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Remains are being shipped in coffins to families
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
On Sept. 11, United Flight 93 shot into a Somerset County hillside at something over 500 mph. In a second, the fury that rose from the jetliner's fuel tanks incinerated most of the 44 people aboard.
That makes that stretch of redeemed strip mine "for all intents and purposes ... their final resting place," county Coroner Wallace Miller said yesterday.
But the traces of humanity that could be found and identified after months of painstaking work are now going home.
At a temporary morgue near Somerset, remains of all but the airliner's four hijackers are being placed into full-size caskets, paired with their belongings and readied for shipment to their survivors. The first remains went out yesterday, 5 1/2 months after the crash; the last of the caskets should be gone in several weeks.
For the families -- a group with whom Miller has kept a running rapport since the days after the crash -- receipt of remains is considered "very, very important," he said.
"Everybody's concerned about remains that they can have a memorial for," said Miller, who never had seen more than two dead at any moment until Flight 93 dropped from the sky.
The process of identifying remains involved some old-fashioned matches of fingerprints and dental records but was done mostly through DNA matches completed by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.
Remains of the hijackers will stay with Miller, possibly for transfer to FBI investigators. Other remains have never been identified, even with DNA.
Miller met with the families on Saturday and explained how the remains would be returned. The meeting was held near Newark, N.J., because that's where Flight 93 departed on Sept. 11, an hour and 24 minutes before it dove into the mountains of eastern Somerset County.
Thirty-six of 40 families came -- 88 people, some driving in, others flying in from as far as Japan and Germany and housed through a $65,000 effort underwritten by the United Way of Allegheny County and planned by the local United Way and its sister agency in Greater Mercer County, N.J.
The benefactors did everything from booking flights to arranging an interpreter for the mother, father and brother of Toshiya Kuge, a 20-year-old Japanese college student who boarded Flight 93 on his way home from touring America.
"The emotions in that room were very powerful," said Susan Hankinson, Somerset County's coordinator for post-Flight 93 affairs. "They found comfort in each other."
It was the first mass gathering of Flight 93 families since they assembled at Seven Springs Mountain Resort in Somerset County in the days after Sept. 11.
Saturday, Miller and others spent a day reviewing everything from the specifics of returning remains to the details of the crash itself.
"I don't think anyone was under illusions," Miller said of the ferocity of the impact. "I don't think anybody was surprised."
Not all questions got answers, though.
FBI representatives refused to divulge contents of the jetliner's cockpit voice recorder, which possibly carries recordings of what officials believe was an attempt by passengers to wrest control of the plane from hijackers.
"A lot of people are looking to that black box for verification," Miller said.
In time, the crash site could become a national memorial, overseen by the National Park Service, Hankinson said. But even after shoulder-to-shoulder searches by 400 volunteers and a probe by a laser-bearing robotic helicopter from Carnegie Mellon University Miller isn't satisfied that all remains have been recovered.
He doesn't intend to relinquish the site, now guarded by county deputies under a $1 million-a-year security grant, until another search, possibly in April. Sometime after that comes the question of what to do with unidentified remains, a dilemma that could be answered with entombment at the crash site, if it is set aside as a memorial.
For now, Miller, who shouldered the role of victims' advocate, is sounding out the victims' families.
Before Saturday's meeting, the National Transportation Safety Board advised that it might be too soon to bring the families together; Miller decided that it wasn't.
"I've talked to the families all along, and I've been a funeral director for 20 years," he said. "I know something about the mechanics of grief. The people cried and they laughed and hugged and shook hands."