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.