Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  I am sad to report that Tom Shepardson died suddenly, on February 18, 2003, in Schenectady, New York. In a press release issued the next day, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said, “As a volunteer, Tom’s efforts to add mortuary affairs and forensic experts to the National Disaster Medical System brought comfort and peace of mind to thousands of families. The identification of victims and proper treatment of their remains is Tom’s lasting legacy. He will be truly missed by not only everyone in the DMORT program but also the entire National Disaster Medical System.”

  I am very proud to have worked alongside a true American hero, shared a few meals with him, and called him a friend.

  Ultimately, bringing in these “exhibits” for the families became a particularly effective tool for demonstrating to them that there were many people hard at work behind the scenes. When the families would feel that progress was slowing and that new developments were not being made, it was our hope that they would conjure these names and faces in their mind as a testament to the scores of men and women who worked around the clock to identify as many victims as possible.

  THIRTEEN

  NOVEMBER 12, 2001, a Monday, was celebrated as that year’s Veterans’ Day. As a New York City employee, I normally would have had the day off and might have been enjoying the last day of a three-day weekend, but since the attacks on the WTC, normal had gone out the window.

  Bleary-eyed and exhausted after an all-nighter at the office, I had returned home for a few hours sleep, a shower, and a shave to try to clear the cobwebs before going back to the office. As I stepped out of the shower, I saw on my bedroom television set a local news channel’s first images of a plane crash that had just occurred somewhere in the New York vicinity. The initial reports were vague as to whether the plane had gone down in New York City or in Nassau County, and as much as I hoped that everyone on board was all right, I simultaneously hoped the crash had taken place outside the city limits.

  I suppose it must seem callous that my first reaction was a selfish desire that the crash would have occurred in someone else’s jurisdiction, but I was fatigued and my shock at this new disaster unfolding only made me groan and mutter, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” After all that we had already been through, how much more could we take?

  I was soon to find out, because within minutes I learned that the plane had indeed gone down within the New York City limits, crashing into a row of houses in Far Rockaway, a residential neighborhood in the southeast corner of Queens.

  As with everyone else who heard about the disaster of American Airlines Flight 587, my first thought was that the terrorists had struck again. The answer to exactly what had made the plane go down was then unclear, but by the time I finished dressing, and the reports revealed that the plane was a jumbo jet—an Airbus 300—I understood that there would be hundreds dead, and that I must immediately return to the office.

  While walking the six blocks to the office, I realized that my unsettled feeling entailed more than the adrenaline rush: The plane crash fed into some of my private fears that stemmed from the first plane crash that I had worked on as an MLI. It happened in the winter of 1992: US Air Flight 405 had tried to take off at LaGuardia Airport in the middle of a late winter storm, and instead slid off the runway into an icy Flushing Bay. The Fokker 28 jet broke apart as it slid, burst into flames, and finally came to rest in shallow water just off the end of the runway. There had been fifty-one people aboard, and twenty-eight died.

  I was on duty that night, and when my two-way radio went off with news about the plane crash, I was in the Bronx at a homicide. Within moments I was pulled from that job and ordered back to OCME headquarters, there to meet up with other personnel and prepare to head to the airport. When I arrived at the office, Sergeant Mark Geffen, supervisor of the NYPD Missing Persons’ detectives assigned to OCME’s Manhattan office, was putting together our emergency field mortuary kit. We loaded it into the trunk of his unmarked police car and he and I, together with Dr. Hirsch and other staff members, headed to LaGuardia in two cars.

  We expected that the airport would be in turmoil when we arrived, so Mark was continuously on his police radio, attempting to alert the Port Authority police (who run New York’s two major airports) that we were en route and with the CME. Unfortunately his messages didn’t get through, and we were held up for some time at the sealed-off gate while the Port Authority cops laboriously tried to confirm with their superiors that they could allow the Chief Medical Examiner of the city to enter the scene of a mass fatality.

  While we were waiting in our cars, one of the Port Authority cops abruptly motioned us to pull over to the side, then hurried to open the gate and stepped back, windmilling his arm as he ushered an oncoming vehicle through. I craned my neck to see who it was, certain from the cop’s reception that it must be the mayor or perhaps the president of the United States. Before I could see the vehicle I heard it, a clanging sound reminiscent of an antique fire truck. Finally it came into view as it barreled through the gate—the Red Cross coffee truck, driven by two adorable little old ladies in yellow slickers and large yellow fisherman’s rain hats. Clearly, we would have gotten in more easily if we’d been masquerading as a Red Cross coffee team.

  Eventually, the Port Authority cops decided that the Chief Medical Examiner of the city might be permitted in to deal with the dead. We were directed to a maintenance hangar where Airport Operations had set up an Incident Command Center and temporary morgue. There were already a number of bodies and body parts laid out on the floor, and the entire place was fouled with the pungent smell of jet fuel that had spilled into the water and permeated everything it touched—remains, luggage, clothes, airplane seats, and other debris. The fuel spill made things more difficult not only because it stung our eyes and nauseated us but also because of another effect that I would learn about during the next twelve hours. Shortly after arriving at the airport, I went to the crash site itself and helped recover remains. I found a severed hand with polish on the nails and brought it back to the hangar. Next morning, when we looked at the hand again, the nail polish was gone—blanched off by the jet fuel, which had also obliterated the writing on the toe tag that had accompanied the hand, and many of the other toe tags, thus making identification more difficult.

  Working all night in that hangar, with the sickening smell of the jet fuel around me did more than just turn my stomach. The experience evidently seeped into my unconscious; thereafter, whenever I smelled jet fuel at an airport, I began to feel nauseous and panicky. To this day, I’m forced to will myself to suppress that panic to get on a plane. The first time it happened was about a year after the LaGuardia crash, as I was about to board a plane—at that very airport—on a trip out of town to deliver a talk about that very crash. Although I’d always been a fearless flyer, I hadn’t flown since the crash, and my sudden panic symptoms surprised me. I forced myself onto the plane, took my seat, and concentrated on breathing. My training in medicine allowed me to understand what was happening to me, and although I knew my fear was irrational, I was nonetheless helpless to control it. I began to imagine what would happen if this plane, too, slipped off the runway or burst into flames; I imagined the passengers as they would look after they’d been torn apart or burned to death, even though, of course, if they were dead at that time, I would be also.

  Fortunately, I was sitting alone when these thoughts came to me, or else I would have been terribly embarrassed. A flight attendant noticed my distress and asked, “Nervous flyer?” I blurted out to her that this was my first flight since working last year’s plane crash. Without saying a word, she walked away and came back a few moments later with two little bottles of liquor and a glass with ice. I accepted them gratefully.

  People always ask me whether I have nightmares, given all the horrible things to which I have been exposed over the years of working at OCME. My answer is, “No, never.” I can’t recall even a single bad dream or loss of sleep due to my work. So far, thi
s terrible fear of flying has been the only real price for my years of exposure to traumatized human remains. Over time I’ve learned to manage it, and though I prefer being on large planes to small ones, I have even been able to board small commuter planes—most of the time without the little bottles.

  Although twenty-eight people perished and I picked up a phobia of flying, there was something positive that came of the US Air plane that slid off the runway. From that incident, the aviation industry gained a new understanding of how important it was to have planes properly deiced before takeoff in frigid weather. This in turn led to new regulations, which have likely saved more than a few lives. As the Latin motto in the lobby of OCME suggests, the dead always have something to teach the living.

  Weather though, did not appear to have played a role in the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, because November 12, 2001, was a clear day with temperatures around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time I reached my office, I had sketched out a plan to deal with this new disaster as my work on the US Air crash equipped me to envision the work we at OCME would have to do on this far larger crash. Flight 587 had been en route from JFK Airport to the Dominican Republic when it crashed less than two minutes after takeoff. All 260 people aboard the plane were killed, along with 5 people on the ground, where parts of the plane landed. There were 9 people in the plane crew, and the 251 passengers included 5 unticketed infants who had been sitting on their parents’ laps. Most of the victims on the plane, 180 of them, were Dominicans. Some of these were citizens of the island republic who were returning home, and some who lived in the several Dominican enclaves in New York City were going to the island as visitors. The regular Monday-morning flight was a popular one because it was one of the least expensive. This particular plane was packed because the fare on the flight was about to be raised, considerably, for the forthcoming Christmas season, and many people wanted to take advantage of the lower rate to return home or to visit relatives before the fare increase took effect.

  Had the crash of Flight 587 preceded the events of 9/11, it would have been the largest disaster ever faced by OCME and setting up a system for identifying multiple deaths would have been a major challenge. But because the crash of Flight 587 occurred two months and a day after 9/11, this new disaster ended up feeling relatively routine. Even I was surprised by how well prepared we were to handle this new challenge.

  By 11:30 A.M. on November 12, we had set up in the OCME mortuary a separate and segregated path for receiving the remains from the air crash, as well as a system to collect postmortem information. The segregated receiving area and the assignment of a Disaster Queens (DQ) number to each of the remains would ensure we would not mix up plane crash victims with the Disaster Manhattan (DM) WTC victims.

  Upstairs in the conference room, we also got to work quickly. By 1:00 P.M., the WTC Incident Command Center was renamed the “WTC and Flight 587 ICC” and was ready for the plane crash victims. We had created an empty copy of the WTC database into which information on the crash victims could be put, had made a few critical modifications of the software, and on every computer in the Incident Command Center, a new icon on the screen displayed the logo of American Airlines. By 1:30 P.M., we were so ready that we were all looking at each other, trying to figure out what we might have forgotten, since surely it could not have taken so little time to set up the entire identification process for a major air crash. In the two months since 9/11, we had grown so accustomed to mass fatality work on a colossal scale, and we had so many resources readily available, that Flight 587, horrible though it was in information-processing terms, simply felt like a little bump in the road.

  Later that day I met with Office of Emergency Management Deputy Commissioner John Odormatt at the Jacob Javits Center, the largest conference facility in Manhattan, located not far from Pier 92 and the headquarters of the Emergency Operations Center. It was a good choice for the site of a Family Assistance Center to be devoted exclusively to victims of the plane crash. My assistant director of identifications at OCME had been born in the Dominican Republic, so I dispatched her to the Javits Center to establish and run the Family Assistance Center. By 2:00 P.M., we had the airplane’s manifest, provided by American Airlines. This was an unusually quick response from an airline, but Tommy McFall, the leader of the American Airlines disaster-response team and a familiar figure at OCME since 9/11, was incredibly helpful. The passenger list showed that the plane’s passengers also included people from Taiwan, France, and Israel; one passenger, we would later learn, had previously managed to escape alive from the WTC disaster.

  All of this occurred before the first remains reached OCME at 3:30 P.M. on November 12. Not only were the remains from Flight 587 in much better shape than those we were working with from the WTC disaster, but with the passenger manifest in hand, the scope of this disaster shrank to become a “closed universe.” Nevertheless, despite the relatively small number of victims, positive identification of all the victims was by no means an easy task, because the information that we were able to obtain on the victims, particularly on those who held Dominican citizenship, was a mess. It was astonishing to me, in the wake of 9/11 and the new security measures that it had mandated, how many people on Flight 587 had been traveling with “fuzzy” documentation.

  For the next twenty-eight days, until we had identified every victim, I would go twice daily to the Family Assistance Center, from where OCME staffers would send me distress signals about the difficulties they were having in extracting information on which we could rely. Part of the problem was structural. Whole families had been traveling together and had perished, so there were no close surviving relatives who could give us precise information or DNA samples to help identify those victims. Complicating matters was the difficulty that stemmed from incorrect spellings of names. Members of one family spelled their name three different ways, which made for difficulties in labeling samples and proper identification.

  A third problem, especially for our DNA lab, was that many of the Dominicans in our closed universe were related to one another. Some, we would later discover through DNA analysis, were related to one another differently than had been reported to us—for example, first cousins were actually half sisters. Some other “family” members were not even blood relatives. All these circumstances made managing DNA matches, and keeping reliable track of family relationships between the donor and the decedent, a complicated task. We sometimes had to make guesses about the right relationship; in several instances, these hunches were later verified by the DNA lab analysis.

  Adding to OCME’s difficulty in performing the identifications were the families’ attitudes toward what had happened to their loved ones and toward our effort to make identifications, while returning bodies and body parts to them for burial. Perhaps it was the nature of the airline crash disaster; perhaps it was the families’ belief that having the manifest and the bodies in hand should have made the identification process easy—whatever the reason, some families of Flight 587 victims, far more than the 9/11 families, were frustrated by our progress and by our inevitable mistakes. This led to interactions with many of the families that were often much more challenging than those with the WTC families.

  One such exchange occurred a few days after the adult children of an elderly victim left with their mother’s remains. A particularly difficult family, we were relieved to see them on their way. Later that week, while working with some DQ remains, Bob Shaler discovered that the number 587 had been typed into the computer in place of the number 578 for a particular piece of remains. It was an honest mistake, doubtless helped along by the fact that the flight number was 587, but the remain number should have been 578. Of course, as luck would have it, the mislabeled remain was among those that had been sent to the difficult family. Bob promptly called me to his office and informed me of the mistake. Though it’s the sort of numeric mistake that happens every day in a bureaucracy, we knew at once that in this highly emotional situation, it would be painful fo
r the family to accept.

  We knew too, at least theoretically, that if we never said a word, no one would be the wiser. Tempting as staying silent was, it was not an option. No matter how large or small the error, once we’d discovered what had happened, Bob and I both knew that the family must be immediately informed. We were professionally and ethically obliged to do this and, if possible, to rectify the mistake so that all the families could be assured that we were not hiding mistakes of any kind. Only by acknowledging our errors could we expect the families to have confidence in the remainder of our work.

  I found Tommy McFall from American Airlines, told him what happened, and that I had to speak with the family immediately. The airline’s care team, stationed at OCME, was keeping track of every family’s whereabouts. To my dismay, I learned that the entire family had gone to the Dominican Republic for the funeral of their mother. Tommy shrugged and said, “We [American Airlines] have a flight leaving in three hours; if you can get to the airport I will take care of the tickets.” I told Dr. Hirsch what had happened and that I was going to the Caribbean to correct the error.

  By late afternoon, I was in the Dominican Republic. Alerted to my mission by American Airlines representatives, the Dominican government had graciously agreed to furnish me with bodyguards, including a plainclothes officer and two uniformed and armed soldiers, for the duration of my stay. I was glad to have them with me.

  After a runaround worthy of a Keystone Kops episode, we finally located the family in a hotel, and via several intermediaries, I made an appointment to go and see them. Through an interpreter also provided by the government, I told the family what had happened: We had correctly identified all the body parts of their mother except one, a hand, which we had erroneously included. I further explained that we needed to take that hand back. After hearing this news, a member of the family spit in my face. Other family members hustled him out of the room, though none apologized. After we got back on track, I explained that the hand, which belonged to another victim, would have to be exhumed and returned to our office so that we could process it properly and convey it to the family of the person to whom it had belonged. After some more shouting, reason prevailed, and twenty hours after I had touched down in the Dominican Republic, I was on a flight back to New York. The hand would eventually follow me back to the United States, but only after lengthy negotiations between U.S. and Dominican authorities, and between funeral directors in both locations.