Over four months have passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, and while some of the families of the victims have moved on with their lives, many others still have not found any sense of closure. Part of this is because the majority of the victims are still listed as "missing" in Ground Zero, an open graveyard for those lost and not found.
Although some of the casualties of 9/11 may never be recovered, two professors at UB offered their services immediately after the attacks to assist in identifying as many victims as they could.
Last Thursday, the department of oral diagnostics at the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine hosted "September 11: The Human Side of the Tragedy," a seminar based on the experiences of two of its professors who worked to identify victims killed in the World Trade Center attacks.
Professor Emeritus Stuart Fischman and assistant clinical professor Raymond Miller hosted the seminar after Norman Mohl, chair of the oral diagnostics department, insisted the two share their experiences in an open forum.
"I thought it was interesting that two colleagues of ours were involved," Mohl explained. "That's a personal dimension to it, we know them and work with them. And the uniqueness of this tragedy - you just put it all together."
Fischman and Miller both had prior training in forensic dentistry that qualified them to perform the grim work of identifying victims by matching their remains with dental records.
"The initial reports were that there had been 6,000 people who were killed," said Fischman. "The expectation of New York City was that there would literally be thousands of bodies brought in. As it turned out, there were very few remains found."
Fischman worked as a volunteer in Manhattan as a member of the Forensic Dentistry Task Force of the New York State Dental Society one week after the attacks. The task force specializes in identifying remains at the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, the morgue facility where bodies recovered from Ground Zero are sent for identification.
Although few bodies were recovered, thousands of concerned families sent antemortem records to the city. The records contain data on a person prior to death including dental charts, genetic information, descriptions of distinct body features such as tattoos and scars, and personal effects.
Maintaining the seminar's focus on the human, rather than scientific, aspects of performing antemortem work, Fischman described some of his eye-opening moments.
"The first couple of the antemortem records were X-rays, which was fine. Then I opened one where there was the name and photo of the individual. One was a family around a Christmas tree, and the circle was around the father who was killed. Then I opened another file that says to identify a wedding ring that says 'I love you, Joe.'"
While Fischman worked the day shift primarily analyzing antemortem records, Miller worked at night to help identify the postmortem remains.
He was called in to Manhattan the day after Sept. 11 as a member of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), an agency under the federal National Disaster Medical System.
DMORT primarily serves to help identify victims in the event of a mass disaster. Although this was his first time working in such a situation, Miller received training working with DMORT and also as a member of the Air National Guard.
"It's kind of one of those things where you prepare for it, no different than being prepared for handling a medical emergency at a dental office. It's something you need to know how to do, you just hope you never have to do it."
Miller estimated that in the two weeks following Sept. 11 he examined between 125 and 150 remains. The unique circumstances of the disaster made accurate identifications difficult.
"There were times where there were intact bodies. But most of the time, it was people who were burnt or crushed because of the disaster - not necessarily recognizable as human remains to the most extent."
Fischman concluded that the crushing power of the falling buildings was partially responsible for the lack of recovered remains, in addition to the intense heat.
"When the buildings came straight down, the cement and other things in the building pretty much acted like a mortar and pestle and ground people up as it came down. The bodies that were brought in more or less intact were the bodies of firemen who were mostly hit in the periphery of falling debris."
The recovered remains had to be checked against the thousands of antemortem records. A database was maintained using a computer program called Win-ID, previously used in the TWA Flight 800 crash in 1996.
Working in the Medical Examiner's Office required the doctors to perform continuous, long shifts. Miller, who worked from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., describes the situation.
"It was almost like one day blended into the next. You just went through, you did the job, went home, went to bed, got up, ate, went back," he said.
But working in Lower Manhattan in the days following the attacks was the central reason why the two doctors decided to focus on the human dimension of their work. Fischman presented slides of the posters of missing people taped to the walls of Bellevue Hospital and Grand Central Station. Typically, the doctors walked past these sights every day.
Fischman recalled an anecdote of this experience.
"The Salvation Army was feeding us. ... All of a sudden, everything got quiet and all of the policemen standing around came to a salute. An ambulance came and brought out the remains of a fireman. We compared his dental records."
"Weeks later, I went through the firemen exhibit at Grand Central. And this fellow's picture was there. ... The guy was 21 years old and left a wife and child."
Miller remembers working with the police who, all day, had to escort the remains of the dead. Sometimes, he said, the police tried to use their influence to identify victims they personally knew, or acted on behalf of families with whom they were associated.
"They weren't obtrusive or a problem, but they had clearance to get into certain areas and would try to get priority information. There were a lot of personal things - fathers, sons, brothers they knew."
Working quickly was discouraged to prevent serious mistakes. In an extreme example, Miller cited a case where the wrong body was buried in a cemetery because of a faulty medical examination.
The work at the Medical Examiner's Office already had its share of difficulties: antemortem records were incomplete, written in foreign languages or organized using different tooth labeling systems. Occasional miscommunication between the day and night teams resulted in duplication of work.
The sheer number of records produced difficulties. Miller said this partly explains why the number of missing people has fallen in the past few months.
"It was a solid 5,000 missing people even two weeks after [Sept. 11], and then it dropped precipitously. I think some of it was duplication of important records that various family members sent. It was just miscommunication, and everything coming together achieved the normal number."
At the conclusion of Thursday's seminar, Fischman echoed comments he made in the Buffalo Jewish Review about September's tragedy.
"The families and victims of the disaster were not only deprived of their lives, but also of their deaths. They were deprived of closure."
Recent estimates place the number of missing at 2,900. About 800 whole bodies and remains were identified since the end of December.
Miller highlighted the difficulty in deciding when to conclude the search.
"When do they stop? I think it's difficult to say because of the personal nature and the involvement of the people, the local police, firemen, and families pushing to have people found. When they stop will be determined once they make the realization that they've removed and done everything they possibly can."
