Who They Were

Inside the World Trade Center DNA Story: The Unprecedented Effort to Identify the Missing

Robert C. Shaler

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780743291217
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du 21ème siècle

In Who They Were, Dr. Robert C. Shaler, the man who directed the largest and most groundbreaking forensic DNA investigation in U.S. history, tells with poignant clarity and refreshing honesty the story behind the relentless effort to identify the 2, 749 victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
No part of the investigation into the 9/11 attacks has taken as long or been less discussed than the daunting task of identifying the victims -- and the hijackers -- from the remains in the rubble of Ground Zero. In Who They Were, Dr. Robert C. Shaler, former director of the Forensic Biology Department at the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, tells the inside story of the relentless process of DNA identification and depicts the victories and frustrations that he and his team of scientists experienced during more than three years of grueling work.
On September 11, 2001, New York City was unprepared for the mass-fatality event that occurred at the World Trade Center. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had to completely reconfigure itself to process and identify the nearly 20, 000 remains that would eventually come through its doors. Facing an astonishing array of obstacles -- from political infighting and an overwhelming bureaucracy to the nearly insurmountable task of corralling personnel and supplies to handle the work -- Shaler and his team quickly established an unprecedented network of cooperation among public agencies and private labs doing cutting-edge research.
More than a story of innovative science at the frontiers of human knowledge, Who They Were also tells the very human story of how Dr. Shaler and his staff forged important and lasting bonds with the families of those who were lost. He shares the agony of mistakes made in the chaos and unintended misidentifications resulting in the excruciating difficulty of having to retrieve remains from families of the lost.
Finally, Dr. Shaler shares how he and the dedicated team of scientists who gave up more than three years of their lives when the rest of the world had moved on had to face the limits of science in dealing with the appalling level of destruction at Ground Zero and concede that no more victims would be sent home to their families. As of April 2005, when the process was suspended, only 1, 592 out of the 2, 749 who died on that fateful day had been identified.
With compelling prose and insight, Who They Were reveals the previously untold stories of the scientists determined to bring closure to devastated families in the wake of America's largest disaster.

Part I

Chaos and Uncertainty

1 September 11, 2001

I directed the Forensic Biology Department, also known as the DNA lab, at New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), which routinely analyzes biological evidence in more than three thousand criminal cases annually. The vast majority of these are sexual assaults and homicides. The laboratory is the largest public forensic DNA laboratory in the United States. Although it was housed at the OCME, newspapers erroneously referred to it as the New York City Police Department’s DNA laboratory. Even the mayor’s office had it confused, when as recently as April 2005, it made public statements suggesting that the DNA laboratory was part of the police department.

The laboratory is located in the OCME penthouse, the sixth floor of the agency’s headquarters building, and occupies approximately 12,000 square feet. The laboratory turned out an annual average of more than 1,200 DNA profiles in homicides and sexual assault cases. On September 11, 2001, I was managing 105 people, most of whom were young scientists in the early stages of their careers. Years earlier, after a particularly raucous Christmas party, other OCME staffers had dubbed us the “young and the restless.” It fit. I love New York, but I lived in New Jersey, which meant I had to endure a 63-mile commute each way. I hated commuter traffic, so I tailored my travel to arrive at work around 5:30 A.M. and then spent the first hour or so catching up and responding to e-mails. Then I would dive into the boxes of cases that lined the wall of my small office, reviewing them and entering statistics into a database, which is what I was doing on that sunny Tuesday morning when the fire alarm went off at about 7:30 A.M.

The alarm had the bothersome habit of going off when there really wasn’t a problem, so I did what I always did: I ignored it. I was certain someone would exclaim “false alarm” over the speaker system. That was SOP, standard operating procedure. So I tuned out the incessant, irritating bell and siren and continued working. Seconds later, I heard a loud, persistent pounding on the lab door. The noise was so loud that it forced me out of my chair and to the door, where I found firefighters gesturing madly at the door, demanding I open it.

A word of caution: if you value your doors, do what firefighters want. They’d rather break down a door than succumb to the more mundane solution—using a key—especially if the key isn’t readily available. They have a job to do and nothing stands in the way of their getting it done. For firefighters, time is a precious commodity, which they dare not waste on false alarms.

Unfortunately for the New York City Fire Department, the OCME building seemed to know this and had been toying with them for years. One would think these macho professionals would have known its peculiarities by this time, because the building’s ghosts apparently delighted in vexing them with false alarms. Maybe that’s why the door was still intact when I greeted them.

That Tuesday’s early-morning goblin was the smoke detector located in a storage room at the rear of the DNA lab. This detector had a habit of creating problems, usually during regular working hours, though it rarely rousted New York’s Bravest. For some reason, this single smoke detector was sensitive to almost anything: dust, poltergeists, or things cosmic. I learned later that dust left over from the lab’s renovation project years earlier had gotten inside it and it had never been cleaned.

The firefighters bulled past me, demanding I show them the culprit room. Ever the dutiful civil servant, I escorted them to the back of the lab, pointed to the door, and watched. They attempted to open the door but found it locked.

“Who has the key?” one firefighter asked gruffly.

“I might have one in my office. I’m not sure whether it’ll work,” I said, knowing it didn’t but hoping to stall them until I could find Nick Fusco, our building facilities supervisor, before they invoked their city-given right to splinter the door. I glanced over my shoulder as I left in time to see one firefighter feeling the perimeter of the door for heat.

I reached Nick on the Nextel radio, and he radioed the evidence custodian, who was supposed to have a key, but didn’t. Then Nick instructed me to go to his office, where he said there should be a set of keys lying on his desk. After about twenty minutes, I returned to the lab, fully expecting to find an open storage room and door shards strewn across the corridor. Instead, I found only one firefighter, who made a cursory inspection for fire-like signs after I opened the door, then left quickly; too quickly, I thought. I had never seen the FDNY so passive, which I thought was strange and out of character even though it was a common false alarm. I had no way of knowing this was the prelude to a very strange day.

My managerial staff and I had set aside Tuesday mornings to meet. We started at 8:30 and usually finished sometime after 10:00. The meetings gave us a chance to get ourselves on the same page, sort out the week’s problems, address pending issues, and establish lab policy. Dr. Howard Baum, my deputy director, and Dr. Mecki Prinz, Marie Samples, Dr. Pasquale Buffolino, and Karen Dooling (the latter two left the OCME in December 2001) were my assistant directors. We were in the midst of what I’m certain was an important discussion when at about 8:50, someone knocked on the conference room door.

Ralph Ristenbatt, my MESATT (Medical Examiner’s Scientific Assessment and Training Team) supervisor, stood there, clearly agitated and gesturing for me to join him in the hall. Ralph was not in the habit of interrupting our weekly meeting, so I excused myself and left the room, shutting the door behind me.

An experienced forensic scientist and crime reconstruction expert, Ralph was in his midthirties. He had been at the OCME for more than ten years and was still enthusiastic about his work.

I was expecting a heads-up about MESATT. On autopilot, my mind was already hearing something like “Detective Such-and-Such wants us to examine the blood spatter at a scene in the Bronx.”

“What’s up?” I said.

“A plane just hit the World Trade Center.”

“What?” I said, not certain I heard him correctly.

“A plane—”

“What kind?”

“Don’t know. Just happened—small—twin-engine Cessna or something like that.”

“Bodies?”

Ralph shook his head. “Don’t know.”

“How much damage?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

My mind was reeling, screaming, “It’s a mistake. This didn’t happen. Who is that fucking stupid?” I poked my head back into the conference room.

“A plane just hit the World Trade Center.”

Astonishment and disbelief do not adequately describe the expressions on the faces of my management staff.

“How big was it?” someone asked, a female voice.

Ralph said, “It’s a small plane. Schomburg wants MESATT to help set up a temporary morgue at the World Trade Center ASAP. We have to get going.”

I hesitated. If Dave Schomburg, the OCME director of medicolegal investigations, was setting up a temporary morgue, there had to be bodies. “Sure,” I said, still stunned. “Get going.”

My mind leaped into hyperdrive, flooding me with questions: How many bodies? When would they be coming to the OCME?

I followed Ralph to the elevator. I needed to see my boss, Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, and Dave Schomburg, whom I found in the lobby. His face appeared taut, his expression intense. He quickly told me that two major airliners had hit the buildings, one pounding into each building with passengers aboard, and there was a fire.

My mind was having trouble comprehending the enormity of what I had heard. There would be bodies, hundreds if the planes were full. Thousands if the buildings were filled with workers.

By now, I was on First Avenue in front of the OCME building with Chuck Hirsch, Dave Schomburg, Dan Stevelman, the director of facilities maintenance, Ralph, and the rest of the MESATT team.

In his midsixties, Chuck Hirsch was unquestionably the most rational and stable person I’d met in my life. Always well tailored, he always seemed in control of himself and his surroundings, someone whose clothes perfectly fit his lithe, athletic body. He had become my role model. Chuck’s exemplary career had taken him from Ohio, where he trained, to Suffolk County, New York, where he had been the chief medical examiner, and finally to New York City. In his tenure as chief medical examiner of this country’s largest medical examiner’s office, he reinvented an office mired in turmoil and scandal and turned it into a pillar of efficiency and professionalism, recognized everywhere as a world-class operation.

“How many dead?” I asked Chuck.

“We don’t know,” he replied, his usually calm demeanor now clearly fragile.

“The DNA lab will be ready,” I said with more conviction than I felt.

Chuck barely glanced at me. He simply nodded, then turned and strode to his car with Dianne Christie, a medicolegal investigator, in tow. Ralph was standing on the running board of a white OCME Ford Excursion, the MESATT vehicle. The other members of MESATT—supervising criminalists Brian Gestring and Mark Desire (criminalists are scientists who specialize in the scientific analysis of evidence) and OCME resident forensic anthropologist Amy Mundorff (forensic anthropologists are experts who study bones in order to identify the individual; they can also help pathologists determine the cause and manner of death)—were climbing inside. Dan Stevelman left too, but I don’t remember seeing him get into a vehicle.

I was of two minds. I desperately wanted to be a part of what was happening downtown, to witness it firsthand. I started walking toward Ralph but changed my mind. My responsibility was to prepare the lab. Ralph and MESATT would be okay. It was the first real decision I made that Tuesday. For me, it was a lucky one.

I hadn’t seen the planes hit the Twin Towers either on TV or in person, as millions had. But I had the gut feeling that DNA might become important. On my way back to the sixth-floor DNA conference room, I listened to a radio broadcast. Although I knew it intellectually, my mind stubbornly refused to accept that the World Trade Center had been attacked again. I thought back to 1993, when terrorists had set off a bomb in the parking garage beneath the complex, murdering six people. The bastards had returned to finish the job.

In the conference room, my assistant directors were already working to reorganize the laboratory. We needed to establish teams to accept remains into the laboratory, track them, extract the DNA, and then analyze it. Remains would start coming in later that day and we had to be ready.

The Department of Forensic Biology had a staff of 105 scientists. A lack of space in the OCME building forced us to split up. We occupied the entire sixth floor of the OCME building at 520 First Avenue, the corner of 30th Street and First Avenue (eventually, the World Trade Center DNA identification unit would occupy part of a room on the second floor), and we had a satellite site on part of the fourth floor of the administration building at Bellevue Hospital, four blocks away. The Bellevue lab was a makeshift facility where criminalists examined biological evidence from criminal investigations occurring in the city. Cuttings removed from the evidence came to the sixth floor in the OCME building, where other criminalists analyzed the DNA. We had a modern facility in the planning stages, a thirteen-story, 300,000-plus-square-foot building devoted to forensic biology that would consolidate the laboratory under one roof, but it was years from completion.

While conferring with my managerial staff, I was having trouble concentrating. This might seem strange given the daunting task facing us, but my mind wandered. I kept thinking about a presentation given a couple of years earlier by Dr. Ron Forney of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the New York State DNA Subcommittee. He had outlined how the RMCP had used DNA to identify the missing after Swissair Flight 111 crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia in September 1998 and 229 lost their lives. The Canadians had analyzed more than 1,200 samples using an approach that was both efficient and logical. I had been impressed. Instead of singling out one laboratory to perform the DNA-typing efforts, they had employed several of the country’s public forensic labs, sending samples as far as Vancouver to get the testing done quickly. The DNA data came back to their headquarters facility in Ottawa, where scientists analyzed them. Dr. Benoit Leclair made the identifications using an Excel spreadsheet that he had programmed.

At that time, Dr. Barry Duceman, director of the New York State Police Biological Sciences laboratory in Albany, and I often said that New York State needed a software package like Benoit’s. We both thought we should either obtain a copy of Benoit’s program or develop one. It was an idea that never materialized. Chuck Hirsch and I had several short conversations on the subject over the years. Separately, we urged New York State to develop a DNA implementation plan for mass disasters. Mark Dale, inspector of the New York State Forensic Investigation Center at the time and Barry Duceman’s boss, also agreed. The only movement toward this end came after Chuck contacted the state, which resulted in Ron Forney’s presentation. Then nothing happened. Mass-disaster preparation, everyone agreed, was important—what self-respecting politician would disagree?—but the short-term, more politically expedient issues always took precedence. Mass disasters had clearly been relegated to everyone’s back burner.

While one part of my mind listened to my managerial staff attempt to deal with the emerging situation, another part lamented not having Benoit’s software. I guessed the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory had a version and I wondered whether the FBI had something. Without the appropriate software to help make the identifications, we were hopelessly lost.

I realized that I was of little help to my staff, who were doing a stellar job of reorganizing the lab. Although I certainly wanted to be a part of their discussion, I decided to see how the OCME as an agency had been organized, which certainly would have a critical effect on the laboratory. How would bodies get into the OCME? How would specimens come to the laboratory? Which samples would the medical examiners collect? What about chain of custody? Would it be tight and foolproof? What about sample mixups? That thought scared the crap out of me.

I left the conference room and was heading out of the lab to find Dave Schomburg when my cell phone vibrated.

“Bob, you won’t fucking believe this!” Ralph screamed. “People are hanging out of the building. Oh fuck! Someone jumped. People are fucking jumping! This is horrible!”

“Jesus Christ,” was all that I could muster. “Are you all right?”

Visions of people falling 110 stories filled my brain. I couldn’t talk.

“This is unbelievable.”

“Where are you?”

“In front of the Marriott. Jesus Christ. This is fucking horrible,” he cried. “Bob, you won’t believe what it’s like, the sound—when they hit.”

Today, when I see photos or videos of people jumping from the buildings, I still hear the horror in his voice.

I instructed him to stay in touch and to be careful. I returned to the conference room.

Then the South Tower fell. It was 10:02.

Shocked, we ran into the lab and listened to the broadcast. None of us could believe what had happened. Then the North Tower fell at 10:29. I went to my office and tried calling my wife, Fran, but I couldn’t get an outside line. Frustrated, I went downstairs to the lobby, where Dave Schomburg grabbed my arm and pulled ...