Judge Rules for City on Search for September 11 Victim Remains
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The city is not required to re-sift through debris from ground zero in search of bits of human remains, a federal judge, Alvin Hellerstein of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, decided yesterday.
It was up to Judge Hellerstein to decide what would become of the dust and debris created by the felling of the World Trade Center. A small group of relatives of those who died went to court asking for the city to re-sift hundreds of thousands of tons of World Trade Center wreckage and remove it to a space where a cemetery might be built.
The families say recovery workers did not, in the first month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, take the needed steps to find the smallest fragments of bodies amid more than 1.6 million tons of debris. Currently, the material is atop Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, once New York City’s main garbage dump, which the city plans to turn into a nature preserve.
Judge Hellerstein ruled yesterday that the city was not violating any law or constitutional right of the plaintiffs by leaving the material from ground zero at Fresh Kills. In the decision, the judge urges the city to build a memorial at the site and pleads with the families to participate in the planning process.
“No matter the authority or power of this Court, it cannot bring back the loved ones lost, and it cannot bring peace to the plaintiffs or surcease to society’s collective grief around the events of September 11, 2001,” Judge Hellerstein wrote. “Not every wrong can be addressed through the judicial process.”
The city’s corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, said the city approached the recovery effort after the September 11 attacks “with dignity, care, and respect, and as a result, thousands of human remains and personal items were found.”
No trace of about 1,100 people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center have been recovered, the decision states.
“We are not prepared to leave hundreds of human remains of September 11 victims on top of a garbage dump as their final resting place,” a lawyer for the families, Norman Siegel, said.
