­- Knight Ridder Newspapers

NEW YORK – The end of the effort to identify World Trade Center victims will bring a sad new surge of funerals and burials, as families claim the remains of 419 identified people from the city medical examiner’s office.

“I want to go through it once. I want my husband’s remains to rest in peace,” said Marilyn Reich, 57, of Forest Hills, in Queens, N.Y. “I wouldn’t have wanted to bury (a coffin) and then have to reopen it.”

The medical examiner identified 31 fragments from the body of her husband, Howard. But her rabbi said she could wait to bury him until they were sure no more remains would be matched to him.

“I just wanted them to tell me that they’re finished, that it’s over,” said Reich, who is planning a traditional Jewish burial.

Now that scientific efforts to identify remains have been exhausted, hundreds of other families also are preparing to bury or cremate their loved ones’ remains.

“They’re calling and saying they’re ready to make arrangements,” said Kevin Mack, general manager of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the upper East Side. “I expect that more families will be getting in touch with us.”

For many families the end of the identification process brings no finality – just fresh pain. Advanced DNA techniques failed to identify 1,161 of the 2,749 killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Almost 3-1/2 years later, you still hoped that something would happen,” said Jill Abbott, daughter of victim Michael San Phillip, 55, of Ridgewood, N.J. “I guess I always thought that there would be something to bury, but we don’t (have anything). We never will. That door is closed now.”

It also is stirring new anger among those who want World Trade Center debris dug up from the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island and returned to Ground Zero, saying that ash and dust is all that remains of their loved ones.

“My son is in a garbage dump. I can’t live with that,” said Rosemarie Foti of the lower East Side of New York City, whose firefighter son, Robert Foti, was never found. “I want him buried where he died and where he was cremated.”

The 9,720 unidentified remains, too decayed for DNA testing, will be preserved and entombed in the permanent Ground Zero memorial, so they can be retrieved if, someday, new technology offers the possibility of identification.

“We are doing everything we possibly can to maintain the remains in an appropriate way, both from a respect point of view but also from a science point of view,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “When down the road technology gets better, we will go back and try to do the next level of technology.”

But even families that recovered some fragments of their loved ones were left wishing they could find more.

“Many of my sister’s remains were found, but where is the rest of her?” asked Alyson Low, whose sister Sara Elizabeth Low was a flight attendant on one of the doomed planes. “Hopefully they will be able to start up again someday.”

Yet Louisanne Diehl, 53, of Brick, N.J., warns those families to be careful what they wish for, because her family was devastated when her husband Michael’s right hand was identified in November 2001.

“I wish they wouldn’t have found anything of him; I really do,” she said yesterday. “You’d like to think of your loved one whole, not in pieces.”



(c) 2005, New York Daily News.

Visit the Daily News online at http://www.nydailynews.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-02-25-05 0618EST



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