a plot undertaken by American and Israeli Jews, and that the proof of the conspiracy was that no Jews had died in the bombings. According to this ridiculous notion, all the Jews in the WTC had been notified the night before not to go to work on the day the planes were to hit the towers. Levin began arguing with the cab driver and asked him where he had gotten his information. The cab driver waved a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, saying, “The proof is all in here!” After obtaining a copy of the legendary anti-Semitic tract for himself, Levin was flummoxed that such nonsense was still being actively published and, even more mind-boggling, was being taken seriously by millions of people around the world. Incensed by the book’s allegations, Marc decided to make a documentary about the Protocols, the resurgence of anti-Semitism after 9/11, and the true identity of the victims of the WTC bombings.

  For the documentary, I was able to state authoritatively on camera that hundreds of Jews died in the attacks on the WTC. From the list of the missing and identified dead, and conversations with the families, I estimated that easily 20 percent of the victims of the bombings had been Jewish. My count was not official, since OCME emphatically did not collect or maintain records of victims’ religions. Even had we done so, there would have been some difficulty in figuring out who was a Jew and who was not. But I had my own, very simple criterion: if Hitler would have considered a particular person a Jew, and on that basis would have sent this person to their death, they were Jewish enough for me. (Indeed, there is anecdotal evidence that the buildings may have been chosen because the Muslim terrorists wanted to target a heavily Jewish industry.) Having had hundreds of conversations with family members, I amassed ample anecdotal evidence to back this claim, and I still have my list of “probably Jewish” names on file in case anyone wants to challenge my conclusion.

  Although many Americans seem to have overlooked the fact, a relatively high number of British citizens perished in the WTC attacks. One result of this unhappy circumstance was that I had frequent contact with Patrick Owens, Her Majesty’s Counsel at the British Consulate in New York. In 2004 I suggested to him that Great Britain recognize and acknowledge the terrific work done by our British computer expert, Adrian Jones, in this disaster. To Adrian’s delight, and mine, at Christmas 2004 he was knighted and awarded the title of Member of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

  Adrian’s commendation came as I was nearing a turning point of my own. Early in 2005, I formally left the post of director of WTC operations and returned to my regular work at OCME. I was content to do so in part because I knew that my successor, Katie Sullivan, would do a superb job.

  On the first Sunday in April 2005, at the church of St. Francis of Assisi in mid-Manhattan, a memorial service and appreciation ceremony was held by many of the families of the victims of the WTC terrorist attacks to honor the work of the New York City ME’s Office. It was a kind of unofficial end to the long identification process; we had exhausted virtually every avenue for identifying the remains, and it was clear to everyone, including the families, that no further new identifications would be made. A formal OCME letter to that effect would be mailed a few months later to all the WTC families, stating that while we maintained our commitment to never stop trying to identify the victims of 9/11, we had reached the limits of current science. We pledged to the families that we would resume the identification effort when new technologies made it feasible.

  The event in April was set into motion with a single e-mail from Bill Doyle, leader of a WTC family group in Staten Island, to the leadership of all the other family groups, who in turn sent out e-mails to their memberships. As a result of these communications, representatives from hundreds of WTC families showed up at the church to hear a few speakers. I was privileged to be one of those scheduled to address the crowd. It was an occasion I wouldn’t have missed for the world, an acknowledgement of the most difficult, most arduous, and most rewarding work that I have ever done—and, I suspected, that I would ever do.

  When I stood up on the dais and moved to the rostrum, I grabbed Katie Sullivan and pulled her along with me. The members of the families stood up too, giving us a standing ovation. It was one of the most moving moments of my life.

  While in principle I was returning to regular work at OCME, in an important sense I was unable to return to the world I had left behind. While I had been concentrating on the WTC effort, the position of director of identifications and communications for OCME had been filled by another. Moreover, I had grown beyond that level of management during my time running the 9/11 effort.

  Yet it was now equally clear that I was not going to achieve my earlier goal of becoming director of medicolegal investigations. I had been on that track before WTC and, at the time, I could think of no greater career aspiration. During my three and a half years of intensive work on the WTC effort, however, the old director had retired and was replaced by a contemporary of mine, and by the time I emerged from my tunnel, she had been in place for two years. It was obvious that she was going to remain in that job for quite a while. At this time, it was also made clear to me by senior members of OCME’s administration that they intended to take the agency beyond the WTC identification efforts. “I hate WTC,” one muttered to me, “I hate the fam
ilies.”

  Though I was shocked at the harshness of this statement, I actually understood where it came from. The OCME had become too exclusively focused on the WTC dead, and on servicing their families, and now it would finally have to return to the more broad-based role it was designed to fill. Our work with the WTC families had involved procedures that went far beyond the accustomed role of an ME’s office. It was special work with special demands, requiring continual contact for months and years until every identification issue was addressed. But that was a very different assignment from the work we had trained to do, and it was time for the office to turn back to its traditional model.

  Since no suitable management position for me existed within the hierarchy of the agency, one was created: director of special projects. Now, in Clive Cussler’s bestselling books, the “director of special projects” in his fictional government maritime agency NUMA has an awful lot to do, and every moment of it is exciting. Not so with the director of special projects for OCME. I was put in charge of the development of a software program that would integrate every function and every department of OCME. It was diverting, but it simply never felt like the most rewarding work I could be doing.

  I did my job, but I grew restless. At length, I found it increasingly difficult to be at OCME after the WTC effort was over. That had been the defining investigation of my forensic career, and anything else I could envision myself doing at OCME paled by comparison. The echoes of the WTC effort rang in my ears and followed me everywhere I went in the hallways of the building.