Doctor Narrows Definition Of WTC-Related Death

Police officer James Godbee began directing traffic just outside the World Trade Center site two days after September 11, 2001, working hundreds of hours before developing a common cough. He died in 2004 of sarcoidosis, a disease that studies have linked to breathing in toxic dust that hung over the towers' ruins for months. But because he was not at the trade center at the time that the towers collapsed, the city medical examiner has declined to add him to the official September 11 victims' list. The chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, has so far drawn the most narrow definition as he considers requests to reclassify several respiratory deaths as homicides.

"All persons killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and others who died later from complications of injury or exposure directly caused by the collapse of the twin towers on that day are homicide victims," Dr. Hirsch wrote in a letter made public last week that denied a request to call the 44-year-old Godbee a homicide victim. "Mr. Godbee's manner of death will remain 'natural."