9/11 Families Outraged After Body Parts Found Utility crews stumble onto bones that might be from WTC victim
NEW YORK - The discovery of human bones in a damaged manhole at the World Trade Center site has outraged victims’ families, who say the city hasn’t done enough to ensure the remains of those killed in the 2001 terrorist attack are located and treated with respect.
Some relatives called for a new, systematic search by outside experts, such as the military command that identifies missing soldiers’ remains.
“We can no longer rely on accidental discoveries,” the group WTC Families for Proper Burial said in a statement Thursday. “This must be a deliberate search. May this awful news be the catalyst needed to go back and do the job well.”
The remains, some as big as arm or leg bones, were found Thursday by a Port Authority contractor working with a Consolidated Edison crew excavating a manhole, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site.
The crew had already hauled excavated materials to a work center, and more remains were later found there, said Con Ed spokesman Mike Clendenin.
Near area where 9/11 events held
The area where the remains were found is near the spot where a podium is erected each Sept. 11 for families to read the names of their loved ones. It was roped off after the discovery, and investigators began sifting through the dirt under a white tarp.
Police said there was no evidence of wrongdoing but the investigation was continuing.
WTC Families for Proper Burial said it would hold a news conference Friday “to express our outrage at the continued cavalier attitude toward the retrieval of human remains.”
Five years after 2,749 people died in the World Trade Center attack, families of about 1,150 victims still have not received word that their loved ones’ remains were found amid the rubble.
The remains of Charles Wolf’s wife, Katherine, 40, were never recovered. He said his wife, an employee of insurer Marsh & McLennan, was on the 97th floor of the north tower when the building collapsed.
“I am totally shocked that this was found in the pit,” said Wolf, 52, who was notified of the discovery by television stations.
“The fact that they were found in ground zero says there was some major, major shortfall in the recovery effort,” Wolf said. “Where else are we going to find them next?”
Military investigators?
Wolf called for a “qualified independent party” to get involved, such as investigators with the military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which identifies the remains of U.S. soldiers once listed as missing in action.
The excavation of the 110-story twin towers began the evening of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and lasted for nine months. About 20,000 pieces of human remains were found. The DNA in thousands of those pieces, many small enough to slip into a test tube, was too damaged by heat, humidity and time to yield matches in the many tests forensic scientists have tried over the years.
The city told victims’ families last year that it was putting the project on hold, possibly for years, until new DNA technology is developed, because every known process had been tried.
Last month, Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch said advances had been made by Bode Technology Group, the Virginia company contracted to work on recovered Sept. 11 bone fragments, and that “new identifications will be forthcoming.”
Besides the new remains found by the utility workers, the lab recently received hundreds of bone fragments discovered on the roof of a nearby building. The building was condemned after the attacks and was about to be torn down when workers found the bone pieces.