Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  On the day of the firefighter family meeting, I developed a temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit, along with mild encephalitis (brain swelling). I knew I had encephalitis because I’d begun experiencing the visual disturbances known as “Alice-in-Wonderland” phenomena. My field of vision was continuously rippled, as though someone had dropped a rock into a pool; the ripples would spread from the center of my visual field to the periphery, clear up, and then a few moments later begin again. I figured the encephalitis must have been mild, because I was still walking around and talking, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I could do that. So I took Katie Sullivan with me to the meeting.

  The event began with Nick Scoppeta introducing himself to the assembled family members and receiving a reception that was tepid at best. Next up were two French brothers who had produced a film about the fallen firefighters. The film was set to air on national television shortly, and the families were incensed that they had not been consulted. The filmmakers faced a very angry crowd. I was up next, and by the time the brothers finished, I was in a state of dread.

  Perhaps it was the fever, perhaps the encephalitis, but for whatever reason I was preternaturally calm. I introduced myself, and within a few moments, I had the families’ rapt attention. I spoke slowly and clearly (I don’t think I could have spoken rapidly had my life depended on it), telling them that we were still trying to identify their loved ones, that we would continue to do so to the limits of our physical strength and the limits of science. Perhaps the mono made me appear so weary that the families perceived just how hard we were working. I can’t explain why the families calmed down as I spoke, but it was surreal. As I finished speaking, they applauded, asked me questions, and warmly thanked me and OCME for the efforts we were making on their behalf. I felt like I was on death’s door, but it was one of the best nights of my professional life.

  On the way home, I realized that the calm I had artificially marshaled for the sake of the families had crept inside me—that I actually was calm. For the first time since 9/11, I was at peace. That peace birthed a revelation in me. We were doing all that we could and more, and a tough audience had recognized that. I couldn’t go on killing myself, working all day every day without a break, not while I was battling my own illness. I had to slow down, to bring some balance into my life, or shortly I would burn out and be of no use to anyone.

  FOURTEEN

  BY EARLY APRIL 2002, I had recovered enough from my illness to start functioning properly again. To regain my equilibrium, I cut back on my insane hours, shifting some of the workload to Katie Sullivan and others. That didn’t mean I altered my emphasis on compassionate care or on identifying the victims and bringing peace to their families. I remained devoted to the WTC identification effort and still gave every WTC family member I spoke with my cell phone number and let them know they were free to call me anytime, day or night.

  Coinciding with the reduction in my hours, the overall OCME workload for WTC began to level off as the initial phase of the recovery work approached an end. The receiving area, for instance, was now open only sixteen hours a day instead of twenty-four. Through the late winter and early spring of 2002, the pace of arrival of new remains tapered off; by May it had essentially concluded. Shortly thereafter the Ground Zero site was officially closed, at least for the purposes of recovering remains.

  In the task of cleaning up after the WTC tragedy, an important shift in emphasis had begun back on January 1, 2002, when Mike Bloomberg took office as mayor of New York City, replacing Rudy Giuliani, who was prevented by term limits from running for a fourth term. From my perspective, the change in administrations was striking. Giuliani and his team had concentrated, in the months after September 11, on recovery of the remains and on comforting the bereaved families. The Giuliani administrators also kept the city going, but anyone who was working for the city during that time will tell you that WTC and the victims’ families were issue number one. The Bloomberg administration came in with new priorities. While it also pledged to recover, renew, and rebuild the city, its emphasis was on renewal and rebuilding.

  The WTC families felt the difference keenly, and many of them complained bitterly to sympathetic ears at OCME. They saw the change, in part, as a matter of personal style; where Giuliani had been very warm and close to the families, Bloomberg’s style was more managerial, more businesslike, more politely distanced. I believe that Giuliani’s remarkable warmth and affection for the WTC survivors and victims’ families can be traced to his own narrow escape from the falling Towers on September 11. Rudy Giuliani breathed in the dust at the site and barely escaped with his life; the experience seared him. Even today, his public statements since leaving office indicate his continued strong support for the WTC families.

  In truth, this shift in styles and Bloomberg’s emphasis on being an all-about-business mayor were not a bad thing. The city desperately needed that kind of management if it was going to pull itself out of the shock and sadness that threatened to overwhelm it. Businesses, particularly in the financial community, were pulling out of the city, or threatening to do so, and taking with them thousands of jobs. New York City was obviously at a major crossroads in its history, and I believed that Bloomberg was the right man to lead New York out of the tragedy and into the future.

  Still, it was a shame that his style left many WTC family members feeling cast aside. Many of the families felt that the differences between the two mayors went beyond stylistic issues, and that the Bloomberg administration’s agenda—for example, in the rebuilding at Ground Zero—was completely at odds with what the families wanted.

  On the day in May 2002 when the recovery site was closed, a ceremony was held at Ground Zero. A piece of WTC steel, the last remaining in the pit, was symbolically brought out, draped in an enormous American flag. Many of those who had played key roles, and some who were still actively involved in the recovery and identification effort, were invited to attend. Hundreds of us stood on “Tulley Road,” the long ramp leading down into the pit of Ground Zero, and waited for the massive steel beam to be pulled past us. Bob Shaler, Tom Brondolo, and I, representing OCME, were on that ramp along with steelworkers, firefighters, cops, and governmental officials. Giuliani was there, standing alongside Mayor Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki; both of New York’s senators and many other dignitaries and notables also lined the route. As the beam passed, we fell in line behind it and marched out of the pit, out of Ground Zero, and away from all that death.

  As we strode for many blocks up the West Side Highway past throngs of applauding New Yorkers on the side of the route, it occurred to me that for most of the marchers behind that steel beam, this was indeed a closing ceremony. Their work was done, and the spectators seemed to feel that. No one was going to forget what happened at Ground Zero—as evidenced by so much effort having gone into organizing such a solemn, public ceremony, but it felt as though the city was getting up after a period of public mourning. We had veiled ourselves in black and we would never forget, but now we must carry on.

  Still, for all the good intentions, I noticed in the facial expressions of Bob and Tom the same realization that I was reaching myself: for the New York City ME’s office, and for all the victims’ families still waiting for a loved one’s remains to be brought home, this day’s ceremony rang a little hollow. The families were not yet out of the pit at Ground Zero, so we couldn’t be either.

  Back at OCME, work continued as though there had never been a closing ceremony. The complex DNA-matching programs, and our relentless efforts to reach out to the families to collect more DNA samples, were finally beginning to pay off, but slowly. By the first anniversary of the WTC bombings, on September 11, 2002, only around five hundred of the nearly three thousand victims had been positively identified. I was too busy at OCME to attend that day’s anniversary ceremonies at Ground Zero; hundreds of families of the WTC dead, both before and after those ceremonies downtown, wanted to visit the Memorial Park where the remains were being
stored, and I remained at OCME to assist them.

  Since October 2001, when we first made arrangements for families to come to OCME and visit the adjoining Memorial Park, thousands of WTC family members had done so, paying their respects under the tent where the remains were stored. Interacting with the families at that time, even for such a routine task as escorting them to the family room at Memorial Park, was always a delicate and difficult process.

  Often, it was complicated by interfamilial tensions. One of the more troubling aspects of the aftermath of the WTC bombings was that many significant others of the dead, who were legally not members of their families, were being shunted aside by the “real” families. This didn’t happen in every instance, but there were plenty of such difficult cases. Partners, lovers, even fiancés were ignored in the grieving—and in the process of deciding who would share in the funds donated to assist the victims’ families. I saw fiancées shoved away by blood relatives, even prevented from knowing whether their beloved’s remains had been identified.

  One woman who had lost her son came in to our office for the sole purpose of ordering me not to divulge any information to her son’s fiancée. “I always hated her,” the mother said, “and if she thinks she’s going to cash in on my son’s death, she has another think coming!” In some instances, the biological family excluded the fiancée even though the wedding date had been only a few weeks away. Long-term roommates, lovers, and even common-law spouses were similarly treated, as though they had little claim to grief—and none at all to survivor benefits. In many cases, this treatment seemed to me unfair; common-law spouses did have some legal protection, but the bereaved survivor had to cope with proving and defending the relationship in addition to suffering the usual emotional stress of sudden loss of the spouse.

  As time went on, and the monies available to the victim’s relations, through the federal Victims Compensation Board, swelled to life-altering proportions, I sadly found that fractures began to develop even among blood relations. I suppose it’s not surprising: big money has long been known to produce squabbling among surviving relatives.

  The spectacular exceptions to the rule gave me hope and kept me going. I remember seeing a father-in-law-to-be in the lobby of our building, holding his son’s fiancée, both of them crying. “A week from now,” he said through his tears, “a piece of paper would have stated that this woman is my daughter. Well, I don’t need a piece of paper to recognize my family. This is my daughter.”

  Family infighting depressed all of us who worked closely with the WTC families. Witnessing this inequality of treatment firsthand galvanized me to propose to my then-girlfriend, now wife, Jennifer. Deep down, I had always known I would ask her to marry me; I had loved her from the day I set eyes on her. With a divorce behind me, though, I had been unwilling to rush into marriage again.

  Now, you don’t have to work at OCME for very long to figure out that life is short and precious, and certainly by 2001, I had seen too much death not to know that. But my work in the wake of 9/11 gave me an even greater appreciation for the beauty of life, for what I once heard described as “the magic of an ordinary day.” Caring for the families of thousands of young, dynamic professionals who had died way too early, and who were not that dissimilar to me, taught me that life was too precious to waste even a moment. I asked Jenn to marry me. Lucky me, she said yes, and we set a wedding date and place: in our synagogue, early 2003.

  As my work on the WTC identification eased a bit, I made time for other endeavors. During my spare hours, after work, I sometimes watched television, and became a fan of the Law & Order series. A fellow congregant at my synagogue, Roz Weinman, was a producer on the show, and from time to time I would call her to grouse about a forensics absurdity that had crept into the writing. From time to time, she asked me for forensics advice on a script in development. Now with a bit more time on my hands, this relationship was formalized, and I became the forensics consultant to Law & Order. It was a pleasure to be able to use my forensics knowledge in such a fun and creative endeavor. I worked with the writers on script development, coming up with interesting story devices to kill people, and even more interesting ways for the detectives to figure out how the death occurred. As time went on, I also worked with the props people, set designers, and special effects artists to make the death scenes look more realistic and interesting. This made for some pretty entertaining conversations: “No, don’t use a hatchet,” I would tell them, “make it a hammer—less shattering of the skull.” “After three months in a salt marsh, the skin falls off the body as you pick it up.” Anyone who overheard my cell-phone conversations with the producers and writers must have wondered which I was—a professional hit man or a homicidal maniac.

  Since Law & Order is shot entirely in New York City, I regularly visited the set and got to know some of the actors and actresses on the series. Leslie Hendrix, who plays Medical Examiner Rodgers, became a particular friend. And before Jerry Orbach passed away, I had the pleasure of spending time with him in his dressing room, listening together to the cantorial music we both loved.

  As the months wore on, the number of identifications we were making began to dwindle, from a rate of about a hundred a month to twenty or thirty, and then to only a handful. For many victims, we had no dental X-rays or fingerprints, and in the case of smaller fragments, we had no clues at all. Moreover, the soft tissue on remains found later in the recovery effort was in even worse shape than on those remains uncovered earlier; the inevitable process of decomposition had caused the disintegration of scars, tattoos, and other potential identification clues.

  By the spring of 2003, DNA had become our one remaining tool. Soon after that, even the straightforward DNA identifications began to thin out, so we started using composite DNA matches—that is, employing several different DNA technologies to make a single identification. The remains from which we were now attempting to wring out a few more identifications were so degraded that a single DNA identification method would not give us a match we could count on as 100 percent accurate. When two or three such methods were combined, however, the likelihood of an accurate match rose. One DNA matching technique was based on mitochondrial DNA; another was called “short tandem repeats” (STR); a third was a kinship-DNA match.

  What we were doing, by combining these methods, was coming nearer to closing the universe of potential missing persons. One DNA test allowed us to reduce the number of possibilities for a match from the thousands of people on the missing lists to, say, 250 people. We’d then run additional DNA tests, further narrowing the possible number of victims. When we reached just one possibility, we’d have a match. More often than not, we could not do that. When we were left with several possibilities, we had to deem those remains unidentifiable.

  The process was extremely labor intensive and time consuming, demanding that individual attention be paid to each remain and each DNA test by the scientists doing the testing, the anthropologists working with the remains, and the Incident Command Center staff who were putting all the information together. By the end of 2003, our rate of identifications was down to a trickle—a steady trickle, but no more then that.

  Making identifications in this manner was a very expensive as well as a very time-consuming effort. Identifying the dead of the WTC disaster ultimately cost around $80 million for just OCME’s share of the work, according to an estimate published in the New York Times. I suspect that is an underestimate. Fortunately for the City of New York, most of this cost was borne by FEMA. As far as I’m concerned, the expense of the identification process was well worth it—and I know that it was certainly worth it for the individual families. There are countries where the superhuman effort involved in recovering, collecting, and identifying the remains of thousands of victims would never have happened. Had the WTC attacks taken place even in some advanced nations, it’s likely that a few easy identifications would have been made and the remainder of the victims’ families would have received nothing, not even the
scant comfort of knowing that everything possible had been done to identify their loved one. The site would have been paved over and covered quickly with new buildings, with no regard given to its sanctity.

  As the eighteenth-century British statesman William Gladstone eloquently put it, “Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercies of its people, their loyalty to high ideals, and their regard for the laws of the land.” I am very proud that I live in a country that is compassionate enough to have gone above and beyond the norm to identify and return the remains of the WTC victims to their families. If this country is being judged by the way in which it reacted to the WTC attacks, then let the judgers also take note of how we cared for the victims’ families. It should be remembered that these were not only American families—they came from a host of countries, and without exception, the families were treated with dignity and respect, and their deceased members received our full attention.

  The WTC identification effort was well worth its staggering cost for a second reason. The paths we blazed in using and creating new techniques for victim identification, including the development of new DNA science, have changed the way governments around the world respond to mass fatalities. To some extent, they had to change, because by going to extremes in New York City to identify each tiny piece of human tissue, we opened a Pandora’s Box: in the wake of each new disaster, victims’ families now demand that more be done to locate and identify their loved ones. Some of the techniques we developed have since been used in identifying victims of the tsunami of December 2004. Here in the United States, the procedures we established for the WTC work are being adopted as standard operating procedure for mass-fatality incidents.

  Unfortunately they have not yet been fully adopted, a fact I learned when I received calls from friends working to identify the dead in the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Many of the callers had rotated through New York’s OCME and worked alongside me during the WTC efforts. Each one mentioned that the Katrina identification effort was being mishandled, that lessons we had learned the hard way during WTC were being ignored. The authorities responsible for the Katrina identification process were evidently reinventing the wheel, which resulted in numerous instances of bungled identifications, of families not being notified in a timely fashion, and of remains being mishandled; many such instances were reported in the press.