I directed the Forensic Biology Department, also known as the DNA lab, at New York Cityâs 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 Departmentâs DNA laboratory. Even the mayorâs 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 agencyâs 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 âyoung and the restless.â 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 wasnât a problem, so I did what I always did: I ignored it. I was certain someone would exclaim âfalse alarmâ 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. Theyâd rather break down a door than succumb to the more mundane solutionâusing a keyâespecially if the key isnât 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 buildingâs ghosts apparently delighted in vexing them with false alarms. Maybe thatâs why the door was still intact when I greeted them.
That Tuesdayâs 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 Yorkâs 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 labâs 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.
âWho has the key?â one firefighter asked gruffly.
âI might have one in my office. Iâm not sure whether itâll work,â I said, knowing it didnât 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 didnât. 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 weekâs 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 Iâm certain was an important discussion when at about 8:50, someone knocked on the conference room door.
Ralph Ristenbatt, my MESATT (Medical Examinerâs 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 âDetective Such-and-Such wants us to examine the blood spatter at a scene in the Bronx.â
âWhatâs up?â I said.
âA plane just hit the World Trade Center.â
âWhat?â I said, not certain I heard him correctly.
âA planeââ
âWhat kind?â
âDonât know. Just happenedâsmallâtwin-engine Cessna or something like that.â
âBodies?â
Ralph shook his head. âDonât know.â
âHow much damage?â
He shrugged. âI donât know.â
My mind was reeling, screaming, âItâs a mistake. This didnât happen. Who is that fucking stupid?â I poked my head back into the conference room.
âA plane just hit the World Trade Center.â
Astonishment and disbelief do not adequately describe the expressions on the faces of my management staff.
âHow big was it?â someone asked, a female voice.
Ralph said, âItâs a small plane. Schomburg wants MESATT to help set up a temporary morgue at the World Trade Center ASAP. We have to get going.â
I hesitated. If Dave Schomburg, the OCME director of medicolegal investigations, was setting up a temporary morgue, there had to be bodies. âSure,â I said, still stunned. âGet going.â
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 Iâd 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. Chuckâs 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 countryâs largest medical examinerâs 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.
âHow many dead?â I asked Chuck.
âWe donât know,â he replied, his usually calm demeanor now clearly fragile.
âThe DNA lab will be ready,â 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 MESATTâsupervising 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)âwere climbing inside. Dan Stevelman left too, but I donât 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 hadnât 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 countryâs 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 Benoitâs. We both thought we should either obtain a copy of Benoitâs 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 Ducemanâs boss, also agreed. The only movement toward this end came after Chuck contacted the state, which resulted in Ron Forneyâs presentation. Then nothing happened. Mass-disaster preparation, everyone agreed, was importantâwhat self-respecting politician would disagree?âbut the short-term, more politically expedient issues always took precedence. Mass disasters had clearly been relegated to everyoneâs 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 Benoitâs 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.
âBob, you wonât fucking believe this!â Ralph screamed. âPeople are hanging out of the building. Oh fuck! Someone jumped. People are fucking jumping! This is horrible!â
âJesus Christ,â was all that I could muster. âAre you all right?â
Visions of people falling 110 stories filled my brain. I couldnât talk.
âThis is unbelievable.â
âWhere are you?â
âIn front of the Marriott. Jesus Christ. This is fucking horrible,â he cried. âBob, you wonât believe what itâs like, the soundâwhen they hit.â
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 couldnât get an outside line. Frustrated, I went downstairs to the lobby, where Dave Schomburg grabbed my arm and pulled ...