9/11 Death Investigator: Stop Calling Them "Jumpers"

Michael Smerconish (0:00)

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Ditch the clowns on the left and the jokers on the right and join Michael Smerconish right here in the middle.

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This is The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

Michael Smerconish (1:14)

Thank you all for the many comments that we received pertaining to our 25th anniversary September 11 coverage on Friday. Five and a half hours of material relative to the events of September 11 I was immensely proud of everything that went on on Friday. And so your comments were heartfelt and appreciated. Before we go, before we leave the 25th anniversary of September 11, I read so much material over the weekend, essays, thought pieces and so forth. But there was one that really caught my attention, made me think about an issue that I'd never considered before.

And Barbara Butcher wrote it for the New York Post. It begins this way. I was working for New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner when the unthinkable happened on September 11, 2001

As a death investigator, I would usually go to an apartment or to the streets to investigate a homicide, a suicide or an accidental death. Now, it was my job to work the pile. That is, to recover and catalog the shattered human remains found in the burning, smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. Barbara Butcher is the author of What the Dead Know, covering some of her most interesting cases that was published in 2023 by Simon & Schuster. She's featured in the Netflix series Homicide New York. You can watch her Oxygen New Crime Series, titled The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher. Barbara, thank you so much for being here. Before we talk about your work on September 11, tell everybody a little bit about yourself, your background and how much time you spent with the Chief Medical Examiner.

Barbara Butcher (3:04)

Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here. I started out with the New York City Medical Examiner's Office in 1992 as a death investigator.

My job was, as you read, to investigate deaths of all kinds. In that time, there were disasters. There were plane crashes, train crashes, all manner of terrible deaths, but nothing, nothing could have ever prepared me for the magnitude, the horror and the tragedy of the attacks on 9-11. And working there, working on the pile, recovering human remains, and then supervising that area of the recovery, another of my colleagues' supervised identification. So my team was out there on the pile every day in that smoke, the fire, which burned until December, and all the horrors that they saw out on the pile, it was overwhelming. And some memories I can't ever get out of my mind.

Michael Smerconish (4:19)

Let's also remind people of this. I had a 9-11 widow here in studio with me as we were talking about these events. It was just last Thursday that she was here. And sadly, her husband, one of the 40% for whom there's been nothing in terms of recovery for the victim family members.

Barbara Butcher (4:40)

Yeah. And that's a terrible compounding of the tragedy is that of the 2,753 people who died that day, there were more than 22,000 individual remains. And you can imagine that some of them were so shattered, even vaporized, that nothing we could recover could be identified. Although, as Dr. Hirsch, the chief, said, we will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes until every single person is identified. And yes, to date, there are 40%, some 1,100 people who have never been identified.

And that is tragic.

Michael Smerconish (5:27)

So the meeting, the meeting about which you wrote to the New York Post, I'll set it up for you. Your words. After some months, my boss, Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles Hirsch, called a meeting.