The Mammoth Book of New CSI by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780335346
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

9/11

ON 9 SEPTEMBER 2001, two planes full of passengers crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, causing them to collapse. A third passenger plane ploughed into the Pentagon in Virginia; a fourth – possibly destined to crash into the White House or Capitol Building – came down in a field in Stonycreek Township, near Shanksville, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. This presented investigators with three massive crime scenes. Each presented its own difficulties.

In Pennsylvania a makeshift morgue was set up at the National Guard Armory at the Somerset County Airport by D-MORT, the Disaster-Mortuary Operation Response Team. The team is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ national disaster medical system set up under the 1996 federal Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act. Heading the team at Stonycreek was forensic anthropologist Paul Sledzik, the curator at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, who has worked on numerous murder cases.

Some seventy-five people went to work, including X-ray technicians, anthropologists, forensic pathologists, dentists and experts on DNA analysis, to assist Somerset County coroner Wallace Miller in the identification of the thirty-three passengers and seven crew members. The D-MORT workers’ job was to attempt to document every piece of tissue, no matter how small. By walking or crawling over the crash site and by sifting dirt through mesh screens, D-MORT workers recovered even tiny samples that, despite their size, would be analysed and identified. Afterwards, the remains were transferred to the Armed Forces Laboratory at Dover, Delaware, for further tests.

Miller had asked everyone involved, particularly those working in the evidence recovery and search efforts at the crash site, to consider the dignity of the victims and the feelings of their families.

“We give the site the dignity and respect it commands,” said Miller. “These people are loved ones of family members . . . We respect that and embrace it.”

Miller was among the very first to arrive after the 10.06 crash on the sunny morning of 11 September. He was surprised at the small size of the smoking crater.

It looked, he said, “like someone took a scrap truck, dug a ten-foot ditch and dumped all this trash into it”.

As coroner, Miller had only handled two homicides in his twenty-year career – a domestic murder-suicide and the case of a woman who killed her husband after he refused to take her rattlesnake hunting.

After about twenty minutes, he said, he stopped being a coroner because there were no bodies at the scene.

“It became like a giant funeral service,” he said. He found himself honoured and humbled to preside over what has become essentially an immense cemetery stretching far into the scenic wooded mountain ridge that he considers to be the final resting place of forty national heroes.

When the FBI arrived, the crash site became an FBI crime scene and agents clambered over it clad in white suits to protect them from jet fuel and possible biological hazards posed by human remains.

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