To bring the 9/11 victims to rest

Sept. 12, 2011

Because the attack on the Twin Towers was so well documented, criminal justice professionals and others have been able to return time and again to recordings, photographs and other records to reconstruct the incident and scrutinize both their own responses and those of others. This visual record has served to allow agencies to build and refine mass disaster plans, now a training staple for local, state and federal agencies. But prior to 9/11, many of the protocols that now exist were theory – this country had never before dealt with such a massive, multi-faceted terrorist attack.

The day of the attacks, the FBI’s senior scientist, Dr. Bruce Budowle, was attempting to catch an international flight when word came that airplanes all across the country had been grounded. Budowle says the FBI immediately began its investigation into the terrorist incident, and that included analyzing intelligence from a scientific angle.

The identification of recovered remains didn’t begin immediately. Responding agencies were more involved with trying to locate survivors and secure the scenes; but eventually, both Budowle, now with the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, and Dr. Arthur Eisenberg, also of the UNT-CHI, were called in to assist the New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME).

“Our main roles as far as working with New York was to help guide them with our expertise, and what might be the best methods to use (to identify victims), what might be the best ways to interpret results,” says Budowle. He adds that they experimented with new and more advanced methods to obtain better sensitivity and overall results out of the “very challenging samples” encountered in the case.

The National Institute of Justice officially took things a step further: Along with Budowle and Eisenberg, they formed a study committee, the members of which were drawn from various related disciplines, and charged them with analyzing the more than 20,000 fragments recovered in the process. The NIJ then distilled those findings into a massive report. Known as the Kinship and Data Analysis Panel, the report that grew out of that effort targets laboratory managers, but also contains lessons that work for anyone faced with dealing with the logistics and science stemming from mass casualty disasters. (See sidebar for more information on the KADAP).

Making it personal

Eisenberg grew up in New York City. “I’ve been in the World Trade Center dozens of times and you put yourself in (the role) of ‘it could have been me,’” he says. But the really hard part was confronting those who had lost loved ones in the attacks.

“One of the greatest challenges was dealing with the families (of the victims). The OCME was the final authority in making identification, and he had to rely upon the laboratory. In other cases, you might rely upon autopsies and other things, but in this particular case there was a greater reliance on DNA technology. We’ll normally deal with family members on individual cases, but they were dealing with hundreds, if not thousands, of families simultaneously. It was very, very difficult. You’d spend 12 hours in the lab and then hours with the families trying to answer their questions and give them information,” says Eisenberg.

He says providing information to the victims’ relatives during the difficult weeks following the attacks was critical. Families were reaching out to the authorities for answers to questions that sometimes had no answer.

“That was a tremendous burden to the people with the Medical Examiner’s Office. To struggle with a difficult sample, to repeat things as often as the sample would allow, to squeeze out a little more genetic information in order to reach certain thresholds that we thought were appropriate and be confident that it was a true identification – those were difficult and left a lot of emotional scars. Some (staff members) resigned – I don’t know what their turnover was, but that clearly was happening,” he says.

Eisenberg says that members of the KADAP would travel to Washington, D.C., and New York City for meetings, but the ultimate burden of dealing with processing the genetic material and handling the families fell to the OCME’s office. “They were the people who were living with it day in and day out,” Eisenberg says.

Identifying the take-away

Budowle and Eisenberg deal with hundreds of identifications in the normal course of their work, but they say nothing prepared them for the sheer volume of labor engendered by the attacks.

“As they started to move the debris, they sent it over to a landfill on Staten Island where it was filtered, and more and more fragments – many the size of your thumbnail – were found. Another of our colleagues, Dr. Harold Gill-King, a forensic anthropologist, with the DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team), was also brought in,” says Eisenberg.

The scientists say the many lessons learned from dealing with such a massive disaster have helped them both with their research at UNT-CHI and in the development of other initiatives. Among the many programs in which the two scientists participate are DNA-PROKIDS, which is an effort to identify children who have been the victims of human trafficking with the goal of returning them to their biological families, and ongoing efforts to identify human remains. The teams also learned how to more efficiently handle copious samples.

“At the time it was one of the largest applications of DNA technology for a mass disaster human identification event,” Eisenberg says.

Budowle adds that one of the most important lessons they learned evolved from the handling of logistics. “There were so many more players involved. You had the police, the fire department, the federal government, the media, the families – all working on this thing, and we really had to come together,” he says.

Every aspect of the identification process proved valuable in some way – even miscommunications.

“For example, the mayor of New York said we’re looking for reference samples and that parents and children were good, but brothers and sisters are of no value, and that is absolutely not true. They are of extreme value; they share a portion of their DNA with their brothers and sisters,” says Budowle.

Although seemingly a relatively minor thing, miscommunications like the exclusions of siblings from comparison samples can have a big influence on the outcomes of some identifications. Budowle says they also encountered challenges to their own communications skills. Dealing with families required extreme sensitivity to their individual situations. “How do you talk to them, how do you educate them?” He says other challenges involved he handling, triaging, shipping, archiving, labeling and storage of evidence.

“It becomes a tremendous undertaking,” he says.

The legacy continues

Although an entire decade has passed, the job is not yet finished.

“You see stories every now and then of remains from the demise of the World Trade Center being found in the sewer system, even after 10 years, “ says Eisenberg. “The numbers (of victims) change almost on a daily basis.”

Budowle says only about half of the victims were identified. “When the buildings collapsed it had a grinding effect that tore the bodies into small pieces. Because of the fires there it was like a kiln with very high temperatures, so a lot of biological material was destroyed,” he says.

Eisenberg says it’s really unknown as to the exact number of people who were actually in the buildings when they were destroyed.

“There were allegations that there were people in the restaurants, non-U.S. citizens in there working. That was a tremendous problem, just ascertaining how many victims there were. There were fraud (attempts) by people who were claiming their loved ones were in there and were trying to collect insurance,” he says.

The team’s job was to make a reliable identification, rendered even more difficult by simple, unanticipated stumbling blocks.

“In very few cases were there actual biological samples to compare to the remains. We attempted to find reference samples: Families would bring in toothbrushes and razors to try and get an actual DNA sample from the victims,” says Eisenberg. But, he adds, often they would find those samples would contain the DNA of more than one person, as in when someone grabs the wrong toothbrush or the spouse uses the other’s razor.

Researchers found that stored PKU cards – from a test conducted on newborn babies – were a rich source of unadulterated DNA samples.

“We have never done this to that extent before and it has become a great learning tool on how to do things well and in some cases, how not to do things. So, from that, our lab and other labs that do this type of work have really learned and are using it as a stepping stone to try and develop better systems,” Eisenberg says.

“I don’t think there was necessarily a new process (stemming from handling the Twin Towers DNA), but perhaps the enhancement of a process,” Budowle says. He points to better extraction techniques and more efficiency.

“Better markers, getting DNA out of family members – all of those things existed, but being able to handle all those different samples and get DNA out of them was pretty challenging,” says Budowle.

They says that technology now allows DNA to be extracted from much more seriously degraded samples then ever before – even a decade ago.

“But I don’t know if anyone can prepare for that kind of capacity surge,” Eisenberg says.

If anything positive can come out of the events of 9/11, it’s that those who deal with identification issues now have a better blueprint when and if the unthinkable strikes. It’s not a skill set anyone hopes to use, but as the KADAP can attest, it’s far better to have those capabilities than not.

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