by Colin Evans
Notwithstanding Hirsch’s findings and Molloy’s dubious track record, on April 18, 1997, a judge threw out an indictment for second-degree murder, saying there was insufficient evidence to prove reckless behavior by the officer. Once again, or so it seemed, the cowboy cop had slipped through the net. But the district attorney’s office wasn’t about to roll over without a fight. On appeal the indictment was reinstated, after it was discovered that the gun in Molloy’s holster was secured by a leather strap that ran from the outside, over the handle, behind the hammer, and snapped on the body side. Tests showed it was physically impossible to pull the gun from the holster with one hand while the strap was snapped shut. There was one other anomaly: how many suicides, after shooting themselves in the head, are thoughtful enough to return the weapon to its owner before they expire?
On April 20, 1999, Molloy, who had also waived his right to a jury trial, was found guilty and later sentenced to a maximum of twelve years. Most trial watchers agreed that Hirsch’s testimony had been crucial. And controversial. Plenty of NYPD officers grumbled that they had been stabbed in the back by a rogue public official with a vendetta against New York’s finest. Those able to see the big picture recognized that Hirsch’s independence was utterly essential if public confidence were to be restored in what had become a very shaky institution indeed.
Not long after the conclusion of this trial, the OCME proudly presented the latest addition to its ever-expanding array of technical resources—six enormous refrigerated trucks that could be used to store bodies if the city mortuaries lost power or in the event of a mass fatality. There were two for Manhattan and one each for the other boroughs. Ellen Borakove, a spokesperson for the OCME, explained that the mortuary at 520 First Avenue could house only about 200 corpses. For just a few hundred dollars a month, the city gained six rolling morgues, each five feet high and forty-five feet long, that together could store about 250 bodies. New York was taking the possibility of catastrophe seriously. Ever since the beginning of the decade, the city had maintained a contingency plan that called for up to eight thousand body bags to be on hand should they ever be needed. “We have the ability to get a significant number more,” said Ms. Borakove. “Of course, we all hope it won’t be necessary.”
Twenty-one months later that hope collapsed in rubble.
CASE FILE:
September 11, 2001
Sixty-six years to the day after New York’s first chief medical officer, Charles Norris, died, his successor, Dr. Hirsch, was in his office at 520 First Avenue. Outside, it was a glorious fall morning with bright sunshine and promised highs in the eighties. Inside, Hirsch had his hands full. A training session on dealing with biohazards and airborne pathogens had been scheduled, and the OCME was once again up to its elbows in yet another headline-making case. This time it concerned an off-duty cop, Joseph Gray, who, after an all-day drinking binge, had plowed his car into a family group, killing three people. One of the victims, Maria Hererra, had been pregnant at the time. Despite urgent medical attention at the hospital, her unborn baby also died. Because the baby, which had been delivered by Caesarian section, never took a breath on his own and lived only for half a day with the aid of drugs, Hirsch felt justified in declaring it to be stillborn. But the Brooklyn DA’s office—with one eye on an upcoming election and urged on by the victims’ furious relatives—decided to take a stand. Suddenly everyone wanted little Ricardo Hererra’s name added to the murder victim list. When Hirsch refused to change his finding, the DA’s iron fist came down, and in a showy announcement Hirsch was overruled.* It was a rare public reversal for Hirsch, but he was ready to put all that behind him now. Win some, lose some; as far as Hirsch was concerned, this Tuesday morning was shaping up to be just another day at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Until just before 9:00 A.M.
That was when the phone rang. The message was terse—a plane, thought to be a commercial airliner, had struck the North Tower at the World Trade Center, barely three miles away.
During its brief and hectic history, New York City had suffered some quite appalling accidents, none greater than the General Slocum disaster of June 15, 1904, when a steamship burst into flames on the East River with the loss of more than one thousand lives. But a modern airliner slamming into one of the world’s tallest buildings threatened to dwarf even that catastrophe. Those with long memories recalled that once before a plane had hit a Manhattan skyscraper. On July 28, 1945 a twin-engined B-25 army bomber, hopelessly lost in blinding fog, had careered into the Empire State Building, 915 feet above street level, killing thirteen persons and injuring twenty-six more. Shocking as that incident had been, today’s sounded much, much worse.
Over the previous decade, the OCME, in concert with New York City’s various emergency response agencies, had repeatedly practiced drills based on simulated plane crashes and attacks with biological weapons, so while other staff members set in motion this well-rehearsed disaster plan, Hirsch and five aides readied themselves for the short drive to the scene. Their first task would be to establish a temporary morgue for the inevitable victims. But just moments before they left, another message came through—a second jetliner had smashed into the World Trade Center’s South Tower.
In an instant it became clear that the first crash had been no random accident but part of a well-coordinated attack. An aerial assault of this nature on a major city was entirely unprecedented; the body count could be astronomical. On any given day, upward of fifty thousand people worked at the Twin Towers, with visitors more than doubling that total. Faced with numbers like that, Hirsch and his department were potentially dealing with the greatest act of mass murder in American history.
The OCME team threaded its way through streets filled with screaming sirens, firefighting trucks, and just about every kind of emergency vehicle imaginable. When the congestion turned to gridlock, they parked a few blocks up from the disaster zone and completed the rest of the journey on foot. As they reached the World Trade Center Plaza, a vision of Dantean horror reared up before them. The peaks of both towers were ablaze, and columns of smoke billowed from raw holes in the structure, blackening the lower Manhattan skyline. But it was unable to block out the most horrific sight of all—a ghastly human confetti, as scores of trapped workers chose to jump a thousand feet to their doom in order to escape the raging infernos. Very few medical examiners are eyewitnesses to the deaths they investigate. Here, Hirsch could only look on, as helpless as everyone else around him, as the bodies rained down.
Amid the pandemonium, news came through that the carnage wasn’t confined to New York alone. Just before 9:45 A.M., the networks began reporting that 240 miles southwest of Manhattan, another hijacked airliner had careered into the west wall of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The devastation there was also colossal.
As dazed onlookers in Lower Manhattan stared up at the stricken towers, struggling to digest the magnitude of what was happening about them and elsewhere in America, suddenly, at 9:59 A.M., the air bulged with a fearful cry from the disbelieving onlookers—the South Tower was falling!
In a matter of just ten seconds, the 1,368-foot-tall building simply ceased to exist. Its concertina-like collapse squeezed all the life from sixty million cubic feet of space, generating a lethal windstorm that roared with hurricane force through the concourse, killing scores more and filling the air with shards of steel, flying concrete, and choking smoke.
Among those flattened by the blast was the OCME team. One investigator broke her leg so severely that the bone gaped through; another, felled by a blow to the back of the head, would take months to recover. Amy Mundorff, the city’s first forensic anthropologist, was thrown forty feet headlong into a wall and fractured two ribs. Hirsch got lucky. He happened to be standing on West Street beneath a pedestrian footbridge when the tower fell and was shielded from the worst of the blast. Even so, he too was hurled like a rag doll, sustaining bruises all over his body and spraining an ankle. When he picked himself up he resembled
a ghostly wraith, blanketed from head to toe in white dust.
Suddenly news came over the wires of yet more insanity. Another hijacked airliner—the fourth—had crashed, this time in a rural part of Pennsylvania, eighty miles southeast of Pittsburgh, and twenty minutes’ flying time from Washington, D.C. Apparently en route to a target in the nation’s capital, for some reason it had crashed short of its destination. Only in the fullness of time would cell phone transcripts reveal how heroic passenger intervention had most likely averted yet another national disaster.
Meanwhile, in the World Trade Center Plaza at 10:28 A.M., one hour and forty-two minutes after being struck, the North Tower went the way of its twin, collapsing with hellish, almost unbelievable rapidity.
In the midst of all this madness, with hundreds of emergency personnel milling everywhere, Hirsch fought to coordinate the OCME’s response. His arm had been badly gashed in the hail of debris belched out by the South Tower’s collapse, but he calmly sutured the wound himself and remained at his post. No other medical examiner in history had had to deal with death on such a monumental scale. Although the number of casualties was as yet unknown, whispers from some shell-shocked authorities were putting the death toll as high as ten thousand. Such a loss of life on American soil had not been seen since the bloodiest days of the Civil War.
When Hirsch reached the end of that dreadful day, he made a chilling discovery: his pockets were full of dust. He shuddered inwardly. If the blast had been able to pulverize concrete and steel to this fine powder, what on earth would it have done to human bodies? In the normal course of events, the medical examiner’s function is either to determine or confirm the cause of death. Here, Hirsch sensed that his overriding concern would hinge on simply finding enough human matter to identify.
All through the night the disaster management plan swung into action. By first light, less than twenty-four hours after the atrocity, a barge tied up at a pier in Lower Manhattan. On board were pallets of ice, designed to preserve any human remains as they were recovered from the rubble. Later that morning a convoy of refrigerated trucks lined up along Second Avenue, adjacent to the medical examiner’s office. They would provide space to store about a thousand bodies. More than eleven thousand body bags were delivered in two loads, with no one yet knowing how many would ultimately be needed.
As work began on clearing the devastation, logistical nightmares were uncovered at every turn. It wasn’t just the Twin Towers that had suffered. Sixteen other major buildings in and around the plaza were either partially destroyed or else had sustained significant damage, and although hygiene requirements mandated that the rubble be cleared as soon as possible to minimize the risk of disease, medical urgency was tempered by the realization that among this debris lay the remains of thousands of murder victims. Some compromise had to be found, a kind of clearinghouse for the World Trade Center debris. It was decided to recommission the Fresh Kills Landfill, a three-thousand-acre site on the northwest of Staten Island that had been the city’s main garbage dump until it was closed down earlier in the year. Once there, every scrap of the 1.6 million tons of rubble would be sifted by hand by FBI agents, and any body parts discovered put on ice and transferred to 520 First Avenue.
Investigators began the task having no idea how much—or how little—they would find. The manuals told them that jet fuel burns at about a maximum of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on circumstances. Temperatures of this magnitude would ordinarily consume human remains beyond recognition. But there was another element at work here. Experts calculated that after the initial impacts numerous fires broke out at the core of the buildings, raising the temperature ever higher. And it was these fires that did most of the damage. Sucking in energy from floors full of office supplies, they reached temperatures of over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to buckle the buildings’ steel frames and weaken them to the point where collapse was inevitable.
The quite extraordinary violence of the disaster and the fires at Ground Zero that would ultimately burn for months among the rubble made the problems of identification almost unimaginably difficult. There would be fingerprint records for the scores of government officials who died in the inferno, provided there was a print to match. Dental records, too, were expected to play a big part. Of all the tissues in the human body, nothing is tougher than teeth. But everything has its destruction threshold and even teeth can be incinerated at the kinds of temperature levels reached in the Twin Towers. The hope was that most victims would have experienced only minimal exposure to these extreme temperatures.
To aid in the identification process, staff at the OCME issued a seven-page form to relatives and friends of those thought to have died in the tragedy. The questions were necessarily intimate: What was the blood type? Were there any distinguishing scars? What about facial hair? Had he been circumcised? Did she or he wear any distinctive jewelry? A wig, perhaps? Had they undergone expensive dental work? Or cosmetic surgery? Were they tattooed? What was the color of her favorite nail polish? The list was comprehensive and heartbreaking. Once a form had been completed, its answers were fed into a giant database supplied by the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), a special unit designed to assist local agencies in the event of natural and man-made disasters. In time, they would provide more than two hundred investigators ranging from pathologists to investigators, X-ray technicians to dentists. Many were veterans of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that had left 168 dead, but nothing could have prepared them for the kinds of numbers they were dealing with here. This was domestic tragedy on an entirely unprecedented scale.
To understand just how so many people could have died so quickly, it was necessary to piece together the series of events between impact and collapse. At 8:46 A.M. American Airlines flight 11, which had been hijacked shortly after taking off from Logan Airport, Boston, flew into the upper portion of the North Tower, slicing through floors 93–99, rendering all three of the building’s stairwells impassable from the ninety-second floor up, and killing all eighty-one passengers and nine crew. One astonishing fact emerged: within the space of the tower’s 209-foot width, the plane was brought from 586 mph to a dead stop! Yet even this stupendous amount of energy—sufficient to sway the tower a foot on its foundations—failed to make it collapse. That would come later. Countless workers were pulverized instantly as they sat at their desks. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, survived the impact, only to be trapped on the floors up to the top of the 110-story building.
Many of these would have been helpless spectators when, at 9:03 A.M., a second Boeing 767 hijacked out of Logan International that morning, United Airlines flight 175, tore into the South Tower between the seventy-seventh and eighty-fifth floors, killing all seventy-four passengers and crew. For some reason the plane had banked just before impact, a maneuver that left portions of the building undamaged on the impact floors. The most significant outcome of this abrupt shift was that it allowed one of the stairwells to remain passable from at least the ninety-first floor down and likely from top to bottom.
Within minutes of the dual impacts, emergency rescue personnel were inside both buildings. Their actions that day have entered the pantheon of human courage. Fighting their way up smoke-filled stairways, often in pitch darkness, they found terrified workers and shepherded them to safety. Then it was back into the choking smoke to hunt for more survivors. But their bravery came at a terrible cost. When the roll call was taken, history would remember this as the blackest day ever for the world’s fire and rescue services. The numbers were staggering. Three hundred and forty-three members of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) were killed, the largest loss of life of any emergency response agency in history. The Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) suffered thirty-seven fatalities—the largest single day loss of life of any police force in history. Their colleagues in the NYPD lost twenty-three—the second-largest loss of life of any police force in history, exceeded only by the number of PAPD officers lost the sam
e day. And yet, amid all this tragedy for the emergency services, a single beacon of brilliance gleamed through. Miraculously, twelve firefighters, one PAPD officer, and three civilians—all of whom were descending stairwell B—survived the collapse of the North Tower and somehow managed to emerge alive from the wreckage.
But thousands had not, and it was the OCME’s grim duty to put names to as many victims as possible. Two days after 9/11, Mundorff, both eyes blackened and her face puffy and bruised, reported back for work. Hirsch welcomed her with a hug. In many ways Mundorff’s resilience became a metaphor for the OCME and its staff in the face of such a crisis. Her role would be crucial in analyzing remains from the catastrophe. The whole bodies and larger body parts came in body bags, the smaller pieces were in red plastic biohazard bags. There was one unexpected problem. To an untrained eye, one bone looks pretty much the same as another, and as the World Trade Center had housed a dozen restaurants, serving twenty thousand meals a day, this meant that many of the bones sent to Mundorff actually came from chickens and other animals. First she needed to eliminate these; then it was a matter of sorting through the human parts, looking for anything unique, like a healed fracture or an operation scar, that might help identify the victim. Parts obviously not from the same person were placed in separate containers for subsequent DNA analysis.