by Colin Evans
Hirsch had a fine balancing act to perform—weighing the sensibilities of an intense human tragedy against his department’s role as a medico-legal facility. Because a crime had been committed, and because the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were working round the clock to track the source of the conspiracy, it was essential, as much as possible, to identify the remains of the hijackers. An examination of passenger manifests for the hijacked planes, combined with close study of CCTV footage taken at Logan International and other airports, did provide clues to the whereabouts of the hijackers in the days before their final act. If they had left any personal items in hotel rooms—hairbrushes, soiled clothing, washcloths, that kind of thing—then the chances of extracting useful and identifying DNA were high. This in turn might lead to other conspirators, ones who had taken no physical part in the atrocity but who might be actively pursuing further outrages. There was another factor at work here. In the event of a possible mass burial, rigorous DNA profiling would allow the investigators to segregate the remains of the attackers from those of their victims, thereby diminishing the distress felt by the victims’ bereaved relatives.
With thousands of body parts buried under a debris field that stretched for sixteen acres, progress was mind-numbingly slow. By mid-morning on September 13, crews had recovered just ninety-four bodies; of which, forty-six were identified. Once the legal proprieties had been observed, vehicles from funeral homes began arriving to pick up the first named victims.
For most relatives the wait was much longer and much more painful. A family assistance center was established at the Lexington Avenue Armory on Twenty-sixth Street to deal with anyone desperate for news of missing relatives. Some brought photos, little realizing that chances of a visible recognition were vanishingly slight; others held out hairbrushes and razors, having heard that such personal items might hold DNA traces of their missing loved ones. Blood relatives were asked to provide a swab sample from the inside of their cheeks in hopes that it would yield a DNA match for any fragments found. At the same time, every relative was asked to complete the seven-page questionnaire.
As the rescue effort began to gather pace, a string of mobile mortuary containers was flown in by DMORT, and a temporary morgue was set up in a hangar at LaGuardia Airport, complete with its own generators, X-ray equipment, cooling units, desks, chairs, lights, and medical equipment. Most of the bodies and body parts were brought here first.
At the OCME, details of the victims were stored in more than fifty file drawers labeled RM DM, for Reported Missing/Disaster Manhattan. Among these was Father Mychal Judge. Known to everyone in the fire service as Father Mike, the sixty-eight-old Franciscan priest had been the FDNY chaplain since 1992, and in that time he had attended scores of fires and seen almost as many tragedies, providing comfort to victims and firefighters alike. His was a regular face on news broadcasts. When the second plane struck the World Trade Center, Father Mike was already in the North Tower. Documentary film cameras show him as being everywhere, counseling, tending the injured, praying. At one point he went to the side of a firefighter who, bizarrely, had been struck by a falling body. When it became clear that the man was not going to survive, Father Mike removed his fire helmet and began administering the last rites. At that moment a fresh avalanche of debris engulfed both men. Neither survived. As a mark of respect to Father Mike’s supreme self-sacrifice, it was decided that the first death certificate for 9/11—officially listed as 00001—should be in his name.
At first the rescuers were pulling whole bodies from the twisted steel and concrete, but gradually the remains became smaller, harder to seek out. And all the while the fires burned, and the hoses gushed, and the evidence slowly turned to mush. Bodies had been incinerated, mangled, crushed, mingled with others, often to the point of oblivion. As early as September 15, Hirsch declared his belief that in the future most identifications would be made through DNA analysis. Although the OCME had long practiced for a major catastrophe, the sheer scale of the 9/11 DNA effort was beyond the capability of any single agency. For this reason, it was decided to contract several private companies to help. The Laboratory Corporation of America, with nine hundred offices across the country, was brought in to analyze the personal items of the missing and the cheek swabs of their kin.
The DNA samples from the recovered bodies would be handled by two companies, Myriad, based in Utah, and Celera, a Maryland company. To minimize the ever-present risk of error, all the analyses would be double-checked by New York State Police laboratories. Then came the announcement that the database of genetic material would be moved from the armory to a new unit situated at Pier 94, near West Fifty-fourth Street. The city promised it would be open from 8:00 A.M. to midnight, seven days a week. At the same time, adjacent to the OCME a large tent had been erected. Filled with wreaths and votive candles, it served as a kind of ecumenical chapel and soon became known as Memorial Park. Here grieving relatives could come and, perhaps, find some comfort. Meanwhile, just next door, in the blue and black tiled building, the relentless identification process continued without pause.
There was still no exact figure on how many people had died. Initial estimates in the tens of thousands looked to be wide of the mark, and steadily the numbers were pared down. By October 23, the number had fallen to just over four thousand. Of the 478 victims confirmed dead, 425 were identified. At first the identifications were running at ten a day, but as the difficulties multiplied the identification numbers dwindled markedly, and it soon became clear that this would be a mammoth undertaking. The medical examiner’s office remained tight lipped as to how long the operation might take.
With the OCME and almost every other government investigative agency working flat out, the unimaginable happened. On November 12 at approximately 9:00 A.M., another American Airlines jet, flight 587, bound for the Dominican Republic, crashed just minutes after takeoff from Kennedy Airport. The first reaction everywhere was that terrorists had once again targeted New York City.
The plane came down in the Rockaway Beach section of Queens, an area that had been home to dozens of firefighters who had lost their lives at the World Trade Center. Within twenty-four hours, crash investigators were able to issue assurances that there had been no terrorist involvement. Mechanical malfunction, not malevolent intervention, had brought down the Airbus 300-600. For Hirsch and the OCME the lack of terrorist involvement provided cold comfort; there were still another 265 bodies to autopsy and numerous grieving families and friends to counsel and comfort.
At times, fate can deal hands of almost indescribable cruelty, and for one woman, Naomi Gullickson, this crash was especially gut wrenching. Just two days beforehand, she had attended a memorial service for her firefighter husband who had died saving lives at the Twin Towers. Now she had to absorb the crushing reality that her father was on board flight 587 when it crashed.
Others, too, were similarly devastated. On September 11 Rafael Hernandez had been seriously injured while escaping the Twin Towers. Even so, he and his family counted him lucky to be alive. In the days and weeks following 9/11, Rafael had been tortured by nightmares of planes crashing, but he was finally making some headway and had raised no objection when his wife said she was taking their three-year-old daughter on vacation to the Dominican Republic. They, too, were aboard flight 587. Rafael learned of their fate from watching TV footage, standing dumbstruck as the cameras showed how his wife and daughter had been snatched from him. For those working at the OCME such random and terrible tragedies don’t just occur at times of national disaster—they are regular events. This is the part of the job that rarely makes headlines: having to look into the eyes of people struck down by unfathomable levels of human suffering. For Hirsch, it strikes to the very heart of his responsibilities. “The real test of a place like ours,” he once said, “is the service we deliver to anonymous citizens at the worst times in their lives: Someone you loved walked out the door and now you’ll never see them again. At times like that, people n
eed not only technical excellence but they need to be treated with compassion and creativity. And doing that day in and day out is [our greatest] challenge.”
In the meantime, the recovery mission at Ground Zero continued with quiet determination. But the problems of identification were getting tougher with each passing day. There were no more intact bodies being pulled from the wreckage. The human remains were getting smaller and smaller. By the end of November, Hirsch hadn’t seen an entire corpse in weeks. At first, victims’ remains had been identified using conventional methods that relied on the human eye. Dental records alone were responsible for 187 identifications. Fingerprints added another seventy-one to the identification total, while photo identification and miscellaneous X-rays boosted the numbers by sixteen and forty-five, respectively.
But year’s end brought the grim realization that many of the missing would never be identified or even found. No one wants to be the bearer of such ill tidings, and at a public meeting Hirsch’s sad but honest observation that many victims had been simply vaporized caused uproar among some bereaved relatives, many of whom either refused or else struggled to comprehend a reality in which their loved ones had simply vanished from the face of the earth with no trace.
Just about the only glimmer of hope in all this darkness was a marked improvement in data management. Originally, the OCME had been inundated with human fragments—they were, after all, dealing with more homicide victims than most forensic pathologists see in a lifetime—and all too often scientists and technicians found themselves testing samples from victims who had already been identified. (When one considers that as many as two hundred human fragments had been linked to a single person, it was a miracle that so few duplications actually occurred.) As discrepancies and repetitions in the victim details were rectified, it led to a dramatic decrease in the estimated number of victims.
One year from Black Tuesday and the verified identification toll had reached 1,401. Given the circumstances—bear in mind that only 293 bodies were recovered intact, an incredibly low percentage for such a large-scale disaster—this was a quite astonishing achievement. The OCME and its satellite laboratories spread right across the United States were performing miraculous feats of identification, but one fact was now glaringly obvious—henceforth DNA typing would offer the only hope of identifying the victims of September 11.
Overseeing the DNA effort was Dr. Robert C. Shaler, the OCME’s forensic biologist. Initially, his hope was that conventional DNA analysis would be able to provide the answers he was looking for. From each collected fragment of remains, three rectangular plates of DNA samples were preserved at the medical examiner’s office and frozen at -80 degrees Fahrenheit. A computer software program then collated all the data from the different tests, recalculating the percentage of identification certainty each time a new result came in.
But conventional DNA analysis requires high-grade genetic material and here so many of the samples were too crushed, burned, or decomposed to yield useful DNA. (At one stage more than a dozen tractor-trailers were packed with human remains too small or too degraded even for DNA analysis.) As already minuscule human body parts decompose, the roughly three billion base pairs that make up a strand of DNA in the nucleus of a cell begin to disintegrate. Any fragments left are likely to be worthless when tested using standard DNA profiling methods. This posed a problem for Shaler. To achieve the level of certainty demanded by both the scientists and the families, he turned to new technologies that had been under development for some time but never used in forensic investigations.
One, known as mini–short tandem repeats, or mini-STRs, was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The other, called single nucleotide polymorphism analysis, or SNP, was created by Orchid BioSciences, of Princeton, New Jersey. The beauty of both methods is that they require far smaller intact pieces of DNA than the standard process used globally for everything from crime investigations to paternity tests.
To give an example of the mini-STR’s sensitivity, whereas scientists customarily analyze DNA samples of about four hundred base pairs, which form the signature double helix of human DNA, the mini-STR can evaluate pieces of DNA as short as one hundred base pairs.
A SNP—pronounced “snip”—is a small genetic change, or variation, that can occur within a person’s DNA sequence. There are four chemicals that make up DNA: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). Strung together in an extremely long sequence, the chemicals on one chromosomal strand align with the chemicals on the other strand; that is, A always joins with T, C always joins with G. Thus, a section of DNA code might be arranged thus:
C A G T T C A
G T C A A G T
But occasionally irregularities occur, and an example of an SNP is shown in the following:
C A G T T C A
G G C A A G T
Note that the second adenine in the first snippet is replaced with a guanine in the second snippet. For a variation to be considered a SNP, it must occur in at least 1 percent of the human population.
The effectiveness of these new DNA techniques can be demonstrated by the case of forty-six-year-old Manhattan firefighter Thomas J. McCann, who had disappeared during the rescue effort. Distraught family members had brought a toothbrush to the OCME, hoping that it would contain DNA from the missing McCann. It did. Now it was a question of matching McCann’s DNA to any of the thousands of human fragments recovered. Eventually investigators at the OCME compared it to a three-by-two-inch piece of muscle that had been recovered from the site. By July 2003 they were confident that they had a DNA match between the muscle fragment and the toothbrush, but the numbers weren’t statistically strong enough. According to the calculations, the probability was one in 4,600, considerably below the threshold that had been agreed in order for an identification to be cited as positive. (At the beginning of the investigation at least five samples were misidentified and had to be reclaimed from disappointed relatives.) For Mr. McCann, it was an SNP test, more than two years after the small bit of muscle had been recovered, that finally produced the requisite degree of certainty—one in a trillion. For his widow, Anne Marie, it was a miracle worth waiting for. “I wanted something,” she said.
In the understandable desire to identify victims, it was, at times, easy to lose sight of the fact that the OCME was still involved in a homicide investigation. There were guilty parties that needed to be named. When Shaler found, against all the odds, that he was getting DNA identifications from passengers on the planes, he pondered the possibility of obtaining DNA from the terrorists. However, when inquiries were made to the FBI, asking if they had managed to obtain any DNA from the suspected hijackers, all that came back was a thudding silence. If the FBI—notoriously parochial in matters of jurisdictional authority—did hold this evidence, then they were clearly not about to surrender it without a struggle. Only after a year of hectoring and exasperation did the FBI reluctantly hand over ten DNA profiles, presumably from the hijackers. Shaler was able to make two matches almost immediately. A third came soon afterward. This surprised him. The commonly held wisdom was that all the hijackers had been grouped together in the cockpit, and would have therefore been vaporized when the planes made impact. Shaler’s findings forced a rethink. Now the likeliest scenario had one cadre of hijackers storming the cockpit and overpowering the flight crew, while their co-conspirators herded passengers into the rear of the plane. Shaler hypothesized that when the planes struck the towers, those hijackers at the controls would have been consumed by the main fireball, and that therefore the traces of DNA he found had originated from the guards. Like everyone else at the OCME, Shaler was kept in the dark about the identities of those hijackers whose DNA he had matched. The FBI decided to sit on this information. Another closely guarded secret surrounds the current whereabouts of the hijackers’ remains. Besides the ethical considerations—most sensibilities would rebel at the thought of any cross-contamination between remains
from victims and hijackers—these samples are still classed as evidence from a crime scene and have been preserved by the FBI at an undisclosed location. Not even the OCME is privy to the secret.
Identifying the victims, though, would always be the OCME’s main mission. And that meant cross-checking every possible detail before a death certificate was issued. The first question to be answered: Was this person actually dead? This information—seemingly so prosaic or unnecessary, even—was vital for insurance companies to begin settling claims that were expected to run into the millions of dollars. Most insurance adjusters have a predictably jaundiced view of human nature, even in the aftermath of a national tragedy. Someone, somewhere, they suspect, will try to turn a quick buck. And so it proved. Across the United States no fewer than two dozen fraud cases linked to the 9/11 disaster eventually went to court. Of these, the most egregious involved a Georgia couple, Alan and Cynthia Gavett. Like millions of Americans that fateful day the Gavetts watched events unfold on their TV screens, but where others saw only horror, they spotted a business opportunity. Just days later Alan Gavett filed insurance claims that could have netted him upward of a half-million dollars, saying that forty-year-old Cynthia had been a victim of the tragedy. She had, he said, traveled to New York for a 9:00 A.M. job interview on the morning of September 11 with Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment bank at the World Trade Center. Choosing Cantor Fitzgerald was a crafty ploy. It had been well publicized that in terms of human loss Cantor Fitzgerald was the worst affected company at the World Trade Center, losing 658 employees. Of even greater significance to an aspiring fraudster, was the accompanying revelation that the company’s records and paperwork had been almost entirely destroyed. This made the Gavetts’ version of events virtually impossible to verify. (In truth, his wife had never left the family’s comfortable seventy-four-acre spread in Concord, Georgia.) When an insurance company ran some background checks, it was puzzled to learn that no obituary for Cynthia Gavett had appeared in the Georgia press. Thinking they needed to straighten out their records, they contacted the local sheriff’s office to verify the Gavetts’ address. Now, it just so happened that the person to whom they spoke knew the Gavetts. Not only that, but he had seen the allegedly deceased Cynthia, very much alive and well and making no attempt to pretend otherwise, in the days following the tragedy. Following this disclosure, the Gavetts’ scam unfolded in double-quick time. On November 26, Alan and Cynthia Gavett were arrested and charged with fraud. In May 2002, each was sentenced to ten years imprisonment.*
