Retired Det. Lou Savarese still cannot forgive the men who carried out the September 11 attacks.
Savarese, who spent 53 straight days working 12-hour shifts at the city morgue after the terror attacks, spoke out as the 25th anniversary approaches and the Medical Examiner’s Office continues its mission to identify victims. “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,” he said.
The destruction surpassed anything the veteran detectives had encountered in hundreds of homicide cases. “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,” Savarese recalled.
The condition of victims varied dramatically. Some left behind only shards of bone, while others appeared almost peaceful, as if sleeping. In the earliest days, detectives focused on bodies that were recognizable or carried identification — an ID in a wallet, the badge number of a fallen first responder. When no identification existed, they extracted DNA samples and placed them in test tubes corresponding to each body bag.
Retired homicide Det. Terry Murnane described how the nature of the recovery shifted over time. “Then we started to get bags just with body parts. Sometimes you would get an arm, sometimes a leg or a hand. Whatever part we got, we treated it as if it was a full body,” he said.
The missing person flyers plastered across the city haunted Murnane after he witnessed the horrors inside the morgue. “It bothered me because I knew a lot of those people would never be identified,” he said. “I knew this was an important job that has to be done. A lot of families were looking for answers.”
The psychological toll deepened when detectives processed the bodies of fellow officers they had once stood beside. Retired Port Authority Lt. John Ryan was working when the remains of Capt. Kathy Mazza, Chief James Romito and four other heroes were pulled from the North Tower rubble. The six had been carrying a woman in an evacuation chair when the tower collapsed.
“I knew every one of those six office officers. That was a rough day,” Ryan said. “As we escorted them into the morgue, I thought about each of them — When they were alive and how good they were as cops and, more importantly, as great people. But I had to get back to the site because more bodies needed to be found,” he continued. Detectives treated every body as a homicide victim, he added. “Identifying those bodies was a very important job and still is today.”
Charles G Wolf, who became a prominent advocate for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, noted that promises made by then-Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles S. Hirsch continue to be honored. “A lot of people retired and they have brand new employees who just finished college working in there — and they’re still working,” Wolf said.
Of the 2,753 people killed at the World Trade Center, 1,099 victims remain unidentified — roughly 40% of the total. The Medical Examiner’s Office continues analyzing approximately 7,000 recovered human remains, some as small as a fingernail tip. Four individuals have been identified since last year, including one woman whose DNA was matched through forensic investigative genetic genealogy, a breakthrough technique.
Wolf’s wife Katherine was on the 97th floor of the North Tower and he does not expect her remains to be identified. He has found his own closure in believing she died on impact rather than suffering through the fire and collapse, and has dedicated his life to helping other families find solace. “There are two things that are most important when a person dies, whether it’s normally and peacefully or as Katherine did and everybody else did on 9/11: the money and the body,” he said.
The Medical Examiner’s Office has pledged to continue its identification work indefinitely.