Volunteers and professionals at the Family Assistance Center rose to the unprecedented challenge of their task. The Crowne Plaza Hotel provided food, drink, and waiters for several days. In all, the hotel served 7,500 meals and absorbed costs of $168,000. Thousands of flowers were donated by the Rhode Island Spring Flower and Garden Show, which ran that weekend. Volunteers from the Pet Assisted Therapy Association, joined by their furry empathy counselors, circulated among the families, dispensing hugs and canine kisses to children who anxiously awaited word of a missing mother or father. Even the dogs sensed serious business afoot.
At various times in the first post-fire days, Governor Carcieri addressed the crowd assembled in the grand ballroom. He had presided over countless rubber-chicken fests in this same room, but never before so tough an audience. The governor’s remarks were received with hushed silence — until he updated the death toll. Then the families’ composure dissolved in wracking sobs.
The harrowing wait for names of the dead affected Rhode Islanders well beyond the confines of the Crowne Plaza ballroom. One newspaper reporter, Meaghan Wims, put it succinctly: “In this quirky, close-knit state of roughly a million people, it’s only a matter of time before most find out that they do, indeed, ‘know someone.’ Or, they’ll know someone who knows someone.” Rhode Island attorney general Patrick Lynch summed up his state’s insularity when interviewed on NBC’s Today show in the fire’s aftermath: “They say there are six degrees of separation in this world. In Rhode Island, there’s a degree and a half.” Not nearly enough to insulate from heartbreak.
National news organizations sometimes overlooked the state’s collective fragility. For over a week after the fire, CNN aired pieces by its reporter, Whitney Casey, “from on-scene in West Warwick, Rhode Island.” Producers in Atlanta kept using a horrific screen-shot of the front-door pileup at The Station as a backdrop for her reports, even as funerals began taking place in Rhode Island. When Casey realized what was happening, she immediately put a stop to it.
Even though The Station had been designated a crime scene, officials compassionately accommodated many families’ strong desire to visit the ground last touched by their loved ones. Three days after the fire, eleven buses, loaded with victims’ families and friends, made a grim pilgrimage from the Family Assistance Center to the Station site under police escort. The buses disgorged their passengers, then ringed the site, shielding grieving families from press and onlookers. It was too much for some. At least one family member was overcome and transported to a hospital by ambulance.
Many relatives simply could not wait passively for news, once they’d completed a missing-person report at the Crowne Plaza. Reminiscent of World Trade Center families, they went from hospital to hospital carrying pictures of their loved ones, hoping against hope to find a match among the dwindling number of yet-unidentified injured.
Dina DeMaio was tending the main horseshoe bar of The Station in Brian Butler’s video, smiling her thirtieth birthday smile, when fire broke out. Now her mother, Patricia Belanger, stood near the emergency entrance to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, clutching Dina’s picture and showing it to anyone who might have seen her. Approaching a reporter, she sobbed, “This is my daughter. It was her birthday yesterday. . . . Can you put her face on television?”
Rhode Island Hospital, which had admitted forty Station fire victims, still had one patient who remained unidentified. It was not Dina DiMaio. Belanger drove to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Then to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in that same city. Dina was at neither. Days later, her death would finally be confirmed.
The process was repeated by other families, usually with the same result. Gina Mattera carried two photos of her sister, Tammy, from hospital to hospital, checking lists of admissions. She showed the photos to the crowds gathered near the Station site. But no one had seen Tammy after she became separated from her friend, Erin, in the crush at the club’s front door. Tammy’s husband and two children would receive the worst possible news a few days later.
News of others was no better. Tina Ayer, the Fairfield Inn housekeeper on Jack Russell’s guest list; Steve and Keith Mancini of Fathead; Andrea Mancini, last seen at her ticket desk; Mike “Dr. Metal” Gonsalves; Karla Bagtaz — the list of the dead grew and grew.
Sometimes persistence appeared to pay off. David Penny raced to Kent County Hospital after hearing that his best friend, Kevin Anderson, was in the hospital’s intensive-care unit. But when he arrived there, no one could find Anderson. Hopes dashed, Penny was about to leave, when an ICU nurse did some further checking on her own. It turned out that Anderson had been at the hospital, but was immediately airlifted to a burn center. Penny’s relief was palpable — but short-lived. His buddy died shortly thereafter at the other facility.
Hospitals faced difficult decisions when family members sought to visit seriously burned patients. Intubated, sedated patients could not identify themselves, and family members might not recognize them. The very last thing that doctors wanted was to have the wrong family at a victim’s bedside. “It would be extremely traumatic to take a patient that we had not identified and send a person in if it was not immediately apparent: ‘Is that my son or daughter, or is it not?’” explained Alasdair K. T. Conn, MD, chief of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. And so, until identifications were absolutely positive, families were kept at bay, adding further to their frustration.
Hospitals did their utmost to care for families, as well as patients. The waiting area of Rhode Island Hospital’s intensive care unit teemed with concerned family members who had set up a virtual encampment there. Doctors and nurses consulted with loved ones. Clergy comforted anyone willing to speak with them. The hospital did all it could, even in small ways, to comfort the afflicted. Free meals were provided to families in the hospital’s cafeteria. Parking was free to all who were “with the burn victims.” At daily meetings, Dr. William Cioffi, Rhode Island Hospital’s chief of surgery and a former army burn surgeon, briefed family members, two hundred at a time, in the hospital’s auditorium.
Given the confusion and highly emotion-charged atmosphere of the Family Assistance Center it is, perhaps, surprising that there was only one instance of erroneous family notification in the wake of the tragedy. A family was told that two of its members were hospitalized, only to learn thereafter that they were among the missing. Tragically, they were later identified as deceased.
Identification of the dead was the ultimate responsibility of the state medical examiner, Dr. Elizabeth Laposata. While her complete absence from the fire scene undoubtedly impaired the marshaling of sufficient assets during the body recovery phase, the ME’s work in the days following was exemplary, especially given the staffing limitations of her department.
With assistance from a federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), the Rhode Island Funeral Directors Association, and the Rhode Island Dental Association, autopsies were conducted by eight teams consisting of pathologists, funeral directors, and dentists. They worked in twelve-hour shifts, transferring bodies from refrigerated trailers at the ME’s office to the morgue, where directed autopsies and toxicology tests were conducted. With an average of thirty-five persons working around the clock, the autopsies of all ninety-six deceased victims removed from the scene were completed in only four days, with all identifications complete in just one more day. The successful use of dental and fingerprint records precluded the need for any DNA testing, further speeding the process.
In one unanticipated way, the demographics of Station fire victims played a role in their prompt identification. The popularity of tattoos among heavy-metal fans resulted in a dermatological ID card for many of the victims. As explained by Dr. Laposata, “When we identify people with tattoos, it doesn’t mean they weren’t severely burned, because the tattoo goes into the dermis. . . . The needles put the pigment deep, so you can even be charred and we can push off that top layer and the tattoo will be just prist
ine in the dermis.” Over one-third of the bodies from The Station were identified with the aid of distinctive tattoos. They included thirteen women.
As significant as what was on many bodies was what was in them. Toxicology studies revealed that twenty of the ninety-six dead at the scene had significant levels of cyanide in their bodies, a result of inhaling smoke from burning polyurethane foam. (As a general matter, the cyanide-poisoned victims were found near the stage, not near the front doors.)
One young victim’s identification was easier, and more poignant, than all the others. On his body was found a cell phone, with functioning speed-dial.
It called his mother.
CHAPTER 21
ARTIFACTS OF TRAGEDY
SEVEN DAYS AFTER THE FIRE, an unlikely collection of volunteers — young and old, male and female — began putting in daily shifts at the frigid Station site. They brought with them buckets, shovels, and quarter-inch mesh sieves. Clad in Tyvek suits, surgical masks, goggles, and gloves, they divided the footprint of the club into five sections, then dug, filled buckets, sifted, and cataloged everything they found. And, following strict protocol, they spoke to no one among the curious onlookers.
Newspaper and web accounts speculated about who these people were and what they were doing. “They look just like archaeologists,” mused one blogger.
He guessed right.
Forensic archaeology is a relatively young discipline — an outgrowth of the science that, more traditionally, unearths artifacts to learn about historical events or ancient civilizations. Forensic, or “disaster” archaeology, however, applies the techniques and disciplines of archaeology to recent tragic events, serving more practical objectives — usually, victim identification and repatriation of their personal effects. Additionally, the fruits of forensic archaeology may become evidence in criminal or civil proceedings.
At its best, forensic archaeology harnesses objective scientific techniques to serve very subjective, emotional needs: the yearning of families for accurate word of their loved ones’ fates, and for some tangible memento of the departed. The term “closure” is much abused; however, it fairly describes the humanitarian service that forensic archaeology can sometimes render.
One of the progenitors of forensic archaeology, Dr. Richard A. Gould, was a professor at Brown University in nearby Providence at the time of the Station fire. His interest in disaster archaeology had been piqued eighteen months earlier by another tragedy — the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. Professor Gould’s reaction to the horrors of 9/11 gave birth to the forensic archeology team that would later put in yeoman’s work at the Station site.
If Sean Connery had been unavailable to play Indiana Jones’s archaeologist father in The Last Crusade, Dr. Gould could have stood in pretty well. With his bearded face, weathered skin, and hands roughened from countless digs and wreck dives, Gould fits the image of an emeritus college professor more at home chipping relics from earthen mounds than holed up in a library. His post-9/11 experience was the genesis of “Forensic Archaeology Recovery.”
Three weeks after the fall of the twin towers in September 2001, cleanup efforts were well under way in lower Manhattan. New York’s mayor had given the order to clean up avenues, side streets, and rooftops as quickly as possible to allow residents to return to their apartments, and businesses to reopen. While few victims’ remains had been identified at that point, the hurried cleanup proceeded apace.
It was upon this scene that Richard Gould walked on October 5, 2001, from Ground Zero toward Wall Street. His archaeologist’s eye for detail immediately picked up several small fragments of bone amid the ashy dust covering the street. He did not bend to pick up any, lest he call attention to them. One larger piece, several inches across, appeared to be part of a human scapula. Gould became convinced that much of lower Manhattan had been blanketed with fragmented human remains, and that the massive cleanup activities under way were removing these remains along with other debris.
Perhaps this commingling and loss of “biologicals” was inevitable, given the sheer size of the potential debris field and the imperative for returning the city to function. However, Gould believed that archaeological techniques could be used, at least on a limited basis, to assist in identifying and repatriating victims’ remains and personal effects. With official permission, Gould returned to Manhattan on April 1, 2002, accompanied by a volunteer team consisting largely of Brown University and Brooklyn College graduate students, to attempt a trial excavation at a small site on Barclay Street, next to the WTC. They called their group Forensic Archaeology Recovery, or FAR. Its mission was “to provide trained volunteer assistance to local authorities at mass-fatality disaster scenes to locate, record and recover human remains, personal effects and other evidence, primarily for victim identification.” Little did they know that FAR would be pressed into service again so soon, and so close to home.
The results of FAR’S Manhattan excavation, like its artifacts, were mixed. It was too late after the event to determine with certainty the order of objects’ deposition. Of the ten pieces of bone found, none was even tentatively identified as human. What the experiment did demonstrate, however, was that a team of volunteer archaeologists, using established scientific protocols, could prepare for and perform controlled forensic recoveries at a disaster scene. They just needed to be called in sooner.
While his team’s work at Barclay Street failed to prove Gould’s suspicion of widespread human remains in the aftermath of 9/11, fragmented remains were still being found months and even years later, often in quantity, at construction sites and on rooftops in lower Manhattan. Indeed, when the victim identification process officially ended on February 5, 2005, 1,162 victims, or 42 percent of the missing, remained unidentified.
Less than a year after FAR’S trial excavation at the WTC, Richard Gould walked the site of the Station fire with State Fire Marshal Irving “Jesse” Owens. Only six days had passed since the tragedy, and already the site had been disturbed by rescuers, fire inspectors, and federal ATF agents. All ninety-six victims who died at the scene had been identified by the medical examiner. But Owens still had important work for FAR to do, if the team was up to it.
Owens took the Station tragedy very personally, and his overwhelming objective was to spare victims’ families further pain. His official charge to FAR was to gather personal items for repatriation to families. His unofficial, but no less imperative, concern was that the site be absolutely stripped of all biologicals and items of interest to souvenir hunters, once the area was no longer secured. Owens was adamant that charred memorabilia from the Station not appear on eBay or be otherwise exploited. Gould’s FAR team accomplished these objectives, and more.
During their tour of the fire site on February 26, Fire Marshal Owens pointed out to Professor Gould the main entranceway of the club, its atrium, stage, and bar areas. He described the general locations of the greatest number of bodies, in the hope that there might be some correlation between them and the physical location of items recovered by FAR.
The work would not be easy. Two particular challenges to this “dig” were the absence of any true soil and the punishingly cold weather. Recovered items were encased in a lumpy mixture of ash, charcoal, pulverized building materials, and melted roofing or ceiling materials. Temperatures had not gone above freezing since the fire; therefore, artifacts had to be chipped out in frozen lumps. Fieldwork in archaeology is normally not conducted in midwinter; however, FAR’S work did not have this luxury. Disasters can occur any time of year.
The FAR team arrived on the morning of February 27 equipped with shovels, buckets, three rocker sieves, and one hanging sieve, each with quarter-inch mesh. They divided the site into five search areas and strung two “baselines” perpendicular to each other across the foundation. The location of any artifact could be established by its distance from each of the two baselines. Rather than separate the area into permanent grids, as in a more traditional
archaeological excavation, a portable PVC-pipe square, three feet by three feet, was used to delineate each area from which buckets of fill were removed and screened. The team had originally intended to wet-sieve the fill, for which West Warwick Fire Department offered the services of a pumper truck; however, subfreezing conditions ruled out that normally more expeditious technique.
All artifacts, biological and otherwise, were bagged and entered as evidence in a State Police Crime Scene Laboratory van that remained on-site the entire time FAR worked there. In this way, chain-of-custody was maintained for all items removed.
On any given day, an average of nine to thirteen volunteers worked the archaeological site. The FAR team consisted primarily of Brown University archaeology students with field experience. One had specialized training in forensic anthropology (the study of human bones for legal identification), a skill that would prove useful in identifying human remains. Joining the Brown students were three volunteers from the Providence Police Department’s Bureau of Criminal Identification. The Salvation Army and Red Cross provided food and shelter for FAR workers on breaks, while the state police provided site security.
The FAR team worked in a proverbial fishbowl, but in total anonymity. No one spoke to the press. Viewers, including bandaged survivors and grieving families, watched the process through the surrounding chain-link fence, sometimes for entire days. Because of this constant observation, FAR’S protocol forbade any raised voices, or even cell phone calls, from the work area. Anything that might draw attention to finds such as human remains was forbidden. The workers’ professional demeanor remained unbroken throughout their engagement at The Station.
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