On the way back, my FBI guide explained to me the third leg of the recovery effort, one that I'd never actually see for myself but which was an integral part of the work I would do here. When human remains were spotted in a particular place at Ground Zero, he explained to me, they were recovered and sent uptown to the OCME disaster morgue. Then, workers excavated the rubble and debris from that same location and sent it over to the Fresh Kills landfill at Staten Island on barges. Trucks on Staten Island off-loaded this material and workers spread it out on the ground so they could examine it once again for any traces of human tissue. Indeed, some body parts were so small or so camouflaged by their coating of pulverized concrete that they slipped by the spotters at Ground Zero and were only separated from the rubble at the Staten Island facility.
Eventually, forensic experts from around the country worked around the clock for more than eight months on Staten Island, separating bone and flesh from more than sixty-one million tons of shattered metal and concrete. By the last few months of the effort, they had created a huge assembly-line operation with conveyor belts and commercial sifters. They'd also built a semi-permanent tent city that offered the workers some shelter from the weather, housed the cafeteria and a dining area, and served as space for office work and evidence processing.
As I returned to the morgue, I realized that my vision of the disaster had shifted. Before, I had been looking for an explanation of why the results of the towers' collapse were so horribly uneven- how a relatively intact body could lie side by side with a tiny bone fragment. But once I saw the magnitude of the destruction, I realized that there was no point in seeking such answers for the mechanisms of injury. We just had to accept things as they were and deal with the results.
And soon it would be my turn to deal with those results on my own. Today was Wednesday. On Thursday I'd be taking over the night shift triage station in the morgue. I had only tomorrow to get ready.
On Thursday morning, I didn't get up and go to the morgue with the day-shift workers. Instead, I tried to adjust my sleep/wake schedule by taking a few naps and keeping the room dark and quiet. I'd be expected to show up at the six p.m. briefing that evening and be ready to go as if it were the start of a normal work day-and then I'd be in the belly of the morgue until seven the next morning.
As I lay in my hotel room bed at two o'clock that afternoon, the thought of having to go to sleep when my built-in diurnal clock was telling me to wake up was almost more than I could bear. I punched the pillow, turned over, and tried to will myself into a state of relaxation. Tonight, I'd face the test.
When I walked into the morgue that night, the first thing I did was run through a mental checklist of the guys on my team, the men and women I'd met over the past two days who would be helping me with triage. To my Kentucky eyes, they were an almost archetypal group of New Yorkers, colorful and brash. Al Muller, a detective with the NYPD, was our company jokester, always ready to crack a smile and find something funny in even the most awful situation. Mickey was a Port Authority cop who reminded me of a quick-witted and quick-tempered jockey I once met at Churchill Downs. Carmen was part of the NYPD's missing persons unit; an exuberant Latina, she switched back and forth between Spanish and English without even thinking about it. A police officer, Mia, was a headstrong diva with long black dreadlocks and a swagger to her walk. Kam worked on the NYPD Emergency Response Team-a man of action whose skin was the color of oiled mahogany. Mark Caruso was the first openly gay police officer I'd ever met. He complained endlessly-but he was always the first to come up with a pep talk when we needed it, laughing at everything and everybody. Just to make me feel a little more at home, there were Mark Grogan and Don Thacke, the New York versions of the Kentucky and Tennessee cops I'd come to know and love.
And then there was John Trotter: my buddy, my comrade in arms, my right-hand man.
John was a Port Authority detective who shaved his head bald as a cue ball but cultivated a thick white beard. A big, broad-shouldered John Wayne kind of guy, he'd gone down to the World Trade Center right after the first plane hit, trying to get his people out. When Tower 2 started to come down, he ran for his life with a bunch of his men. He zigged and they zagged-so he survived and they died, even though they were all within inches of one another. John was down there, too, when the fighter planes roared over the area, and he didn't know if the planes belonged to friend or foe. All he knew is that he and the civilians he was shepherding out of the area might once again be in danger of death.
After all he'd been through, John felt that he couldn't go back down to the site to help with rescue and recovery. But he'd been on the job for thirty years, and his bosses knew they had to find something for him. So he'd ended up assigned to the morgue, and I never had a better helper in my life. He seemed to get totally absorbed in the work, as though knowing that he was doing something vitally important for the victims' families and friends-not to mention his own fallen comrades-gave him a way to cope with his own loss. He became a darned good anthropologist, too, recognizing bones almost as quickly as I did, and sometimes helping me figure out which bone some of the fragments belonged to.
John and I were about the only middle-aged ones among a big group of twenty- and thirty-year-olds, and I think we each appreciated not being the only “old-timer.” We offered each other moral support when the hours and body parts at our table seemed endless, and we often hung out together during breaks.
Although John and I shared a special bond, every single person on my team was steady, faithful, and smart. I adored them and I would have trusted them with my life. And I was honored-and relieved-by how quickly we all seemed to put our faith in each other.
My team was already experienced in the carefully choreographed procedure that kept the identification process running like the assembly line it was. Mickey brought me my first body bag and unzipped it, revealing that it contained a smaller plastic bag. Al reached in and removed the bag, then read the tag telling us where it had been found. Steve, another member of my team, removed the tag and reached under the table for a new bag, while Al cut the first bag open. Then John reached over and removed whatever was inside, handing it to me. I did my best to tell what it was and to see if there was anything in or on it that might help with identification. More often than not, my “identification” was limited to saying that the body part was a tip of an elbow, or a section of lung, or maybe a fragment of mandible, but sometimes we would open a body bag that contained almost an entire torso or even a complete body.
In most mass-fatality incidents, such as high-impact plane crashes, the only materials you can use for a positive ID are teeth, bones, unique tattoos, fingerprints, or DNA. People often think we can use associated evidence-an article of clothing or an ID card-but that's only good for a “presumptive identification”: The body or body part that accompanies it must still be identified by scientific means.
In a few rare cases, you can use objects to make a positive ID. If a unique ring is found on someone's finger, the hand can be ID'd-but that's no help with the victim's other body parts if they aren't connected. Or if the human remains contain a surgical device that bears a serial number, you might use that for a positive ID. But most other personal effects don't help you identify a body part because they can so easily become commingled: These effects, along with parts of the victims themselves, are often inextricably mixed with one another. Watches and other jewelry can actually be torn from one victim and recovered from directly on top of or under another victim.
So, back in the morgue, if we found a unique and identifiable watch securely circling the wrist of a severed arm, we were able to make a tentative ID of the entire upper extremity, but the pathologist still had to take a DNA sample in hope of eventually linking that arm to the rest of that victim's remains.
It's always difficult to identify human remains after a mass disaster. A small plane crash or a minor industrial mishap-even a house fire or a space heater's explosion-can shred a human body, mingling remains with rubble. I'd worked a number of such scenes in Kentucky, and my primary objective had always been to find a body part that might ultimately be used to make a positive ID. Maybe I'd pick up a single fingertip torn from the rest of the hand-the basis for a fingerprint that might later be matched to a coffee cup left at home on the breakfast table. Or I might find a small piece of skin with a unique tattoo, or a gold-capped tooth torn from its socket that could eventually be matched with a dental record.
That process of sorting and identifying human remains is hard enough in an “ordinary” disaster, when you've got a dozen or a hundred victims to deal with. But nearly three thousand? All of whom had died either in the plane crashes, the fires, or the collapse of the buildings-from one of the several forces that had reduced a gigantic steel-frame structure to rubble?
Yet, I reflected, watching the swift and precise movements of my team and the pathologists' team on the other side of the morgue, human bones and teeth are incredibly durable. Their mineral content is made up primarily of calcium hydroxyapatite crystals, so they can often withstand the fires of commercial crematory retorts that can reach as high as 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. And bones shattered by bullets and motor vehicle collisions can often be screwed or pinned back together well enough to allow them-and their owners-to survive happily for decades.
Now these sturdy bones were being brought into the morgue by the thousands. And it was up to us to identify them and send them on for further analysis. So after I had named whatever I could recognize, Mark or Mickey would write my description on the new bag, into which John or I would gently place the tissues in question. One of the other morgue workers-Audrey, Terry, or Vinnie-would carry the bag over to one of the pathologists, who had their own group at the other end of the morgue, close enough for us to work together but far enough to avoid DNA cross-contamination from the various body parts. The pathologists were technically in charge of the whole operation, but they worked as members of the team, assigning case numbers, dictating detailed descriptions of the remains, instructing Diana to take x-rays, Joe or Raoul to take fingerprints, or a dentist to analyze the teeth. They took the DNA samples themselves. Barbara, the Port Authority sergeant, was there, too, helping things to go smoothly.
Meanwhile, at my end of the morgue, I felt my way through the mangled remains, trying to come up with some bone or a recognizable bit of soft tissue to which I could give a name. I had the unmistakable sense of everything coming together again-the dissections I'd done in Georgia; the work in Texas, Tennessee, and Kentucky; the years of memorizing bone fragments in Dr. Bass's osteology class. Here I was using all of it-and the stakes had never been higher.
On and on I worked, my hands seeming to move of their own accord, my mind automatically naming and noticing and cataloguing. Every once in a while we'd get a body that was relatively intact, perhaps one that had been sheltered by fortuitous physics as the structures imploded. Somehow, the combination of kinetic forces had formed a few pockets that denied access to the pulverized concrete and debris. While the victims found here died just as suddenly as the others-their lives snuffed out quickly from the heat, lack of oxygen, and explosive pressures of the implosion-their bodies were not torn asunder and they could be returned in relatively recognizable shape to their grieving families, having been identified by standard means-dental records, fingerprints, and/or unique tattoos.
Mainly, though, we were working with fragmented and unassociated bones or body parts. But although we were moving at a relentless pace, the mood in the morgue wasn't tense-instead it was somber, almost reverent. Every single one of us was aware that the remains we handled were all that was left of somebody's loved one, that a fingertip or bone shard might be all that a family would have to mourn over and cherish after such a sudden loss of life.
Indeed, the remains we handled might well belong to someone that my triage team had known personally-one of John's Port Authority buddies, or a colleague of Mark's from the force. Usually, in a morgue, you have complete detatchment-the morgue workers are rarely acquainted with the people who have died, and that impersonality is as important to us as it is to a surgeon, who can make a healing incision on a stranger that he or she could never make on a parent, child, spouse, or friend. Yet even though in Kentucky we
Despite the very personal grief that these police officers felt, they worked with an unfailing commitment and caring that never failed to move me. They were there by my side the whole time, opening bags, transcribing the words I was using to describe the tissues: “right distal femur,” “left foot,” “portion of scapula.” At first I had to spell some of the technical terms I was using, but in spite of my southern drawl, they soon caught on to what I was saying, and since we were seeing so many of the same bones I no longer had to spell out m-a-n-u-b-r-i-u-m when I identified a fragment that had come from the top of someone's breastbone.
These guys not only helped me with the logistical problems of identifying and re-bagging the remains, they helped me stay focused. It was easy to get emotionally involved with the work-a piece of monogrammed jewelry around a neck or a name badge still pinned to a victim's shirt constantly drove home the fact that these weren't just shattered bodies, they were also shattered lives. We all did our jobs efficiently and with care, but sometimes the stress got to be too much and we had to stop, step outside the tent, and get some fresh air just to clear our heads.
