WHEN THE bus let me off in front of the morgue in New York City, I was struck by a powerful sense of deja vu. I had first come here on September 23, 2001, in response to the attack on the World Trade Center, so that I could help identify the thousands upon thousands of human remains that the disaster had caused. I had worked a relentless schedule of twelve-hour shifts for thirty straight days until, finally, my tour of duty ended and I went home. Now it was November 18, and I was back for my second tour. I felt as though I had never left.
I showed my pass to the police officer, and he waved me past the barricade, toward the huge tent city that had sprung up on Manhattan 's Lower East Side, beside the city's central morgue and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). Here, morgue workers examined the bodies and body parts that had been extracted from the rubble, identifying some, analyzing the rest, and storing the unidentified remains so that, hopefully, one day they could be returned to their grieving families. The people working here were law enforcement specialists, evidence technicians, forensic medical scientists, and full-time OCME personnel, as well as volunteers from all over the United States-but they were also New York beat cops, detectives, SWAT team members, and police clerks, pressed into service to handle a volume of death and destruction that the city had never known and that involved many of their own fallen comrades.
I headed down the street, ignoring the refrigerator trucks in which the newly arrived body bags were stored and the tents where people handed out food and toiletries and sweatshirts. I thought only of how I could reach the morgue in time to relieve the workers who had been working nonstop for the past twelve hours. Then I noticed the ambulance with its flashing lights and the two dozen police officers who had just come out of the morgue to greet it. The police stood silently as the ambulance doors opened and a flag-draped body bag emerged. On command, every officer snapped to attention, saluting as paramedics lifted the bag onto a stainless steel gurney.
I went to stand among them, feeling the comfort of their presence, my right hand over my heart in a civilian salute. NYPD Sergeant Mark Giffen stepped over to the gurney, the silence broken only by the endless city traffic that rushed up First Avenue behind us. He folded the flag, handed it to Captain Marilyn Skaekel, and added his salute to the rest. “At ease,” she said finally. Six of the police officers, each wearing hospital scrubs, sprang into action, pulling back the tent flaps that covered the morgue's entrance, wheeling the gurney inside, and opening the bag so that Amy Zelson Mundorff, the forensic anthropologist who ran the day shift, could begin to examine its contents.
I hurried on past the morgue to the small yellow-and-white supply tent-crammed to overflowing with scrubs, plastic gowns, and latex gloves-and suited up like the rest. In less than five minutes, I was back in the morgue, where autopsy tables and portable carts full of medical instruments lined the walls. However, the initial examination was already complete, and a morgue worker was hand- delivering the contents of the body bag to the x-ray technician.
Mark Grogan, a young Irish cop with flaming red hair, looked up from the clipboard, on which he'd been taking notes as the forensic pathologist dictated his findings. Mark rose to his feet immediately, throwing his arms around my shoulders in a long tight hug. He never said a word, but I knew he knew. So did the others. We had worked together for every night of that first long month and we had become true comrades in arms. Soon after I'd left that first tour of duty, Mark had called me at home, and through uncontrollable tears I'd told him that my father had died of cancer just hours before his call. Dr. Reuben Craig had been my hero, my fishing partner, my mentor, my rock, my dad. And now he was gone.
Mark released me from his hug and I took a long grateful look at the other members of my triage team as they prepared to start the night shift. It's hard enough facing a death that comes after a long, lingering illness-but at least you have time to say good-bye. When death happens suddenly, violently, on a grand scale, there's an extra sense of outrage, an anger at the senseless loss that unites not only the survivors, but also those of us who deal with the victims. It was this bond that had kept me going on my first assignment to New York, and it was this bond that I was seeking once again.
Amy and I completed the routine business of a daily shift change, and I took my place in front of the next body bag, my hands already feeling through the torn flesh. I realized that something very important had changed. Before, despite my sympathy for those who'd lost their loved ones, I'd been able to keep some measure of the scientific detachment that had served me so well at the countless death investigations I had handled over the past ten years. Now, the loss of my father had opened something new in my heart, a grief that echoed the public mourning around me, an agony that flowed straight into my hands. As the night-shift workers gathered around me, ready to begin another night of processing the dead, I thought perhaps that they, too, could sense the difference.
Like everyone else in America that morning, I woke on September 11 with no idea of how profoundly that day would affect my life. The night before, I'd gotten a call about some skeletal remains discovered in an isolated wooded area out by Bowling Green, Kentucky -remains that the coroner thought might be those of a fifteen-year-old girl who had been missing for two weeks. Halfway to the scene, I idly flipped on the radio, and what I heard sounded more like a disaster movie than real life. As the hysterical announcer explained that an airplane had slammed into Tower 1 of the World Trade Center, I cranked up the volume, unable to believe my ears. Then I heard about Tower 2.
I wanted to turn the van around and go home, where I could watch this horrifying event on television and wait for the call from the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), a national volunteer operation I had joined about three years before. Whenever there's a disaster that goes beyond the resources of a local area, DMORT mobilizes mortuary workers and death investigators from around the country to help pitch in. They'd called me in to help with other mass-fatality incidents and I couldn't go, so I desperately wanted to be in the first wave of response to this shocking event-to do something, anything, that might counteract the helpless rage that was suddenly welling up inside me.
But all I could do was keep driving. Like every other rescue worker in America, I was anxious to spring into action and help wherever I could, but I knew that the isolated Kentucky crime scene was in a valley beyond the reach of cell phones. DMORT would surely be trying to reach me-and when they couldn't, I knew they'd go on to the next name on their list.
When I finally got to the crime scene, I felt as though I'd entered the twilight zone. There was none of the banter, the easy camaraderie that death scene investigators rely upon to help us cope with our morbid tasks. Instead, we were all in shock-partly because of the horror that always overtakes a death scene when a child is involved, partly because of the larger tragedy that none of us knew how to process. I felt as though we were all going in slow motion, and I was amazed, the first time I checked my watch, to see that, in fact, we were proceeding at normal speed.
I'd called in forensic specialists from halfway across the state to meet me at the crime scene, and as they arrived they would each try to describe the devastation they had watched on television that morning. But even those who had seen the footage with their own eyes had a hard time believing what had actually happened. Each person who arrived brought further news. The nation's airports had been shut down. Terrorists had attacked the Pentagon. A plane had gone down in Pennsylvania. The president had been whisked into hiding.
Here in the woods, an eerie quiet surrounded us. Because all aircraft had been grounded, there was none of the usual noise from planes flying in and out of the nearby airport. Even the police radios-usually crackling nonstop at a crime scene-were silent, since everyone had been ordered to keep the airwaves free for emergency communications. One of the deputies would periodically drive to where he could get a phone signal, call his dispatcher, and bring back additional bits of news.
I tried to imagine the falling buildings, the thousands of lives snuffed out. I had never even seen the Twin Towers in person, but my mind returned obsessively to the scene again and again.
When I finally got back to my lab in Frankfort, I found my voice mailbox full of messages and my e-mail crammed with urgent requests from DMORT. But when I called the regional commander, it was just as I'd feared. They'd wanted to send me, but they'd had to move on. They would surely be calling me later, the commander told me-but, for now, they had all the help they needed.
Back at home, in front of the television, I felt a wave of dread. Now that I could actually see the Twin Towers come down, I understood from experience something that many others didn't realize right away-there would be almost no survivors. And the remains of the victims would be mangled almost beyond recognition, mixed in with steel and concrete and rubble. As at Waco and Oklahoma City, but on a much larger scale, the recovery effort would involve pulling shredded body parts out of a mass of debris and then somehow trying to identify the remains as part of a leg, a shoulder muscle, a kidney. It was just the kind of work I'd been doing for the past ten years, and I knew that very few other people would be willing or able to do it. Because of my odd, checkered career-all the time I'd spent dissecting remains at the Hughston Clinic; the months of memorizing bone fragments at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville; and the many fires, explosions, plane crashes, and homicidal dismemberment cases I'd worked in Kentucky-I had somehow put together precisely the combination of skills that would be useful in a situation like this.
I settled down to watch yet another replay of that morning's horrifying disaster. Whether or not I was part of the first response team didn't matter anymore. Sooner or later, I knew, I'd be going.
The first few days following the attacks are a blur. As I tried to keep up with events in New York, we identified the teenaged homicide victim from Bowling Green and managed to determine the cause of her death. I did my best to finish up the rest of my active cases so that when DMORT called for reinforcements I'd be ready. As I'd suspected, all three disaster sites were soon flooded with volunteers; but, with the airports shut down, even DMORT had great difficulty getting enough workers to the New York and Pennsylvania sites (the damage to the Pentagon came under the jurisdiction of the military and other federal agencies). Nevertheless, the logistics were still an enormous challenge. DMORT command had even sent some people to military bases, with instructions to travel by military transport. Those volunteers waited endless hours in cold hangars, spending the night on cots-only to learn that military resources were needed elsewhere and they'd have to drive for two days to get to their destinations.
DMORT was fearful, too, of putting a huge percentage of the nation's forensic experts in one place. What if our entire team of forensic experts, mortuary specialists, and medical death investigators were all sent to New York and then someone blew up their hotel or staged another attack in the recovery area? And what would happen if there were then new attacks in other cities?
Neither DMORT nor any other U.S. agency had ever dealt with a disaster of this magnitude. Before DMORT came on the scene, only two agencies dealt with mass disasters-incidents in which the number of dead is beyond the resources of a local community. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) supervised rescue and recovery operations during earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and tornados, while the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) responded to train wrecks, airplane crashes, and other transportation-related incidents.
These agencies did admirable work, but there were some gaps in the services they provided to the families of the deceased. DMORT evolved as a way of supporting those who had lost loved ones in mass-fatality incidents, making sure they got the information they needed and providing them with social services. Gradually, the agency began to add other forensic specialists to their team of funeral directors and mortuary experts, including medical personnel; forensic anthropologists, pathologists, and odontologists; fingerprint specialists; dental and x-ray technicians; and DNA analysts- resources drawn from all over the country to supplement the personnel available in any one location. Likewise, DMORT recruited such skilled workers as heavy-equipment operators, security specialists, photographers, and investigators, as well as administrative support staff, computer specialists, and the like.
Eventually, a protocol developed for integrating DMORT into disaster relief. The first step, obviously, is always to deal with the living casualties. When the Federal Building went down in Oklahoma City, rescue workers were pulling survivors out of the wreckage for days. Emergency disaster relief focused on bringing additional doctors, nurses, and medical personnel-anyone who could deal with the needs of the wounded.
Once the living are taken care of, attention can be paid to the dead. The second wave of disaster personnel is the forensic specialists who can perform autopsies on corpses, match their recovered teeth to dental records, compare fingerprints, and analyze fragmented body parts and bone shards. That's usually where I come in-sometimes days or even weeks after the initial disaster.
On the evening of September 22, I finally got the call. DMORT wanted me to fly out the next morning and report to their New York City headquarters in the LaGuardia Marriott, a large hotel near New York 's LaGuardia Airport. The authorities had first planned to set up morgue operations in an airplane hangar there, so DMORT chose a nearby location to house their staff. When that plan changed, we all moved to a midtown hotel, about a week later; but meanwhile, here I was, walking into a lobby that seemed so deserted I wondered if I had come to the wrong place.
