To ease overcrowding inside the morgue, canopies have been set up in the parking lot beside the entrance. Beneath them, scores of exhausted workers, clad in blue paper aprons, face masks and paper bonnets unload body bags from the trucks, placing them on stretchers for inspection. But trucks from the site have arrived at a slow trickle throughout the week. Finding bodies in the mountains of tangled rubble has proved difficult. Today, the city officially listed 4,700 people as missing; 184 casualties have been officially counted.
Medical examiners and morgue workers are making every effort to speed the process of matching remains with descriptions of missing people. “If there’s jewelry or personal items, you separate it from the body. If there’s a hand, you take finger prints,” says New York Police Detective Barry Gorelick. Clothing, ID cards and other items are being put into numbered security envelopes to be given to victim’s families after the bodies are identified. Medical examiners are focusing first on identifying victims through items found with remains, but soon the New York forensics lab will initiate a massive round of DNA testing. Family members have been asked to fill out forms identifying relatives who can provide DNA samples to be matched with tissue samples taken from remains. Earlier in the week, volunteers, including NYU medical students, attempted to match photographs of the missing with bodies. The effort proved futile.
The job of identifying victims is complicated by the fact that some bodies arriving at the morgue are burned beyond recognition. And the vast majority of body bags contain only fragments. “It’s nothing more than an arm here, a leg there,” said one shaken police officer helping to unload trucks Thursday.
The number of fragments also makes it nearly impossible for medical examiners to know how many bodies have come through morgue, the only one currently operating in the city. Medical examiners say the number of bodies that have passed through is probably well above the official 184 count. That number reflects whole bodies. In the end, morgue workers say, an accurate body count may be impossible, as some bodies were probably so badly burned they never made it out of the rubble, and others may have been picked up by trucks clearing away rubble at the wreck scene.
The grim task is clearly taking a toll on workers. “We’ve got tractor-trailer loads of body bags here,” said NYPD Sgt. David McDonald, who was helping to unload trucks Thursday. “We’re in a combat zone now. This is just too much.”
Salvation Army Capt. David B. Davis, running a canteen truck for morgue workers taking breaks noted “the facial expressions I’m seeing say it’s been rough. There’s sadness, some disgust, some nausea. You can see the exhaustion in the faces. There are a lot of heads shaking.” One worker glanced at a NEWSWEEK reporter and said only “Your job is easy.”
Scattered rain and a brief bomb scare made the gruesome job even tougher on Friday. The morgue, located between two major city hospitals, Bellevue and NYU Medical Center, was evacuated for a short period because of a bomb threat. The threat proved false, adding to the growing tally of phony scares spreading new tremors of panic through a weary city over the past several days.
Family members of victims, desperate to be reunited with loved ones under any circumstances, gathered at police barricades surrounding the morgue, flashing photos at morgue workers and police. Families had been instructed to bring dental records and photos of distinguishing features to a bereavement center, but many simply could not stand the pain of waiting. Marco Yurisak was searching for his sister, 40-year-old Rosemarie Carlson, a mother of six. He spoke of a slight scar on her right hand and the silver and topaz necklace and ring set she was wearing Tuesday morning as she left for work on the 79th floor of 1 World Trade Center. The morgue was his final stop, after visiting every single hospital in New York City.
