The Mammoth Book of New CSI, page 28
He assisted the FBI and evidence recovery teams at the crime scene, which was marked off in grids of 20 × 20 yards (20 × 20 m). When they were located, debris and remains were marked, photographed and then collected. Personal effects were then transferred to the FBI.
Dirkmaat’s goal was to get the biological material off site as soon as possible, leaving law enforcement officers to handle the non-biological remains. Most of the plane had disintegrated into jagged metallic nuggets, mangled and melted into irregular shapes, little bigger than children’s marbles.
“It’s always very troubling in the terms of putting a human face on this,” Dirkmaat said. “It’s hard to put into words . . . We feel really badly about what happened. But we have a job to do for the families, and we have to do the best job we can.”
The Boeing 757, still heavily laden with jet fuel, had slammed almost straight down at about 575 mph (925 km/h) into a rolling patch of grassy land that had long ago been strip-mined for coal. The impact spewed a fireball of horrific force across hundreds of acres of towering hemlocks and other trees, setting many ablaze. The fuselage burrowed straight into the earth so forcefully that one of the black boxes was found 25 ft (7.6 m) underground.
There was a range of people on board. Aged twenty to seventy-nine, they came from New York City, Honolulu, Manalapan in New Jersey and Greensboro, North Carolina. They were energetic salespeople, ambitious college students, corporate executives, lawyers, a retired ironworker, a waiter going to his son’s funeral, a four-foot-tall disabled-rights activist, a census worker, a fish and wildlife officer, a retired couple who were volunteer missionaries, a former collegiate judo champion, a retired paratrooper, a weightlifter, a flight attendant who had been a policewoman, a female lawyer who had a brown belt in karate, a 6 ft 5 in. muscular rugby player who was gay and a former college quarterback.
Herded to the back of the plane, they used mobile phones or the on-board phones to call 911 and contact loved ones. Only then did they discover that the hijacking of United Airline’s Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco was not an isolated incident. Four passengers in particular – Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham and Jeremy Glick – would be hailed as heroes because their phone conversations provided the most detailed account of the passengers’ plan for a life-or-death charge for the cockpit after the terrorists had seized control.
Beamer, a thirty-two-year-old account manager for a Silicon Valley software firm, made a lengthy 911 call to Lisa Jefferson, a veteran operator outside Chicago. As the plane lurched and passengers screamed, Beamer, a devout Christian, and his seatmates recited the Lord’s Prayer. Jefferson joined in. More screams were heard while Beamer and others recited the twenty-third psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .”
Then Beamer said: “Are you guys ready? Okay. Let’s roll!”
The cockpit voice recorder that records the last thirty minutes of every flight was recovered at the crash site. Most of the tape is taken up with the howling wind created by a plane travelling fast at low altitude. But the recording also includes the seven-minute death struggle in which muffled voices are heard screaming and cursing in both English and Arabic as the plane plunges towards the earth. The families of the victims were allowed to listen to the tape, something that is not normally made public. The recording opened the possibility that some of the victims were killed before the plane hit the ground. Investigators who recovered remains from the crash site brought possible stab wounds and lacerations to the attention of FBI pathologists. But the FBI said that “the catastrophic nature of the crash and fragmentation” left them unable to draw conclusions.
The crime scene was in a scenic stretch of the Appalachians – 70 miles (113 km) south-east of Pittsburgh and 170 miles (274 km) north-west of Washington, DC. It was settled more than a thousand years ago by the Monongahela, and crisscrossed by trails of the Shawnee, Iroquois and Delaware tribes. Then Europeans – German, British, Dutch and Italian – arrived here to hunt and trap, then to settle. In the late 1700s, a German named Christian Shank built a mill on the Stonycreek River, and a town grew up that took his name. It was supposed to become the hub of commerce, but remained a tiny community of 245 people, who describe it as a place that time forgot, in the middle of nowhere. They farmed and fished and hunted, cut timber, mined coal and made steel. They built many churches where they were taught to help out one another when crops went bad, when fires and floods hit their neighbours, when loved ones were taken away by death.
When Flight 93 hit this isolated spot, it was suddenly overrun by the FBI, the state police, a federal disaster mortuary team, the Red Cross, the National Transportation Safety Board, officials of United Airlines and the news media. Almost instantly, informal church networks and local telephone trees were activated and a cascade of hot casseroles, pots of coffee, cold drinks and clean clothes materialized at the crash site. An estimated 5,000 people, mostly Pennsylvania natives, came from across the country to help. Meanwhile, the deep gash in the earth was being excavated, examined and sifted. The nearest thing to a local victim was the Reverend Larry Hoover, a Lutheran pastor in Somerset County who also ran a family lumberyard. He and his wife Linda owned 8 acres (32,000 m2) of woodland with a secluded cabin that was their weekend retreat and their planned retirement home. Their thirty-four-year-old son Barry lived in a sturdy old stone cottage on the property. The shock wave from Flight 93 crashing just a few hundred yards away spewed debris through the woods with such force that it blew out all the windows and doors, and shook the foundations. Human remains were still being found there months later.
The identification process took five months. Ten victims were identified through dental and fingerprint records. All forty were identified by their DNA and four additional DNA profiles were isolated. These belonged to the terrorists – Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed Al Haznawi, Saeed Al Ghamdi and Ahmed Al Nami.
When the identification process was over, the site was restored and a memorial to those who died was built there. The remains of passengers and crew that were identified were released to the families for burial, entombment or cremation, depending on families’ preferences. Unidentified remains and those yielding no DNA information were interred in the county under the auspices of the coroner. The remains of the hijackers would remain in the custody of the FBI. Death certificates for the forty victims record their deaths as homicides, while the hijackers’ death certificates call their deaths suicides.
Despite the numerous phone calls from the doomed aircraft and the evidence from the crime scene itself, a number of conspiracy theories had grown up around the crash of Flight 93. Sceptics claimed that the plane was hit by a heat-seeking missile from an F-16 jet fighter or an electronic pulse from a mysterious white plane seen in the vicinity by at least six witnesses. It was said to have been flying at 34,000 ft, but later to descend to 5,000 ft to examine the crash site.
It has even been suggested that there were no terrorists on board or that the passengers were drugged. A wilder theory is that the passengers from the other planes that were downed on 9/11 were loaded on to Flight 93 so the government could kill them, or that the passengers colluded with the hijackers to bring the plane down.
There was indeed a jet in the vicinity. It was a Dassault Falcon 20 business jet owned by the VF Corporation of Greensboro, North Carolina, a clothing company that markets Wrangler jeans. The VF plane was flying into Johnstown-Cambria airport, 20 miles (32 km) north of Shanksville. According to David Newell, VF’s director of aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Cleveland Center contacted co-pilot Yates Gladwell when the Falcon was at an altitude “in the neighbourhood of 3,000 to 4,000 ft” – not 34,000 ft.
“They were in a descent already going into Johnstown,” Newell adds. “The FAA asked them to investigate and they did. They got down within 1,500 feet of the ground when they circled. They saw a hole in the ground with smoke coming out of it. They pinpointed the location and then continued on.”
One of Flight 93’s engines was found “at a considerable distance from the crash site,” according to Lyle Szupinka, a state police officer on the scene who was quoted in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. This is interpreted by one conspiracy-theory website to mean that “the main body of the engine . . . was found miles away from the main wreckage site with damage comparable to that which a heat-seeking missile would do to an airliner”.
Experts on the scene reported that it was only a fan from one of the engines that was recovered in a catchment basin, downhill from the crash site. The catchment basin was just over 300 yards (275 m) south of the crash site, which means that the fan landed in the direction the jet was travelling.
“It’s not unusual for an engine to move or tumble across the ground,” said Michael K. Hynes, an airline accident expert. “When you have very high velocities, 500 mph or more, you are talking about 700 to 800 feet per second. For something to hit the ground with that kind of energy, it would only take a few seconds to bounce up and travel 300 yards.”
According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of 13 September 2001: “Residents and workers at businesses outside Shanksville, Somerset County, reported discovering clothing, books, papers and what appeared to be human remains . . . Others reported what appeared to be crash debris floating in Indian Lake, nearly six miles from the immediate crash scene.”
One website says: “On September 10, 2001, a strong cold front pushed through the area, and behind it – winds blew northerly. Since Flight 93 crashed west-southwest of Indian Lake, it was impossible for debris to fly perpendicular to wind direction . . . The FBI lied.”
Another concludes: “Without a doubt, Flight 93 was shot down.”
But Wallace Miller, Somerset County coroner, said that no body parts were found in Indian Lake. Human remains were confined to a 70-acre (0.3 km2) area directly surrounding the crash site. Paper and tiny scraps of sheet metal, however, did land in the lake.
“Very light debris will fly into the air, because of the concussion,” said former National Transportation Safety Board investigator Matthew McCormick. Besides, Indian Lake is less than 1.5 miles (2.4 km) south-east of the impact crate – not 6 miles (10 km) – easily within range of debris blasted skyward by the heat of the explosion from the crash. The wind speed on 11 September 2001 was 9 to 12 mph (14 to 19 km/h), blowing from the north-west – that is, towards Indian Lake.
Flight 93 was not the only plane downed that day. After firefighters doused the flames of American Airlines Flight 77 at the Pentagon and the survivors had been evacuated, the crash site became a crime scene and the gruesome task of crime scene investigation was begun by National Capital Response Squad and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. A chunk of the aircraft’s nose cone and the nose landing gear was found in the service road between rings B and C of the Pentagon. A seat from the cockpit was discovered intact, while the two black boxes were found near the hole punched in the outer wall of the building. The cockpit voice recorder was too badly damaged to retrieve any information, but the flight recorder did yield some useful data.
Part of a driver’s licence with the name “ALHAZMI” on it was found among the rubble. It was thought to belong to Nawaf al-Hazmi, one of the hijackers. Personal effects belonging to the victims – including a watch face, a piece of shirt and a burnt handkerchief – were also found and sent to the Joint Personal Effects Depot at Fort Myer.
All fifty-eight passengers, four flight attendants and both pilots on board, as well as 125 occupants of the Pentagon, had died. Only one of those who perished made it to hospital. The rest were killed at the crash site.
“There were so many bodies, I’d almost step on them,” said Kevin Rimrodt, a Navy photographer surveying the Navy Command Center after the attacks. “So I’d have to really take care to look backwards as I’m backing up in the dark, looking with a flashlight, making sure I’m not stepping on somebody.”
Some bodies were intact. But mostly only pieces of tissue were to be found. All were badly burnt, making identification difficult.
Under the authority of the FBI, remains of the victims at the Pentagon were taken to a temporary morgue in the Pentagon’s north parking lot, where they were photographed, labelled and then refrigerated. The debris was also collected there for more detailed examination and bagging and tagging as evidence. The remains were then transported to Davison Army Airfield at nearby Fort Belvoir, and from there to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, where a large mortuary had been built for use in wartime. FBI agents accompanied the remains during transportation to maintain the integrity of the crime scene evidence. About 250 people, including fifty medical examiners from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) and fifty members of the FBI’s disaster team, went to work at the mortuary to identify the remains. A computerized tracking system assigned numbers to each victim. As most of the victims were military personnel, the family services divisions of each branch of the military collected dental and medical records, and contacted the families of the victims to compile DNA reference material.
The remains were first scanned for the presence of unexploded ordnance or metallic foreign bodies. Then attempts were made to identify the remains from fingerprints, dental records and X-rays. Where possible, full-body radiography was used to identify fractures or other damage prior to death that might have shown up in the medical records. After that an autopsy was performed by one of the twelve forensic pathologists on hand to determine the precise cause and manner of death. Forensic anthropologist Dr William C. Rodriguez tried to determine the race, sex and stature of each victim. Forensic dentistry experts from the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology compared any teeth or jaw parts to dental records. For eight days a full complement of AFIP forensic specialists worked twelve-hour shifts to complete the operation. However, in most cases, identification was problematic as the specimens were usually unrecognizable body parts mixed with debris from the aircraft and the building.
Tissue samples were then sent to an Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) in Rockville, Maryland, for DNA analysis. Teams of forensic scientists, under the direction of Demris Lee, technical leader of the Nuclear DNA Section, began the task of generating DNA profiles of the victims. Their work included not only the Pentagon crash victims, but the victims of the Somerset County crash as well. Every one of the organization’s 102 DNA analysts, sample processors, logistics staff and administrative personnel were involved, collecting, tracking and analysing DNA samples, and gathering and logging DNA reference material to prepare DNA reports. For eighteen days following the terrorist attacks, AFDIL employees worked on twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. By the time the formal identification effort ended on 16 November, they had identified the remains of 184 people who died in the Pentagon or aboard Flight 77, plus the five hijackers who were identified by a process of elimination. Their remains were returned to the FBI. DNA profiles identified two of the hijackers as brothers – Nawaf and Salem al-Hamzi.
More conspiracy theories have grown up around the attack on the Pentagon. Firstly, sceptics draw attention to the 75 ft (23 m) wide entry hole in the building’s exterior wall, visible for twenty minutes until the facade’s collapse, and the 16 ft (5 m) wide hole in Ring C, the middle ring of the Pentagon. These, they claim, are far too small to have been made by a Boeing 757, which is 125 ft (38 m) wide and 155 ft (47 m) long. It must have been made by a smaller plane or, perhaps, even a missile.
However, a forensic reconstruction of the incident, using CSI evidence from the crash site, showed that one wing hit the ground before the plane reached the building and sheared off. The other hit one of the Pentagon’s load-bearing columns and was torn away. Only the fuselage actually penetrated the wall, according to Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University.
“If you expected the entire wing to cut into the building,” said Sozen, “it didn’t happen.”
Sceptics also point out that some of the Pentagon’s windows, even those just above the point of impact were found intact. Again, this is thought to prove that the Pentagon was hit by a smaller plane or a missile. However, the Pentagon is a military establishment, thought to be a prime target for a terrorist attack, and has blast-resistant windows.
The idea that it was not an airliner that hit the Pentagon is refuted by CCTV footage and blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer, the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash, who helped coordinate the emergency response.
“I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building,” said Kilsheimer. “I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box . . . I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts.”
The crime scene investigation at the World Trade Center was even more complicated due to the large number of victims, the large area affected around the crash site and the multiple disasters of the crashing planes and the collapsing buildings. While it was known who was on the planes, there was no manifest of who was in the buildings. They were joined by firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel, some of whom died when the buildings came down. It was not even known how many were dead. On 13 September, the estimate stood at 4,947. This rose to 6,714 by 24 September. Now it is thought that 2,606 people on the ground were killed, along with eighty-seven on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the North Tower, and sixty on board United 175, which hit the South Tower – making 2,753 in all. The investigators were also put under pressure by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who said that he wanted Ground Zero cleared by the time he left office on 31 December.
The attack on the World Trade Center not only produced many more victims than any disaster in modern American history, but the destructive forces unleashed were far worse than any other disaster on American soil. First, there was the explosion of jet fuel, then the extreme heat from the fires. After that there was the crushing force of thousands of tons of steel and concrete falling from a great height. The destruction was so great that the flight recorders of neither plane were found at the crash site.
