Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  To manage the families’ often unrealistic expectations of what their loved one’s remains looked like, I was often forced into offering long, graphic descriptions of the effects on the remains of decomposition and of the terrible forces unleashed in the collapse of the WTC buildings. I did so to convince family members that they would not recognize the piece of burned or decomposed flesh that we had identified. Early on, during an interview with a family that was having a particularly hard time picturing what decomposition does to a body, I hit upon a useful simile: I asked the family to imagine they had put a banana on a windowsill in September. What did they think it would look like if they came back in December?

  “Did my loved one suffer?” “Was my loved one among the jumpers?” “Was my loved one burned to death?” Frequently, during the positive-identification interviews, I was asked one or more of these three questions that tore at the hearts and minds of all the families. In answer to the first question, I could provide some comforting information. Each of the towers collapsed in somewhere between six and nine seconds. That meant that each floor came crashing down on the next in a microsecond. Which meant, in turn, that death came to their loved one suddenly, like the turning out of a light switch—and the likelihood was that the loved one did not really suffer at all. No one “rode down” with the buildings. If a person was on the eightieth floor, he or she was killed the instant that the eighty-first floor came down on them. By the time the eightieth floor hit the seventy-ninth floor, the person was long dead.

  I tried carefully to stay away from discussing an area about which we had very little information: whether their loved one might have been injured during the initial attack and then had lain wounded and suffering until the building fell, killing him or her. I was not always able to avoid discussing such possibilities, and when pressed I would say that while I was sure that some few unfortunate souls were thusly injured and trapped, forensic evidence showed that the vast majority of victims were not injured severely or even at all until the buildings fell down, killing them instantly. We knew this because examination of the remains had not revealed many instances of vital reaction to trauma. Vital reaction is living tissue’s response to an injury. Your hand swells quickly if it is hit by a hammer, and blisters with equal rapidity if burned by hot oil in the kitchen. The absence of blistering, bleeding into fractures, or inflammation that we would have seen had the living tissue been badly injured before death helped us at OCME to conclude that the awful trauma we were seeing in the remains occurred at the time of death.

  Along with questions about possible physical injury of victims trapped in the towers waiting to die, came queries about the psychological torture the situation must have inflicted on its victims. I learned from family members who had been “fortunate” enough to have a final conversation with a trapped victim that the victims had been calm and accepted their fate. Though hearing of such conversations always cut through my defenses and caused me to choke up, I was able to use this information about the psychological calm of the victims to comfort other families who had not been “fortunate” enough to speak to their loved ones in the moments before they perished and say good-bye.

  To the other two questions—whether a loved one jumped or had burned to death—my answers were less definitive. We couldn’t know from examining the remains if any particular person was among the jumpers, because when the buildings collapsed, they collapsed on top of anyone who might have jumped earlier, crushing them as thoroughly as it did those who had remained inside. Similarly, we couldn’t say whether a particular person burned to death because all the charred remains had been subjected to the high-intensity fires of the burning buildings, which burned long after the person had died. All I could say to comfort families about this last matter was that even in regular house fires, most victims don’t burn to death. Smoke kills people long before flames do, and smoke inhalation is actually not all that bad a way to go when compared to burning to death.

  Astonishingly, despite the pain these conversations must have caused, many families told me during the post-identification interview that they considered themselves lucky. This thought was perfectly put to me by Edie Lutnick, who lost her brother Gary Lutnick: “I am the lucky of the unlucky,” she told me sadly, because at least she had remains that had been positively identified. She added, “Who would ever have thought that to sit here and be told that you found a piece of my brother’s body makes me one of the lucky ones?”

  At times there was too much of that good luck. Another factor complicating the process was that remains were coming in every day, many of them after we had already identified earlier fragments of the body from which they had come and had previously notified the relatives of the positive identification. This meant that we found ourselves repeatedly notifying families about additional remains, which caused problems. Early in the process, we identified the remains of a man and had the usual post-identification interview with his wife. We had no way of knowing at the time, but the man’s body had been blown into countless fragments, not all of which were found together or identified at the same time. After the fifth time we called and told her that we’d found and identified yet another body part—sending her each time into a new spasm of grief—she asked us to stop. Couldn’t we come up with a way to notify her once at the end of the process? Hers was a good question and—since we eventually identified over 250 fragments of her husband—one well worth finding an answer to. So we began to ask families, during the first notification session, to indicate their preferences and sign an “authorization of release” form, directing us as to if, when, and how often they wanted to be notified in the event we identified additional remains of their particular loved one.

  This is the all-too-human story behind the creation of the Authorization to Release form. Some families chose to be notified every time additional remains were identified, some not at all, and some only at stated intervals. The document also gave the families the opportunity to appoint a proxy, such as a funeral director, who could be notified in their stead.

  One interesting consequence of the release form was that many families chose to never be notified of additional remains. Thus there are plenty of identified but unclaimed body parts at OCME that will eventually find a resting place in the permanent memorial along with the remains that will never be identified.

  Paroxysms of grief took place in front of me, and I was not immune to them. Sometimes I teared up as the family did. More often I did not. I was gentle, compassionate, brutally honest, vague, or direct in proportion to what I sensed the family wanted from me. I was always sincere—the families sensed that—but functioned as though I had a valve on my emotions, calibrating the opening in reaction to what I perceived the family’s needs to be in the moment. Some needed the valve to be wide open, for me to empathize completely with them, others needed it mostly closed, for me to hold on to my reserve so that they could let go of theirs. Sometimes, though rarely, the families and I even laughed together. Once, a widow asked me to show her exactly where her husband’s remains had been found. I took out the grid map of Ground Zero and began to point to the various places at which the six fragments of his remains had been found. To my horror, the widow started giggling during the explanation, and then I became really worried as she broke out into peals of uncontrollable laughter. Initially taken aback, I then started to feel the hysteria build up inside of me, and after a few moments more I gave up trying to keep a straight face and joined her in laughing at the absurdity of our conversation. “He never did anything the easy way, that man of mine,” she said to me. “This is so typical of him: dying, and I can’t even get his body back in one piece!”

  Even in that interview, the pain and grief came through, as they did more openly in virtually every interview that I did; yet during the time that I conducted hundreds of those interviews, I bore it all as stoically as possible. Today, though, recalling the family suffering those interviews entailed, I feel the weight of emotion more heavily tha
n I did then, perhaps because now I no longer have to struggle to preserve myself for the work of seeing the next family, and the next, and the next. Recalling these interviews and their extreme emotionality now, I move slowly, as though under a great weight, and each step feels enormously difficult to take.

  When the identification process got into full swing, which enlarged the number of families waiting to be told that their loved one’s remains had been identified, other people in the office jumped into the family counseling task. Katie Sullivan was one. Jimmy Meyers and Tammie Natali, two of the twenty new MLIs that OCME hired after 9/11, also became a mainstay of the family interview room. As with others who counseled the families, Jimmy, Tammie, and Katie also burned out after a while. These interviews could not be done day in and day out for a prolonged period, while remaining sane and unaffected.

  Dr. Hirsch sometimes saw families—those who would not be satisfied with hearing the news from a lower-ranked official. He invariably had me in the room during these interviews to explain in detail what we had found, how we’d identified the remains, and so on. That arrangement was fine with me; Dr. Hirsch had a much larger and a different responsibility than I did and needed to keep his attention focused on those larger matters.

  Responding to the families’ increasing demand for information about our efforts, we began to offer once-a-week tours of the DNA lab and other parts of the OCME facility to families who were waiting but whose loved ones had not yet been identified. Hundreds of grieving relatives took those tours, and I hope they were comforted by the sight of dedicated public servants working tirelessly to help them.

  At my suggestion, we issued photo identification cards to the family members, which bore their name and the RM case number of the relative they lost, against a background of an American flag. These ID cards were later adopted by the city as the official form of identification for WTC families, accepted at all venues for the families, such as the Family Assistance Center, the temporary memorials, and the chapels.

  By the end of October 2001, organizations of families had formed—of civilian families, that is. The family counseling units of the fire and police departments had long histories of dealing with families of service members who had died in the line of duty, and were well versed in such counseling. Although the death toll from WTC was on a vastly bigger scale than the uniformed services had ever had to deal with, their organization was such that the counseling units were relatively effective in helping their bereaved families. Since the majority of the victims had not been police officers or firefighters, this left the families of the civilian victims without a central organization representing them.

  To Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s everlasting credit, he began to meet weekly with these nascent civilian family organizations and their members. He would call in representatives from the NYPD, FDNY, the property clerk’s office, the Community Assistance Unit, and OCME and we’d report on our progress to the families and take questions. Those meetings started before the end of September, held at City Hall, usually in a room on the second floor called the Committee of the Whole. They were awesome experiences. I had previously been in a few smaller meetings with the mayor and some of the victims’ families, and during them I was repeatedly moved by the warmth and gentleness with which Giuliani treated the families. The mayor made time for them and listened to them, sometimes receiving incredible abuse in the process but responding calmly and respectfully no matter how outrageous the attack.

  In the larger meetings with the families, which featured officials of many agencies, Dr. Hirsch attended the first few, accompanied by Dr. Robert Shaler, head of the DNA lab, and me. Later Bob and I became the only OCME representatives at most of the meetings. By the end of November 2001, the family meetings at City Hall began to be held more intermittently, but OCME continued to meet with the families’ groups at our headquarters, first weekly and later biweekly. Dr. Hirsch would chair these meetings, and Bob Shaler and I would give the factual reports and take questions. Katie Sullivan also attended, and as she took on more and more responsibility, she eventually ran the show, scheduling the meetings, setting the agenda, preparing handouts, and delivering updates to the families.

  Almost from the outset of the meetings, we began to treat these family groups as though they were our board of directors to whom we needed to report on how we were conducting our business. Nothing in our charter mandated or suggested that we do this, but compassion and integrity demanded it. Some family members who regularly attended those meetings became friends of ours. Since the meetings were often held late in the evening, not commencing until 7:00 P.M. or 8:00 P.M., beforehand, when Bob, Katie, and I were grabbing a bite to eat, more often than not we would be joined by one or more of the family members.

  Among the more memorable was John Cartier, elder brother of James, the young electrician I mentioned earlier. John, a tradesman himself and also a biker, would pull up on his Harley Davidson motorcycle with its huge handlebars, park it outside the restaurant, and plop down at the table with us. To other diners, we must have made quite an interesting table, John in his biker’s vest, bandanna, and ponytail, and Bob and me in our business attire. We didn’t think it incongruous because John had become our brother.

  After dinner we’d troop back to headquarters for meetings that generally lasted about an hour. A tradition we developed was for us at OCME to bring to each family meeting an individual whom the families had not yet met but who was working hard on their behalf—and whom we’d jokingly call “tonight’s exhibit.” One of the first such individuals we brought (she quickly became a regular attendee) was Amy Mundorff, one of the great unsung heroes of the WTC identification effort.

  Amy is a short woman, but her air of competency and authoritative personality make her seem much taller. A forensic anthropologist, she played a critical role in the WTC identification effort. From manning the triage station down in the remains receiving area, to helping me conceptualize the big picture of the identification effort, to identifying victims from their bones, she took part in every aspect of OCME’s response. In a few instances, during the identification process, I disagreed with her findings and, being the boss, did it my way—but I soon learned not to. Each time, without fail, in her area of expertise she was proven correct. So good was her record in this regard that when her identification based on bone fragments conflicted with an identification based on DNA, I learned to go with Amy’s identification. She asserted that in the chaos of the debris, remains simply had to have become comingled, and so, no matter how carefully we obtained DNA samples, if the samples were from soft tissues there was a high risk of contaminated results. It was Amy who first championed the idea of sampling bones for DNA, whenever possible, simply because they were less likely to be contaminated.

  Which is not to say that bones could always be trusted, either. The reason lay in how they were collected and delivered to us, a problem which Amy also brought to our attention. One day the remains of a firefighter were brought in, essentially some bones in bunker gear, the super-tough turnout clothing worn in the field by FDNY personnel. Her expert eye detected that there were two left femurs (thighbones) in the bunker pants. As this was not the first time something like this had happened, Amy deduced—correctly, it turned out—that when recovery workers found bunker gear at the site, they were stuffing into that gear any other bones found in the immediate vicinity. Of course, the recovery workers were not trying to sabotage the identification effort, but were simply operating on the mistaken assumption that those remains must belong to the same firefighter as the remains in the bunker gear. We learned to treat all bones found inside of clothing as separate, individual remains unless the bones were clearly attached to each other by soft tissue.

  Another “exhibit” who we were proud to bring to a family meeting, and one of the most important WTC volunteers to rotate through our office, was Tom Shepardson, founder and sparkplug of DMORT. Tom was of average height and appearance; in his fifties, he appeared youn
ger and more slender than most of those his age. At first glance, you would have guessed that he was a farmer, not a funeral director from Schenectady, New York, let alone the most experienced mass-disaster expert in the United States. Though he may not have looked the part, he was. He had come up with the idea for DMORT in the early 1980s and started it as a committee of the National Funeral Directors Association. By sheer force of will, he managed to get the group affiliated with the federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). In 1992 the DHHS created ten volunteer DMORT teams in as many regions spread across the country. You name the large-scale disaster, Tom had been there—air crashes from Alaska to Alabama, floods, tornadoes, and the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Tom and DMORT knew more about large-scale disasters and mass fatalities than any other group in the United States.

  In the wake of the WTC attacks, Tom came to New York City, stayed for weeks at a time, and returned again and again for months, bringing with him hundreds of volunteers. The WTC disaster was no simple task, either for Tom or for the individual funeral directors and other DMORT volunteers. One gentleman from Waltham, Massachusetts, a second-generation funeral director, wrote an article about the mental toll of the task. Deployed by DMORT, he had stayed in New York for several weeks working on it, but was then, in his own words, “emotionally exhausted” by the large-scale carnage of the disaster, and had to go home “to recharge his batteries.” When Tom wasn’t in New York, he didn’t go home; rather, he went to the site of the other plane that was crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. His efforts were an inspiration to me and many others, helping us to perform at the upper limits of our abilities and our physical and mental capacities for long periods of time.