Barbara Butcher built her career confronting death at close range.
Over 23 years with New York City’s Medical Examiner’s Office, she worked on more than 5,500 death investigations, nearly 700 of them homicides, and stepped through the doors of crime scenes most people could scarcely imagine.
Yet nothing in all those years could have readied her for the scale of ruin and human loss waiting at Ground Zero.
The scenes she encountered after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the deadliest in U.S. history, remain with her nearly a quarter of a century later.
As part of the massive recovery operation, the veteran death investigator was assigned to search rooftops around the collapsed World Trade Center towers, gathering fragments of bone scattered by the force of the destruction.
Those small remains were sent through DNA testing again and again as Butcher helped guide the painstaking mission to restore names to the victims of 9/11.
Even with years of forensic work and advances in identification technology, the most painful truth endures: some grieving families still have no remains of their loved ones to lay to rest.
Of the nearly 3,000 people killed that day, more than 1,000 have still not been identified from recovered remains, and some may never be.
‘So many of the things I saw haunted me,’ Butcher told Our News Outlet.
‘I had never seen that much room, that much destruction, and I had never thought that there would be thousands of people trapped beneath, obliterated, killed. It was inconceivable to me.’
Nearly 3,000 people were killed when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the Twin Towers and one into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001
Barbara Butcher spent 25 years working at the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office, including as a death investigator at Ground Zero after the September 11 terrorist attacks
The Twin Towers were struck by two airliners on September 11, 2001, and subsequently collapsed during the deadliest terrorist attack in US history.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed when Islamic terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the Twin Towers and one into the Pentagon.
Passengers and crew aboard the fourth, Flight 93, fought back against the hijackers before the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
Butcher was in New Jersey when the attacks occurred, and she fought to get into the city and help her colleagues during the grueling recovery process.
‘That was enormously difficult, and what my colleagues did- clambering across that pile to find remains- was life-altering for them psychologically, and of course, there are the health issues,’ she said.
Butcher explained that during that time she was promoted to Deputy Director of the medical examiner’s office and was in charge of the identification process.
‘For every single remains we brought back, they had to be tagged, examined by medical examiners and forensic anthropologists, and each remains was given a unique code,’ she said.
‘That identification process was overwhelming, and it was miraculous.’
She said that investigators sent families questionnaires with strange questions such as how long a loved one’s toe was.
‘Anything that we could get that might possibly identify a person,’ Butcher added.
Of the 2,753 people who were killed in the Twin Towers, Butcher said that only 60 percent have had their remains identified.
Of the 2,753 people who were killed in the Twin Towers, Butcher said that only 60 percent have had their remains identified
‘When I say remains, I’m not talking about whole bodies or anything that size; I’m talking about the fact that we are taking the tiniest bone fragments found on top of the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and doing DNA testing over and over,’ she said.
‘Each time DNA becomes more sophisticated and better able to extract a profile, they retest the remains.
‘However, that leaves approximately 1,100 people unidentified. 40 percent of those who died there were never identified.
‘Their families have nothing to bury, and that, to me, is absolutely heartbreaking.’
Butcher noted that all of the deaths from the attacks are homicides, including those captured in horrific images ‘jumping’ out of the burning building.
‘The terrorists murdered them,’ she said.
