At four o’clock there was still no sign of that barge full of bodies. By that time we had been waiting seven hours to start work and wanted to know the reason for the delay. “They had to evaluate the remains for possible biological weapons risks,” Flome said. “You are not to repeat that piece of information.” Stuart was assigned to work the first overnight shift, so Dr. Flomenbaum instructed me to go home and return in the morning.
Crowds of people walked north with me along Lexington Avenue, but quietly, a stunned rush hour. The bars were full, all heads turned to televisions. People on the sidewalk were not averting their gazes as usual. We were all looking one another straight in the eye. Occasionally someone would notice my Medical Examiner jacket and stop me, asking if I had been “down there.” I told them no, and kept walking.
* * *
On the morning of September 12 the police officers manning the barricades at First Avenue checked my ID and badge and let me in. Our office had been transformed into a mass-casualty disaster compound. A village of white tents and suspended tarps had been erected overnight, and four refrigerated trucks were parked in the back of the building by the loading dock.
We convened in the ID office at eight o’clock. Dr. Flomenbaum looked like he hadn’t slept. He briefed us on the first arrivals and what to expect. We would be doing external examinations only, Flome stressed, even when we received whole bodies. The rumored body barge floating up the river never materialized. The remains were traveling mostly by ambulance, from the temporary morgue on Vesey Street, the northern edge of the World Trade Center site.
“The firefighters are calling it ‘the Pile,’ so you might as well get used to hearing that.” Flome paused to remove his glasses, rub his eyes. “You will be working your line outside, under those tarps. Just keep your attention on your own work and everything will be fine.”
In the loading dock I found six stations, each with a metal body pan on sawhorses serving as a table, and a rolling cart holding the equipment we would need. There were vials for DNA samples, trauma scissors for cutting off clothes, scalpels and forceps, Polaroid cameras, banner-size labels for the body bags, and a box of smaller, red-trimmed BIOHAZARD bags for partial remains. A few stools were scattered around for NYPD detectives and scribes to share. The detectives were from Missing Persons and Homicide, and the scribes were NYU medical students and a few pathology residents, taking dictation and marking up the body diagrams as directed. A handful of federal agents circulated among the tables also—uniformly crew-cut men in FBI windbreakers.
A desk at the very rear of the loading dock held a pile of manila file folders, each with a blank body diagram, a recovered-property log, a pair of toe tags, and a strip of preprinted labels starting with that grim prefix DM01. I was stunned to see six digits after DM01. “Are we really expecting over a hundred thousand bodies?” I asked Monica Smiddy, who was working the station with me.
“No,” she said. “But a hundred thousand body parts is a possibility.”
DM01-000041 was a crushed head and torso. It was the first body from the World Trade Center attack I would handle. I was immediately overwhelmed.
I had never seen anything like it. The body was pulverized. Major organs were eviscerated, some still attached by blood vessels and connective tissues but others missing entirely. The limbs had all been amputated. The torso was transected below the navel. The remains were entirely black—burned and covered in soot. The head . . . the head wasn’t recognizable as a head, except that it had hair and was attached to the neck. The smell of jet fuel was so strong it made me dizzy. I could tell just by looking at the open body bag that this person had been mashed, burned, dropped from a height, and slashed by sharp forces. I had seen people killed by subway trains and speeding cars, run over by trucks, crushed by industrial equipment, fallen from great heights, burned, and battered—but never all at the same time.
I didn’t know where to start. I turned to Dr. Smiddy for help. “Remember that you aren’t trying to establish cause and manner of death here, Judy. Your task is narrow: identification. Look for anything that will be useful for forensic dentistry, and send the body for X-ray. There are plenty of bones, and radiology might turn up some old surgery or healed injury.” She scooped up the pieces of the head with both her hands and nudged them into the right general shape. “There is a face in there too. Just try to piece it together long enough for pictures. We have experts who will take it from there. Do the best you can.”
I took a deep breath. What a blessing to have Monica Smiddy at my side. I did exactly as she said and, sure enough, found a partial left mandible still attached inside the head. In the mandible was a tooth with a gold crown. The technician and I held the face together for the photographer to take pictures. The scribe took down everything Monica and I asked her to. DM01-000041 had been a white man, forty to fifty years old, with bushy eyebrows and a hairy chest. Dr. Smiddy was confident this one would be identified. “Good work. Keep at it.”
Since we were doing only external examinations, the pace was fast. I opened the next body bag and found a mangled left leg, nothing else. I noted the material of the scrap of pants, and the scribe drew a picture of the fabric pattern. Then I examined the surface of the leg—and came across something that made me stop and stare. Fragments of a personal bank check, complete with a routing number and a partially legible name, were embedded under the skin, buried deep into the muscle tissue. Using a scalpel and forceps, I removed the shards of paper from the muscle. I asked Monica what I was supposed to do with them. “Log it for personal property,” she told me, and our detective agreed. He also took an interest in a piece of black plastic shrapnel stuck in the leg. It looked like the grip of a Glock pistol. I pulled that for evidence too.
This was only the second body part I had handled from the disaster, and already I was freaking out. “How does a piece of paper and a chunk of pistol grip end up lodged inside somebody’s leg?” I asked the medical student acting as my scribe.
“I don’t know,” she replied, visibly flustered. “I want to be a psychiatrist . . .”
It was time to take a break. There were no more remains coming down the line, and we were going to have to wait for the ambulances to show up from the Pile before we could continue. I ditched my gloves and protective gear and went over to a truck the Salvation Army had brought in to feed us. It was sparkling clean, fully stocked, and staffed by the friendliest bunch of people I had ever seen breathing New York City air. The sandwich was decent, the lemonade superb. “Won’t you please pray with me?” the nice lady behind the lunch wagon window asked. She bowed her head, clasped her hands, and invoked Jesus Christ to help us in our time of need. I bowed my head along with her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was Jewish, and I figured we needed all the help we could get anyhow.
An ambulance arrived with more bodies. I got back to work with my team and quickly learned that the crushed torso and half a leg I had already processed were far more complete remains than others I was likely to receive from the ruins of the World Trade Center. I would open a body bag and find a pelvis, a femur, some muscle tissue attached to nothing. We considered it lucky if there was a patch of skin to help us guess at the victim’s race. There was one whole body, a young woman with a wedding and engagement ring. The wedding ring was inscribed JOHN ISABEL, so we had a tentative ID right there. It made me think of getting my own inscribed. Just in case.
A batch of nothing but feet came in. One had a sneaker, which we photographed and placed into evidence. Monica Smiddy’s eye for detail helped my team invaluably. “There’s a rim of toenail polish on the outer edge of that third nail,” she pointed out, and I documented it. We knew teams of clerks upstairs at the OCME were entering all these physical findings into a database.
Circulating around our outdoor work spaces were the clean-cut FBI agents. “Doctors, please look out for any piece of metal that looks like it comes from an airplane, any electronic equipment such as radios or cell phones, tha
t kind of thing,” one said. “I want any paper with Arabic writing on it. Please also let us know as soon as you come across anything that looks like a box cutter.”
At first blush that made sense, since the terrorists had reportedly used box cutters to hijack the airplanes. Then, a moment later, the absurdity of what they were asking occurred to me. These remains were coming from two office buildings with a hundred and ten stories each. How many thousands of box cutters were in there? But this guy was from the FBI and we figured he knew something we didn’t, so we followed orders and collected box cutters whenever we came across them. Every minute or two someone from one of the six stations would cry out, “Box cutter here!” Sometimes two would at once. “Jinx!” one of my colleagues declared one time. Several dozen box cutters piled up.
“Wonder how long it’ll take them to figure it out,” Monica Smiddy mused at our station, in her imperturbable way. Not long, as it turned out. After an hour or so the FBI agents told us we had collected enough box cutters and could thenceforth discard them with the rest of the debris not related to our forensic investigation.
I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained when I went to see what the Salvation Army had for dinner. Instead of a truck, though, I found they had erected a huge tent on the edge of 30th Street. A witty DMORT anthropologist christened it “Sal’s Place.” The friendly people in the mess tent were handing out Uncrustables peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They looked like giant fuzzy ravioli. I made a mental note to pocket one for Danny, who is a PB&J addict. But then I imagined my husband’s reaction. “A gift for your toddler from the mangled body identification tent! You shouldn’t have! No—you really shouldn’t have.” The thought made me giggle. I felt a little better—and then a lot worse. Don’t laugh, I told myself. This isn’t funny. Well, hell, if I don’t laugh I just might start sobbing, I replied to myself. I had heard through the grapevine that psychological counseling sessions were going to be mandated for all of us, and at that moment, more than any other on that first horrific and surreal day, I realized that this was a very good idea.
After dinner break I went back to my station. DM01-000096 was the forearm and hand of a young woman with dark skin and a perfect, unsullied French manicure. DM01-000112 wore fishnet stockings and a platinum wedding band, missing a few diamonds and inscribed FOREVER KEVIN. DM01-000123 was a firefighter, head bashed in, badly burned but easy to identify because his name was embroidered on his shirt, and his shirt was still on his chest. I made a mental note to give the next living firefighter I encountered a big hug, whether he wanted it or not.
Parts from different bodies arrived tangled together in the same bag, and we had to separate them and give them unique case numbers. Everything had a petroleum reek. By eight o’clock, twelve hours after my shift had started, we’d processed only 110 bodies. That was when the first tractor-trailer arrived from the Pile.
I watched in shock as it beep-beep-beeped backward into our loading dock. What had started with ambulances carrying individual body bags had reached an industrial scale. I had a brief panic attack and nearly burst into tears. I wasn’t the only one. People were bowing their heads. Some were praying, some were weeping. A tractor-trailer holds a lot of body parts.
There would be no stopping after that. I worked six more hours, one case after another, all coming out of the back of that truck. Most took only a couple of minutes, some longer, none more than half an hour. Many of the remains looked like they had been pounded in a mortar and pestle. My first DM01 shift lasted from eight in the morning of September 12 until three the next morning: nineteen hours. A patrol cop drove me home in a cruiser, but got lost in the deserted Bronx streets looking for my neighborhood. “I work out of Brooklyn,” he kept muttering by way of apology. He was young, and looked nervous to have me in his car. I later realized why. I was half asleep, still in my soot-smeared scrubs, and smelled like charred death.
I slept until noon. After that, I played with my son and tried to stay away from the television.
On September 14, Flome started us on twelve-hour shifts, day or night, like firefighters. I arrived at eight o’clock that morning and found I had been assigned to routine city autopsy work. People continued to die, after all, and somebody had to find out who done it. I would work the 9/11 recovery line in the afternoon, but my morning was taken up by the murder of Sylvia Allen, a fifty-eight-year-old woman who had been strangled in her own apartment.
The MLI’s report said Sylvia’s daughter Irene usually saw her every day but couldn’t get through when she tried to call her mother on September 11. Irene figured the phone lines were down. Her mom lived in Harlem, far away from the World Trade Center, and didn’t work anywhere near there, so Irene wasn’t really worried until two days later, when she still hadn’t heard from her. Irene went to Sylvia’s apartment and let herself in. She discovered her mother’s corpse, bound and gagged, lying on the floor beside the bloodstained mattress in her bedroom. She later told the investigator she had smelled the body from outside the door before she turned the key.
Sylvia Allen was only my fourth homicide case. I unzipped the bag and found the badly decomposed body covered in maggots. The Pit, a creepy place on the best of days, was especially so that morning. Jackie the tech and I were the only two souls in there—just us, Sylvia Allen’s corpse, and the maggots. Everyone else was outside under the tents, working the World Trade Center line.
Just as I was starting the external examination for autopsy, the fire alarm in our building went off and someone yelled into the morgue from the hallway. “Bomb warning! Get out! Now!” Simultaneously frightened and annoyed, I snapped off my gloves, pulled off the surgical mask and plastic smock, dumped them in the biohazard garbage in the hall, and ran out to the rainy street in nothing but my scrubs, one step behind Jackie.
Everyone working the World Trade Center recovery line was evacuated from the loading dock too. We crowded under the awning of the apartment building across 30th Street for the next forty-five minutes, while the bomb squad poked at a bag some bereaved family member had left in our lobby by accident. “Everyone’s jumpy these days,” someone behind me said.
“Yeah. Thanks a bunch, Osama,” I replied, and everybody in wet scrubs chuckled. The cops who overheard turned and stared at us in horror.
When Jackie and I returned to the morgue, we found the maggots hadn’t fled during the bomb scare and were still going about their business unperturbed. Sylvia Allen’s hands were bound by a green cloth in a figure eight and secured with a shoelace. Caught in the binding was a black Mardi Gras face mask with black feathers and green sequins. Her jaw and zygomatic arch—cheekbone—had been broken. Some of her teeth were loose, though it was hard to tell if this was due to trauma or decomposition. I jotted a note to get a dental consult. A white satin shirt was wrapped loosely around her head and a white tank top bound tightly around her neck. Beneath it was a hemorrhage in the strap muscles and a laceration of the thyroid cartilage at the vocal cords.
The autopsy took a long time. The advanced decomposition changes slowed me down, and I had to do a rape kit. In some ways, though, I was relieved to be back on a regular case after my first hellish nineteen-hour shift doing World Trade Center work. What was done to Sylvia Allen was no less vicious and senseless than what was done to the unknown woman in the fishnet stockings, or the unknown woman with the lavender toenail polish, or any of the other people whose remains I had handled on the line the day after the bombing—but Allen at least had a name, and a grieving daughter, and police officers who would go get her killer. Her autopsy, complete with rape kit and shattered zygomatic arch and bloody strap muscles, was familiar.
As soon as I finished the autopsy, I changed scrubs and went outside to work the World Trade Center line. I found to my delight that our staff anthropologist, Amy Zelson, who had been injured with Dr. Hirsch when the South Tower collapsed, was back at work. A new forensic anthropology triage table had been set up at the head of the recovery line, an
d there she stood—sorting through the remains of those who had died in the same terrorist attack that had nearly killed her. I ran over to give her a hug but stopped myself when I got close. Amy had a huge contusion across her forehead and thick padding over her ribs. “You ought to see my back,” she told me. “It looks like I was flogged.” She gave me a peck on the cheek and went right back to work, deciding whether each body bag that arrived contained the remains of one person, or two, or six, or more.
During the last shift, an X-ray had revealed a woman’s severed hand, complete with wedding ring, entirely embedded inside the chest wall of a man’s intact torso. We were not assuming that body parts found together belonged to the same person. My station handled in quick succession a burly fireman, a young Asian woman wearing a blue skirt and an elastic-knit tank top, and a white man with a shattered face. The rest of the body bags contained only fragments, and they seemed to be getting smaller as the shift wore on: hands and feet, then a hip bone, then bits of intestine, dirt-encrusted muscle, a ribbon of skin.
When we finished examining and documenting each piece of tissue, it went into one of the four refrigerated trailers, of the sort that haul perishables, which were parked behind the compound. Human remains in the midst of forensic investigation have to be kept cold, and we had nowhere to store the body parts from the World Trade Center site after we had finished processing them at our tent stations. Truck One held whole bodies; Truck Two, bodies that were not complete; Truck Three, body parts; and Truck Four held fragments. In deference to the large number of volunteers assisting us, we doctors had been discouraged by our superiors from saying “bodies,” “parts,” or “fragments.” Instead we had been employing the truck numbers as euphemism: “I have some Truck Four stuff to finish, and then I’ll move on to the Truck One bag that just came in.” All the trailers were draped with American flags. The hum of their diesel generators was the only sound coming out of that parking lot.
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