Relatives of September 11 Victims Sue City To Search for Remains

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The New York Sun

Relatives of September 11 victims whose bodies were never recovered are suing the city to try to force it to sift through 414,000 tons of World Trade Center debris they say was never properly searched.

In a federal court filing in Manhattan yesterday, a group of 17 relatives called on the city yesterday to unearth and comb through the wreckage in a renewed search for body parts.

The families claim that recoverable remains likely exist amid the trade center debris at Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. Those remains could be identified and returned to families, the lawyer for the families, Norman Siegel, said in an interview.

Families of 1,151 victims from the attack on the World Trade Center never received identifiable remains, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office said. For relatives of those victims, Fresh Kills landfill is the closest thing to a grave that they have to visit. The city plans to build an earthen memorial to the twin towers there.

Several families have been involved in litigation since last August to force the city to remove from the landfill the dust, ashes, and debris specks that had been separated from larger wreckage.

Yesterday’s complaint alleges that about a quarter of the total debris removed from ground zero was not sifted on conveyor belts and through screens as it should have been. Instead, according to the lawsuit, workers used only shovels and rakes to comb through the shipments of ground zero wreckage that arrived at Fresh Kills in the first weeks after the attacks.

Beginning in mid-October private contractors developed a more refined method for combing through the debris. But the first debris, the lawsuit alleges, was never put through that process. Instead, the families claim it was bulldozed “over the side of the hill to make room for additional loads.”

“At a minimum hundreds of human body parts” were bulldozed into Fresh Kills, according to the legal complaint, which claims “the sifted and disposed of debris was suddenly subjected to foraging by droves of seagulls attracted by the human body parts contained in it.”

“The recovery effort at Fresh Kills was an extraordinary one,” the lawyer for the city handling the case, Rachel Relkin, said in a statement. “The City, with the assistance and guidance of various federal and state agencies, approached the difficult task at hand with care, dignity and respect for those lost on September 11. Because the matter is now in litigation it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.”

Mr. Siegel pointed to the saga of the Deutschebank building near ground zero, where 680 human fragments, many tiny, were discovered this April by construction workers preparing the building for demolition.

“If they were wrong on that, then it is very possible they’re wrong with Fresh Kills,” Mr. Siegel said.

Plaintiff Sally Regenhard, who lost her son, Christian Regenhard, a firefighter, in the attacks, accused the city of prioritizing, quickly clearing ground zero of debris over searching for remains.

“They called it ‘a clean up,’ which gives an indication of what the focus was,” Ms. Regenhard said. “It was not done right. This was a search for the remains of nearly 3,000 people.”

The families, organized under the group World Trade Center Families for Proper Burial, originally wanted to return the debris known as “fines” to ground zero. One plaintiff, Diane Horning, said many families are now willing to consider “any location that is not a garbage dump.”

Ms. Horning, who lost her son Matthew in the attacks, said that before visiting Fresh Kills she has to write for permission to the Department of Sanitation. “It’s upsetting to know that’s who is in charge of our dead,” she said.


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