Hero detectives recall early days of the morgue at 9/11 as 40% of victims remain unidentified
It’s been 25 years since the Sept.11 attacks, but the city’s Medical Examiner’s Office has not yet faltered on its mission to bring closure to the families who lost their loved ones in the terror attack.There are still 1,099 victims of the terror attack that have yet to be identified — making up roughly 40% of the 2,753 people killed at the World Trade Center.
The painstaking process of identifying the roughly 7,000 human remains — some as small as the tip of a fingernail — that were recovered from Ground Zero today is a far cry from the constant chaos that the heroes worked through in the wake of the tragedy.Multiple detectives who worked at the Morgue in the days after the attacks had previously worked on hundreds of homicide cases, but said they “never saw anything like the destruction” that the terror attacks wrought.“It was constant.Once we finished working on one, another body bag was placed on the table and we went to work.
They gave us an hour for lunch and we would run down to Ground Zero looking for bodies.Then we ran back up and finished our shift,” recalled retired Det.
Lou Savarese, who worked 12-hour shifts at the morgue for 53 consecutive days.“People say never forget.Of course I never will, but I also say never forgive the terrorist who killed thousands of innocent people.
They’re cowards.Most of the bodies that we worked on were crushed under thousands of tons of concrete.”The state of the victims ranged dramatically, with some leaving behind just a shard of bone, while others looked like they were just peacefully sleeping, Savarese said.The detectives spent the earliest days of the recovery working to identify bodies that were recognizable or were carrying some form of identification, like an ID in their wallet or the badge number of a slain first responder.If there was no ID, the detectives would take a DNA sample and place it in a test tube that corresponded with the body bag.“Then we started to get bags just wit...