Working Stiff

by Judy Melinek, Md

  The change of status for the operation on the Pile from a rescue effort to a recovery job had been hard for many of the firefighters. A fire marshal was in our office one day talking to Stuart about an ordinary arson case, and when Stuart asked him, “How are you holding up?” the marshal unburdened his whole 9/11 story. He was there when the first tower collapsed and survived by sprinting into a subway station. His captain was last seen going up to the seventy-third floor of the North Tower. We hadn’t yet identified his remains.

  The fire marshal lost eleven guys from his company that day—eleven dead friends. “Hardest thing after it happened, they wanted us to put together a list of who was there. We didn’t want to sit around and write lists. We wanted to dig. Guys would put in full shifts, do the paperwork, and then go right down to the Pile to dig. But that was when we thought that we might still find someone alive. We don’t think that anymore, not after the things we been digging up. But still it doesn’t seem real.” He looked at Stuart, then at me—as though we could tell him why. We couldn’t.

  One day in early October, Amy showed up for work with a new piece of jewelry, a peculiar pin—an eagle with an anchor, a flintlock pistol, and a trident. I asked her where it was from. “It’s a Navy SEAL pin,” she replied. “One of the DMORT guys gave it to me. He had his wife remove it from his old uniform at home and mail it. He said if I had been in the service, they would have awarded me a Purple Heart.” I was stunned. Amy smiled. “Isn’t that sweet?” She had pinned it to the Kevlar NYC MEDICAL EXAMINER jacket she swore had saved her life on September 11, when she was thrown against a wall during the South Tower’s collapse. I asked Amy if she’d been down to the Pile since that day and was surprised to learn she had been—several times. “I was down there this morning. That’s why I’m so beat. They paged me at two o’clock after somebody uncovered some cremains.” That was shorthand for “cremated remains,” the kind that required her field assessment. She pulled some change out of her pocket, counted it. “I’m going to Todaro’s for coffee. Want to come?”

  I had assumed Amy was emotionally scarred from the experience of surviving the tower’s collapse. I asked her about it while we walked past the police barricade and headed to Second Avenue. “I guess not, not really,” she replied with no bravado. “I even got a police helicopter ride one time, to survey the scene. I asked them if they’d let me fly it, and the pilot laughed at me. I was serious!”

  “I believe you.”

  “Well, there’s no harm in asking, is there?”

  After that conversation, I decided it was time for me to see the Pile with my own eyes. First, though, I knew I had to visit Memorial Park, the collection of refrigerated truck trailers in which we had been housing the remains after forensic processing. Flome had told me how dignified they were, and I wanted to prepare myself before visiting the disaster site. I had seen the first trailers when they arrived on September 12, parked in a dirt lot next to our building. As soon as it started raining, the open lot had turned to mud, and a city road crew came in to do some emergency paving. They paved around the trucks without moving them, so an oblong patch of bare earth remained under each chassis—fitting, for a graveyard on wheels. On October 5, I finally worked up the courage to walk down to Memorial Park and pay my respects.

  By then there were sixteen trailers, sheltered under a lofting hangar of white fabric that cast the park in a soft glow. Everything under that tent was immaculate. After so many days sifting through dirty, incinerated bits of gristle and bone, it was a relief to see these human beings afforded such perfect dignity. A giant American flag hung from the ceiling, each trailer had another draped over its doors, and dozens of other national flags, representing victims from all over the world, lined one wall of the hangar. Floral wreaths covered every inch of the plywood screens around the parking lot. The hangar had a chapel, with potted cypresses and a floor that looked like marble. I sat at one of the pews and felt at peace for a moment. For a moment—but it passed. Though I was moved by the love and care on display at Memorial Park, the presence of those humming trailers stacked with the body parts I had been sifting through for weeks filled me with sorrow, and an overwhelming sense of loss.

  Kenny, one of our investigators, had agreed to take me and three other colleagues with him to the Body Collection Point, on Vesey Street at the Hudson River ferry terminal, when he started his shift there. For blocks and blocks below Union Square, we drove down deserted streets. Restaurants, retail, industry—everything was shuttered, no one on the sidewalks. “Big pieces of a jet engine went right through the building and ended up on a corner, over that way,” Kenny told me, while we were still at least four or five blocks away from the World Trade Center site.

  At the Body Collection Point we were introduced to our guide, a sunburned guy with a cigarette-hoarse voice, old work boots, and a red T-shirt that read MUD FLAP above the DMORT logo. I asked him how he got that nickname. “Because I bring up the rear and catch all the shit,” he said. Mud Flap was in charge of DMORT recovery operations at the site.

  Kenny handed out hard hats and told us about the medicolegal investigators’ operation at the field morgue. “Our first job is to look over the remains and try to evaluate whether it’s one body or more. Besides that we pretty much leave everything as is for you guys. Early feedback was, the less we do, the better. We only separate body parts if they obviously don’t belong together. Two left arms, for instance.”

  I donned the hard hat, perched on the rear end of a John Deere four-wheeler next to a coworker, and Mud Flap jolted us across the smashed, dusty hole in New York where the Twin Towers had been. It was like a construction site in reverse. Huge derrick cranes loomed overhead, backhoes crawled across the dirt, hundreds of men and women in hard hats cut steel, worked equipment, and took down half a dozen crippled and crumbling buildings, piecemeal. Everywhere I looked I saw the spark of welders’ torches disentangling the twisted steel ruins.

  “It was bucket brigades the first couple of days, did you know that?” Mud Flap said, reading my mind. “Hand-to-hand removal of debris so we could look for survivors.” One façade on the edge of the Pile had a gargantuan net draped over it. A neighboring building was left an empty shell after it collapsed on the inside. The blue half dome of the Winter Garden Atrium backing the Hudson River sat sparklingly intact, while its front side was shattered glass and scorched metal. A serrated shard of the South Tower stood there in the center of it all, like a Gothic cathedral bombed hollow by war. Fires were still burning in the six stories of the World Trade Center that had been built below ground. They would burn until December.

  Seeing steel and concrete so thoroughly demolished helped me comprehend the magnitude of the destructive forces unleashed by those two hijacked airplanes, the intensity of the violence that had shattered all those body parts I had seen and handled. The construction equipment was grabbing debris and depositing it into separate piles—it would be easy for multiple parts of the same individual to go out in different shipments from the Body Collection Point and end up at my station uptown on separate days. I saw firsthand why Dr. Hirsch had made it our policy to give each piece of human remains its own DM01 case number unless that piece was physically connected to another in an anatomically normative way.

  We stopped the John Deere in the middle of the Pile and just sat there for a while, watching. Somebody offered to share a pocketed stash of Uncrustables from Sal’s Place. I ate a couple. I was hungry. It was hot out, dust everywhere. When it came time to go, the police car driving us out of the quarantine zone had to have a power wash.

  The cruiser dropped me off near Penn Station so I could catch the subway home. On the street was the usual crush of people—too many for the sidewalk, serious expressions, jostling and grinding. There was still a significant police presence around Penn Station too, because in those days rumors of terrorism were constantly spreading, poisoning the city. The station was papered over with 9/11 MISSING posters. For weeks I had been trying to
avoid the posters, but I didn’t that day. Ghosts had followed me back from the Pile. I searched the posters for their faces. I was frozen in place for a few minutes, staring, straining my memory. Then I stopped. I averted my eyes. I didn’t have the strength for it.

  * * *

  As time wore on, there were only bones: March 5, thirty pieces of skull, which Amy puzzled together for a nearly complete cranium; March 30, the decomposed remains of a hand, entwined with a bracelet; April 16, autopsies in the morning and fifteen bony pieces, the largest a humerus and scapula, in the afternoon. On April 29, Dr. Hirsch informed us that we had identified the one thousandth person from the World Trade Center disaster. On May 7, 2002, eight months after that blue-sky day, we ceased our part of the recovery operation. The numbering of the dead continued, but we medical examiners were no longer needed for it.

  Two months after the recovery effort was officially closed, the New York Times ran a story reporting that cleanup crews at Ground Zero had found “body parts and human remains” in an adjacent building. I asked Amy Zelson about it. She rolled her eyes. “They made me stand for four hours in what had probably been a butcher shop on September tenth, while I told them everything in there was cow or pig.” The whole story was fabricated by loose-lipped police officers and lazy reporters. None of the remains were human—but the story made the front page of the Times. I was used to such false reports, so when I got a call one day in mid-August 2002 about more human remains found at the World Trade Center site, I didn’t think it would amount to much.

  I was wrong. These remains, discovered nearly a year after the disaster, were human. Workers had been dismantling a scaffold on the roof of 90 West Street when they found them. I went outside to the tent morgue, which was by then empty except for one workstation, a solitary body pan on sawhorses—and there on the workstation was a single charred and desiccated human hip joint. The DMORT anthropologist peeled away dried layers of muscle. “There’s the lesser trochanter,” she said, pointing to a bulb on the bone underneath. “It’s always medial. So this is the left. A left hip.”

  A scribe wrote it down on the intake form. We three were the only ones out there, and it was quiet for a long moment. “It’s from the plane,” I decided out loud. The other two women nodded in agreement. We couldn’t see how anything could make it onto the roof of a skyscraper, and so far away from the towers, unless it had a high horizontal trajectory and a lot of force propelling it.

  Less than a month later, it was September 11 again. It was too similar: a beautiful morning as I walked down 30th Street to First Avenue, a patch of blue sky between the skyscrapers where American Airlines Flight 11 had roared over my head. I was supposed to be doing paperwork, but I couldn’t concentrate and didn’t want to sit alone in my office. “How about a commemorative run to Todaro’s?” I proposed, after seeking out Karen Turi.

  We bought cookies and milk, then went back to her office to talk. Karen had worked the very first DM01 shift, on the night of September 11. “The first body I saw was a firefighter who was perfectly intact, with a peaceful expression, until I rolled him over and found the back of his head imploded. I said to myself, Oh. Okay. That’s what this is going to be like, and I got to work. But we were all in shock, weren’t we? I mean, we just had no concept of the scale . . .”

  We had lunch at Sal’s Place again—the Salvation Army had brought their tent back, set it up outside on 30th Street, grilled us burgers and hot dogs. T.J. brought Danny in, and the boy was in seventh heaven when a pair of cops let him turn on the lights and siren of their cruiser. A lot of people showed up from the FBI and DMORT: colleagues—comrades, really—we hadn’t seen in months. Many of the family members of the victims came too. People spoke of a sense of completeness, of how far we had come.

  I don’t know how many remains from the World Trade Center attacks I personally processed. It’s impossible to know. I had 598 DM01 cases officially assigned to me. That makes arithmetic sense: the individual pieces of recovered remains numbered 19,956, and there were 30 medical examiners. Around 600 each. We would try to make sense of it by thinking of the victims as numbers, remains, specimens. A year after the event, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner had issued 2,733 death certificates for the victims of the World Trade Center bombings—1,344 by judicial decree and 1,389 based on identified remains. The count of Members of the Service confirmed dead was 343 firefighters, 23 NYPD officers, and 48 others, most of these Port Authority police. The dead left more than 3,000 orphans. It was the largest mass murder in United States history.

  On the morning of September 12, 2002, I returned to the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner at 520 First Avenue. I gowned up, double-netted my hair from force of habit, and got back to work.

  11

  Just as We Feared

  Kathy Nguyen was a Vietnamese immigrant who had lived in the Bronx for more than twenty years. Her neighbors knew her as a solitary but kind woman. She went to Mass, shopped at the corner bodega, commuted by subway to a blue-collar job. When she died on Halloween of 2001, she left no next of kin. Her cause of death was infection by anthrax, a natural disease. But the manner of death was not natural. The manner listed on Kathy Nguyen’s death certificate was homicide.

  Anthrax is a frightful disease. It is caused by a bacterium which, once it gets inside a human host, spreads quickly and produces a powerful and destructive toxin. The organism can hibernate in the environment for decades or more as an endospore and reactivate when it reaches someone’s lips or eyes. Breathing in the spores can cause the most serious form of infection, inhalational anthrax. The early symptoms are cough, fever, and aches and pains—exactly like the common cold and the flu. If inhalational anthrax is not treated immediately after infection, it becomes incurably fatal within days. This is a nearly indestructible pathogen of high virulence, and once established it camouflages its symptoms until it’s too late to prevent the onset of lethal septic shock. That’s the bad news. The good news is that anthrax does not spread from person to person like influenza or smallpox, there is a preventative vaccine, and early-stage infection is treatable with antibiotics.

  Exactly one week after the attacks of September 11, someone mailed at least five letters containing powder laden with anthrax endospores to news agencies in New York and Florida. By the first week of October, news accounts started circulating about a Florida man who had died of inhalational anthrax, the first case in that state in thirty years. Then two of his coworkers were also diagnosed. A woman at NBC’s headquarters in Rockefeller Center got infected when she opened an envelope addressed to a news anchorman and found a threatening letter laced with fine white powder. On October 16, we learned that two more letters had reached congressmen in Washington. Federal government offices were closed down for decontamination. Two D.C. postal workers died the next week. That was about the time a worried mom stopped me outside the subway.

  I was heading for the office to start a desperately needed paperwork day. The woman with a nose job and sandy-colored hair in a bob had spotted NYC MEDICAL EXAMINER across the back of my jacket. “My son was at the Yankees game last night,” she began. “When I was walking him to school this morning, he told me he saw a puff of white powder in the air, a few seats down from him at the stadium. At first he thought it had come from a beach ball the crowd was batting around, and maybe it popped. But then he saw that the attendants had grabbed the beach ball, so that wasn’t it.”

  I had no idea what to say at first, so I started with the obvious. “Is he a good kid? Prone to pranks or jokes?”

  “He wouldn’t lie to me about this. He knows what’s going on,” the woman replied. “He’s taking the PSAT today, so I didn’t want to stop him going to school.” We just stood there a moment, two moms, Midtown. “What do I do?”

  How do I know, lady? I wanted to say, but didn’t. “If you’re really worried, take him to the family doctor after school and ask for a nasal swab test. It’ll come back negative and put your mind at ease.�
�� This solution did not seem to dispel her concerns. “Also, find out his seat number and call Yankee Stadium to report it.” Other than that I couldn’t think of anything, but the worried mom was still standing between me and the route to my office—and my humongous pile of open case reports. I asked for her phone number and told her I’d call her if I found out anything else about white powder at the Yankees game. That finally satisfied her, and we went our separate ways.

  As the days wore on with no clear answers about the anthrax letters, our office began fielding an increasing number of phone calls reporting mysterious white powder, chronic coughs, suspicious-looking swarthy men on the subway, and demands that we test dead bodies “for Amtraks, like they’re saying on TV.” A forty-year-old postal worker was admitted to a Manhattan hospital for pain and shortness of breath. He told the nurse he had been using cocaine a few days before. The patient was HIV positive and had raging pneumonia. The doctors tried to treat him with antibiotics, but he died in less than twenty-four hours. The press had been reporting that several postal workers in New Jersey had contracted anthrax, so the family requested an autopsy. His nephew specifically demanded that I take a nasal swab from the dead man.