Dead Center Read online

  DEAD CENTER

  BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE WORLD’S

  LARGEST MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE

  SHIYA RIBOWSKY

  AND TOM SHACHTMAN

  Dead-ication

  To my dear wife Jennifer, who astonishingly chose me and

  whose love gives me the courage to reach higher.

  To Chava, Reena, Eli, and Jake, I love you.

  May your lives be full of delightful choices.

  To Rock Positano and to R.A.H.

  “Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead, and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercies of its people, their loyalty to high ideals, and their regard for the laws of the land.”

  —William Ewart Gladstone, 1809–1898

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION

  The morning of September 11, 2001, was sunny and crystal…

  ONE

  When people ask what I do for a living, I…

  TWO

  One day your colleague Fred is in the office and…

  THREE

  All the training we were receiving, out in the field…

  FOUR

  During my training year as an MLI-I, it wasn’t only…

  FIVE

  On countless television crime shows and in just as many…

  SIX

  Being an MLI-II means that you’re a seasoned pro, but…

  SEVEN

  Working a ton of hours as an MLI and handling…

  EIGHT

  After a few years as an MLI-II, I became a…

  NINE

  I can no longer remember every one of the more…

  TEN

  Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, the largest…

  ELEVEN

  On the street surrounding our office building, a tent city…

  TWELVE

  Long before 9/11, my training and experience had taught me…

  THIRTEEN

  November 12, 2001, a Monday, was celebrated as that year’s…

  FOURTEEN

  By early April 2002, I had recovered enough from my…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SEARCHABLE TERMS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MORNING OF September 11, 2001, was sunny and crystal clear—the kind of day that is too rare in New York City—with perfect temperature and no humidity. I arrived as usual at my office at 8:00 A.M., after the six-block walk from my apartment, coffee and muffin in hand. It was such a beautiful day that I decided to have my breakfast outside, sitting on the edge of a granite flowerbed, while I awaited my first visitor of the morning.

  I looked up at the building where I worked, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York (OCME). After working there for eleven years, I still thought of it affectionately as the ugliest building in Manhattan: a misshapen turquoise rectangle on the corner of Thirtieth Street and First Avenue, adjacent to New York University Hospital. A testament to 1950s municipal-pile architecture, the building was an amusing embarrassment to all who worked within.

  My visitor was Dr. Steve Schwartz, registrar and assistant commissioner of New York City’s vital statistics office (at the Department of Health), the repository of every birth and death certificate issued in the city. By 8:30 A.M., we were in a meeting inside. My title at OCME was director of identifications, and we had gathered that morning to discuss New York City’s Electronic Death Registration System (EDRS), a system designed to allow OCME and hospitals to file death certificates with the health department via the Internet. This costly project had been started and delayed many times; now we were trying to determine how to get it back on track.

  Such a system would be very useful, one of us pointed out early in the meeting, in the case of a mass fatality.

  Shortly before 9:00 A.M., our meeting was interrupted by Nick Fusco, OCME’s facilities manager, who stuck his head in the office and told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center (WTC). And that I might want to get myself to the conference room, which had the only television set on the premises.

  As I hurried through the corridors, my mind flashed back to an incident from the previous weekend. I’d noticed a small plane, circling illegally at very low altitude over Manhattan’s East Side, towing a banner protesting something having to do with the United Nations and human rights. Uh-oh, I thought, that idiot’s back again, and his Piper Cub, or whatever it was, has hit one of the towers.

  In the conference room, I joined a group of colleagues huddled grimly around the television set. One glance at the televised image of the tower burning, and I threw out my Piper Cub theory. No small plane could have caused that amount of damage: the tower looked as though it had been nuked.

  I was shocked. But immediately, almost involuntarily, my mind flooded with professional questions. How many people had died? How many were injured? How would we identify the victims? How would we transport the bodies to the office for processing? Where would we handle the processing?

  Then the next plane hit, and I felt something more: fear. The first plane might have been an accident, but the second left no room for misunderstanding. This was an attack—right here, on my city, my country. On an intellectual level, I must have understood what was going on, but it took hours for me to believe that the event unfolding before my eyes was actually happening.

  During the brief period when just the first tower was ablaze, before the second plane hit, I had felt awful about the victims, but I had remained calm. Now I was scared: fearful for my loved ones, my country, my city, and perhaps even for myself.

  Reports began to come in about more attacks—that additional planes were inbound, that a truck had just detonated on the George Washington Bridge. Thankfully, those and similar reports proved to be false, but as the terrible day wore on, we learned that a third plane had attacked the Pentagon and that a fourth hijacked plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.

  My thoughts coursed onward in parallel tracks, one worried for the safety and well-being of my loved ones, for those in the towers, and for my country; the other engaged with professional concerns. I also became aware that I was reacting to the strain in other ways. For one thing, I noticed a metallic taste in my mouth; I came to think of it as the nickel taste, and it would stay with me for weeks, a physical manifestation of my emotional stress.

  Within the first half-hour of the tragedy, the OCME began to deploy its initial response. Dr. Charles Hirsch, chief medical examiner (CME), and a group of other staff members had gathered in front of the building, preparing to head downtown. The towers had not yet fallen; none of us even suspected that they might collapse. The plan was for the “away” team to reconnoiter at the site and then contact us with instructions on what we were facing and how to prepare. They would also locate and secure appropriate locations for temporary field morgues.

  I wanted to go downtown with the chief, and at first I was disappointed when he told me to stay behind at the office. But somebody had to remain at headquarters to prepare for the task ahead. Whatever bodies were recovered at the site would have to be processed and identified, and as director of identifications for the office and senior medicolegal investigator (MLI) for Manhattan, it fell to me to start organizing our efforts.

  In a sense, too, I was relieved. I wasn’t sure there would be much for our agency to do at the site, whereas the job of preparing the main office for the tasks to come was bound to be challenging. After all, I reasoned, it would be hours before the fires were put out, and more hours before the injured were attended to. Only then would full attention be paid to the dead. I went back into the building to look for anothe
r MLI to go with Dr. Hirsch. Three of my colleagues were in the lobby. One of them, Dianne Crisci, half-jokingly pleaded, “Hey, pick me, pick me!”

  “You want it, you got it,” I said, and walked her outside to join Dr. Hirsch, anthropologist Amy Mundorff, and six other staff members, all equipped with Nextel phones and two-way radios. Going downtown in several vehicles, they soon reached what the world would shortly come to know as Ground Zero.

  From their initial reports, it could as easily have been labeled Hell on Earth.

  At the office, we listened over phones and radios to our seasoned coworkers crying as they watched people jump from the burning towers.

  “My God, my God this is awful—the noise the bodies make when they hit!”

  “We’re walking over body parts here, Shiya. Bodies everywhere. You’d better start getting some refrigerated trucks—we’re not gonna have enough room for all these bodies.”

  Then the South Tower fell, and we immediately lost contact with Dr. Hirsch and his team as the antenna that routed much of the city’s mobile phone traffic fell with the building. Busy on my end in the communications unit, I missed the fall of the tower. But shouts of dismay summoned me back to the conference room, in time to watch as the North Tower followed at 10:29 A.M. The conference room was full but hushed, save for the saddened voices of the television commentators, and a colleague’s quiet sobbing. After the second tower fell, we stood watching the television and mourning for a few moments more; then, one by one, we left the room to head back to work.

  In that moment, uncertain whether our coworkers were dead or alive, I felt terrible—not just about the tragedy, but about how OCME had reacted. We were not a first-responder agency, but we’d acted as though we were, rushing to the site to deal with a situation without taking the time to assess it properly. Worse yet, we had allowed our agency head to be part of the field team. Now, we were on our own.

  Even though we didn’t yet know whether we had lost our leader and colleagues, we still had to act—and act immediately. Unfortunately, at that moment many of us had fallen into a kind of shock. Among them was my immediate boss, the agency’s chief of staff and director of investigations. Many others were wandering around, looking lost, and awaiting direction.

  But when direction wasn’t immediately forthcoming, I was unable to sit still. So I set my mind on the first task I could think of: creating a body receiving area and processing system.

  Standing nearby was Dave Eibert, commanding officer of the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Missing Persons squad. I had no authority over Dave, or any NYPD officer, but I wasn’t thinking about authority. “You, come with me,” I said, and we marched off toward the morgue. Later, I couldn’t remember barking such an order, but when reminiscing with Dave, he said he didn’t give it a second thought. “At that point, I would’ve followed anyone with a plan,” he recalls.

  I’m glad he didn’t ask me if I had one.

  On our way to the morgue, I grabbed two friends, Dr. Mark Flomenbaum, our first deputy chief medical examiner, and Dr. Robert Shaler, head of our DNA lab. We reached the morgue and began to set up a process to examine the remains from the WTC tragedies—a process that would continue, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for almost a year.

  As we walked, the outline of a plan was starting to take shape in my head. I had been working as a medicolegal investigator and identification expert since 1989, when Dr. Hirsch had taken over the OCME and began transforming it into the cutting-edge operation it is today. I had not only medical but also forensic and legal training, and before 9/11 my tasks at OCME had routinely called on all of those skills. But far more important, that day and on the days that followed, was something I’d never learned in school—my basic mind-set. By nature I love making order out of chaos.

  And it was chaos that confronted us that day—an enormous, overwhelming, and heartbreaking task that would absorb our every waking moment, and many of our nonwaking moments, for the next three years. As a logistical challenge, it was unlike anything we had ever imagined; later I would compare it to building an airplane, in flight, at night, during a storm, with no cockpit light, and only a set of badly translated instructions to guide us.

  Late that afternoon, our chief, Dr. Hirsch, made it back to the building. He had almost been killed when the first building came down. Dianne Crisci, the MLI who had begged me to send her to accompany Dr. Hirsch, was standing next to him when the towers collapsed, and she did not make it back to the office that day. Both wounded by a chunk of concrete falling from the upper floors of a tower, Dr. Hirsch and Crisci had been taken to a medical facility in New Jersey. Dr. Hirsch refused treatment for himself, and lingered at the hospital long enough to make sure that Dianne was being properly cared for—her injuries were severe, though she would survive—before bumming a ride with some Port Authority cops back into Manhattan.

  Dr. Hirsch’s appearance shocked us. He was bruised and battered, with a large laceration on his hand that required suturing. The shock wave that had hit him was so powerful that it had impregnated his clothing with gray dust and pebbles—the residue of what had been reinforced concrete. We insisted that he go next door to New York University Hospital’s emergency room. Before he left, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of dust and concrete chips. I spread a paper napkin on his desk, and he emptied the dust onto it. Today that dust is still on his desk in a special container.

  A few impressions and recollections from these early days: Pinning on an American flag lapel pin and never taking it off, transferring it from my suit jacket to my suspenders and back, and later proudly wearing a pin of our flag handed to me by former President George H. W. Bush. Being cornered by former President Bill Clinton at the city’s Emergency Operations Center along the Hudson River, on Pier 92, eager to talk with Tom Shephardson of Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) and me about how he had tried and failed to have the CIA kill Osama bin Laden. Having a private conversation with Mayor Giuliani at 2:00 A.M. in a dark corner of the medical examiner’s office when he came there to identify the body of a friend. Being so proudly overwhelmed at the quality of work that our office was doing, and of the assistance we were getting, that I thought: They’ve killed some of us and brought out the best in the rest of us.

  In those frenzied early days, we all felt grateful to be in a position to help—to do something, anything, to help assuage the pain that the attacks had caused. During the first few weeks after the disaster, when we left the OCME office and saw people applauding the police vehicles we were traveling in, I think we all shared that sense of gratitude. We were all coming together, as New Yorkers and Americans, to help.

  I found myself thinking in those days of how often my grandfathers had reminded me and my siblings of how lucky we were to live in the “golden land,” where we had security and protection from persecution and where opportunities abounded. Too young to have served in the Vietnam War, and not sure I would have willingly done so, I nevertheless admired those who served our country. I thought of the OCME’s effort after 9/11 as similar to a medic’s tour of duty in Vietnam, at least when it came to the psychological battering we all took as a result. The relentless arrival of new remains, the onslaught of grief coming from the families—it was difficult to handle such a ceaseless flow of death, even for experienced ME personnel who had spent our careers working with the deceased and the bereaved. Some of us bowed to the stress, retreating from our work to rest and regroup; a few never returned. I kept working, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t scarred.

  Everyone in New York City, and the surrounding suburbs, seemed to know someone who had perished in the attacks. For a while, I thought I was the exception, but that was only because at first I had so little contact with my usual outside world.

  Then, on one of my infrequent trips back to my apartment to change clothes and grab a few hours of sleep, I learned just how out of touch I was. I’d been up for maybe seventy-two hours when a woman wh
om I vaguely recognized as a neighbor approached me in my apartment building’s lobby. “Don’t you work for the medical examiner’s office?” she asked. I told her I did, but I was tired and irritable, and I was a bit abrupt with her. Sweetly ignoring my tone, she told me that her husband was one of the victims of the attacks and that she needed my help. Mortified by the way I’d spoken, I apologized and told her I hadn’t known of her loss. “Of course,” she said, “you haven’t been home since this happened.” A few days later, the news came even closer to home when I learned that a dear friend, Jeffery Weiner, the assistant cantor of my temple, had also been killed.

  By day three after the attacks, Dr. Hirsch had formally confirmed me in the position I’d already assumed: director of the identification effort for the WTC victims. I couldn’t help feeling that, in some way, it was a job for which I’d been training most of my adult life. Yet, as I ran myself ragged trying to keep up with the pace of the work, burning through mobile-phone batteries, I was also overcome by moments of profound sadness that tempered the adrenaline rush of the work. Still I pushed on, as we all did, rarely giving a thought to the outside world.

  In those early weeks, I was unable to leave my post long enough to perform my usual weekend duties as cantor at a temple in Manhattan. But with late September came the holiest of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, and I had pledged to the rabbi that I’d make it back to sing the most solemn prayer of all, the Kol Nidre, on the eve of the day of atonement.

  Suddenly, as I was immersed in work at the Incident Command Center, I realized that sundown was approaching, and with it the start of Yom Kippur. I had only a few minutes to get to the synagogue, about a mile across town. My heart sank; I felt sure there was no way I could make it. But some police officers from Long Island had been working with us, and I asked them if they’d mind taking me. They immediately put me in their car, and off we went. I think I can safely say that I was the only cantor in America who arrived at his synagogue that day in a police cruiser, sirens blaring.