Forensics specialists still shaken by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington prepared Wednesday for additional heartbreaking scenes as they began the most massive victim identification project in U.S. history.
Officials fear that thousands of people died when the World Trade Center collapsed, creating a tangle of bodies and rubble that will require months of painstaking sorting by forensic anthropologists, recovery workers and morticians.
Along with the 3,000 workers deployed to the disaster sites by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal Department of Health and Human Services dispatched 169 mortuary specialists from around the country. Those experts will rely on such evidence as DNA, dental records and fingerprints to identify victims burned or crushed beyond recognition.
Accounting for all the dead could pose an immense technical and emotional challenge. The lack of definitive lists of people missing from the Trade Center complex will complicate the task in New York, adding to the anguish and depression that recovery workers face.
“It will be a horrendous process,” said Dr. Robert Kirschner, a former Cook County deputy medical examiner who helped identify 273 people who died in the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 at O’Hare International Airport in 1979–before Tuesday, the worst aviation disaster on U.S. soil.
The New York City medical examiner’s office on Wednesday began distributing eight-page identification forms to family members and friends of people missing since the collapse of the twin towers.
The forms “cover every aspect of the person missing–their clothes, eye color, whether they’ve had dental work done, if so where and by whom,” said New York City medical examiner spokeswoman Ellen Borakove.
Emergency workers used a Brooks Brothers clothing store near the wreckage as a makeshift area to place some bodies, but Borakove said the city had not yet established a temporary morgue for the expected victims. Although workers had not yet dug into the central wreckage, one New York firefighter described the scene as one of “unspeakable carnage.”
Personal stories
Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist who worked on the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said the grisly remains at such a site may be less disturbing than getting to know the personal histories of innocent victims.
“You learn to handle the disfigurement, but then you hear all these little stories. Everybody has one, every one of those victims,” Snow said.
Even so simple a task as identifying a victim through fingerprints can be deeply saddening, Snow said. To help identify many of the Oklahoma City blast’s 19 child victims, investigators retrieved fingerprints from television screens, where the children once had brushed their fingertips in rapt fascination.
“Children are always tough to handle emotionally,” Snow said.
Of great help in Oklahoma City, Snow said, was the presence of clinical psychologists who guided recovery workers through the tragedy. Officials also saw to it that the workers ate regularly and got enough sleep.
“Morale is a big factor,” Snow said. “Even for people who do this sort of thing all the time, you see such terrible things that you get emotionally upset.”
Identifying victims at the Pentagon should be simplified by the 3.2 million blood-stain cards the armed services keep on file for all their members, said Chris Kelly, a spokesman for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Those cards provide a ready means of identifying service members by DNA, Kelly said.
Jewelry, dental records
In contrast, the best way to identify many New York victims may be through their jewelry, tattoos or dental records. Experts said the team will need a computer database to keep track of dental records, other identifying characteristics, and what body parts workers have found.
Even if no previous blood samples exist for a victim, specialists often can identify the person through DNA, Kirschner said.
The key in such cases is a part of the genetic code called mitochondrial DNA, which is passed along largely unchanged from mothers to their sons and daughters. To identify someone through mitochondrial DNA, Kirschner said, “all you need is a maternal relative–a sister, brother, mother or maternal grandmother.”
After the 1979 O’Hare crash and the Oklahoma City bombing, it took about a month and a half to identify most victims, Snow said. Military officials said the Pentagon victims could be identified within days. FEMA officials estimated Wednesday that crews would be on the New York scene for up to two months.
Even then, Kirschner predicted as many as 10 percent of the victims’ bodies may be so damaged they never will be found. Investigators never found any biological traces of 33 victims known to have been in the 1979 Chicago crash, Snow said.
In those cases, he said, families had to wait until a year after the disaster before courts could give them death certificates for their loved ones.
