PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The process of identifying all the 9/11 victims continues, even today. Twenty years have passed, and Ground Zero remains the largest crime scene in American history.
Just this week, two more people were identified through DNA testing.
The effort started just a day after the attacks. Investigators scoured through the mountain of evidence.
The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office put out a call to dentists to help identify remains found at Ground Zero. Atlantic County dentist Dr. Bridget McLaughlin was one of them.
“The thing that bothered me out of everything were all of the pictures that people put up, all the families who were looking for people,” she recalled.
McLaughlin said they worked in groups of three to match dental records, brought in by the families, with X-rays taken at the morgue. Sometimes, they only had a tooth to work with.
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“Teeth are numbered from one to 32, and they have five surfaces,” she explained. “We all had to agree that it was a certain tooth, agree the filling looked like it looked like or whatever we were seeing anatomically on the X-ray. Everything had to be agreed upon.”
Their goal: Give the families answers as soon as possible.
“Just knowing that something was done; helps a family, a spouse or loved one … that people found some comfort.”
McLaughlin spent three weeks at Ground Zero, alongside many other forensic and recovery teams, like John Taggart. The veteran crime scene officer in Philadelphia spent just about the same amount of time in New York City retrieving remains.
“We weren’t there to find anybody alive — I knew that right away,” he thought. “You just knew there was nobody alive. … I just remember looking at everyone else and said, ‘We’re just here to scoop up body parts.’ ”
The team climbed adjacent buildings and combed through Ground Zero, hoping to collect as much as they could — along the way, they dodged falling debris and inhaled smoke for up to 16 hours a day.
Taggart said they were also tasked with finding and marking plane parts.
“I had never seen a plane part before,” he admitted, “but you knew what it was once you saw it.”
The experience helped him prepare for other events he encountered with the Philadelphia Police Department, like the Market Street collapse in 2013.
“Nothing is ever going to be, probably in my career, that crazy, where it was just utter chaos,” he said.
Listen to McLaughlin and Taggart’s full stories on the special edition of Gone Cold, a KYW Newsradio original podcast.