Dead Center

by Shiya Ribowsky

  One evening at home, I received a call from a WTC family member, wondering why she couldn’t get beyond her grief. It was the birthday of the brother she had lost in the bombings. For both of us, 9/11 had become so ingrained in our collective consciousness that we couldn’t help but see continual reminders of it everywhere. It sometimes seemed impossible to have even a brief conversation without bringing up 9/11 in some way, and a thousand times a day there were references to it in every type of media. Random searches at the airports, and then on the New York subways, were taxing reminders of our shared vulnerability. The collective need to touch the touchstone, to bring up the pain on every possible occasion, and to connect it to every possible subject, was the reason that 9/11 could not fade from this woman’s consciousness. After that phone call I realized consciously, for the first time, what my subconscious had been trying to tell me for months—the same was true for me. It was unhealthy for me to remain at OCME. Like the families, I too had to get past 9/11.

  I wasn’t alone. Katie Sullivan decided to leave OCME in the early summer of 2005, returning with her husband to Virginia, where they had both grown up. Katie also went back to teaching and opened an organic foods kitchen.

  Amy Mundorff also left to complete her doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia on a Trudeau Scholarship. She had long felt that others in her profession looked askance at anyone who lacked a doctorate and a university affiliation, and despite her extraordinary work surveying twenty thousand pieces of human remains in the WTC effort, she knew she needed the ultimate sheepskin to prove her forensic expertise to some academics.

  Bob Shaler retired from OCME to become the head of a new program at Penn State University that trains crime scene investigators, an innovative program that will likely make Penn State the center of forensic education for the northeast.

  Mark Flomenbaum also left, and accepted the position of CME for the state of Massachusetts. Tom Brondolo, the deputy commissioner who had headed up our WTC computer effort, resigned from OCME and is now in private practice as a consultant.

  I knew that all of these good people, too, needed to move on; the WTC identification effort had been the culmination of their best work at OCME, a pinnacle that would never again be reached. Still, I could never quite shake the sense that they and WTC had been collectively nudged out the OCME door. I, too, was feeling the nudge. By summer of 2005, of the half-dozen people who had led the WTC identification effort, only I remained. I had just turned forty, and I was whiling away my time in a job that would never command my passion.

  It was at that moment that OCME’s director of information management and director of records was arrested in an astonishing embezzlement case. The alleged criminal activity had evidently begun long before 9/11, but had heated up considerably thereafter. This totally unexpected event—unexpected, at least, by me—all but sidelined OCME’s effort to develop the all-encompassing software program for the agency that I was directing.

  I continued on at OCME for a few more months, but soon it was painfully obvious that I was spinning my wheels. Wasting time is something I’m not very good at. I’m a good manager, but I never liked being a bureaucrat. I needed a new direction. And so at last I decided to resign from OCME at the end of 2005, to pursue other projects, including this book.

  I never held a more exciting job than medicolegal investigator. I went to work every morning with a sense of keen anticipation, looking forward to solving whatever complex challenges the world would throw at me that day. And when finally the challenge became helping the ME’s office respond to the tragedy at the WTC, the opportunity to apply my skill and experience and help people every day—to make order out of chaos—was to me, little short of perfect.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WISH TO thank a wonderful group of current and former employees of the office of Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York, who encouraged me to write this book: Amy Mundorff, Harry Hahn, Kenny Dotson, Esther Arrington, Tammie Natali, and Jimmy Meyer, and a most special thanks to my dear friend Dr. Robert Shaler for sharing his recollections and standing with me during the rough times during and after September 11th.

  Thanks to FDNY’s Chief of Dept. Sal Cassano, Chief Fire Marshal Louie Garcia, and to NYPD’s Sgt. Joe Blozis, Detectives Hal Sherman and James Nucifioro, and to Deputy Commissioner Bradford Billet of the Mayor’s Office, for helping me with fact checking and for their support.

  I also would like to thank Mel Berger, literary agent at the William Morris Agency, for showing me the path, and gently pushing me along it.

  I am deeply indebted to the members of my Brotherhood Synagogue family, for their love and support along the way, most especially to Dan Alder and Phil Rothman. A heartfelt thanks to Roz Weinman, former executive producer of Law & Order for opening more doors than I can count.

  And lastly many thanks to Cal Morgan, Matt Harper, and the crew of the Regan imprint at HarperCollins for their splendid work, at some odd hours of the night.

  SHIYA RIBOWSKY

  SEARCHABLE TERMS

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  see also Ribowsky, Shiya: recollections of

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