Forgive me for the grotesqueness, but I am curious.
On several news reports of the World Trade Center rescue efforts (and in other disasters), I have heard of body parts recovered. Obviously, it is going to be well nigh impossible to identify the person much less match up parts, particularly on this magnitude.
But even on a ‘smaller-scale disaster’ where there is not much left of a person (e.g., an explosion), what happens to the body parts?
After the parts are collected, do the people doing the autopsies even try to match parts? Do they do DNA testing to figure that ‘this arm’ goes with ‘this left foot’?
Do they even do an autopsy on the parts?
What happens to them afterwards if there is no one to claim them? Are they donated to medical schools for research? Cremated? Buried in a mass grave somewhere? Or are they handed out to grieving relatives so at least they will have something to bury and perhaps bring some sort of closure (even if it may be someone else’s Aunt Marie and not our Cousin Irving in the casket)?
A news report I read said that they do indeed bag each individual part for DNA testing. They will be contacting all the families of people missing to either get a strand of hair of the victim (in a comb or brush) or contact a parent for a blood test so they can do a match.
BBC news last night carried a brief interview with a UK forensic scientist who is on standby, along with others, to fly over and help with the identification process as bodies are recovered. He stressed the benefits of DNA testing in identifying bodies too badly damaged to be identified by other means.
It looks as though every effort will be made to identify the victims here. Sadly, these guys expect to be very busy.
I also heard there is a call out for dentists, to aid in identifying bodies by their teeth.
I suspect some work will be done using fingerprints, too. Also, don’t some forensic scientists try to match body parts to other body parts, in order to re-build the corpse for ID?
My understanding is that while they now believe somewhere around 4500 people are missing, they have asked for 11,000 body bags. That would seem to indicate they are intending to bag everything they find.
I think what many of the loved ones fail to understand (at least yet) is that many of these people are just gone. The people in the planes, the people on the floors directly impacted by the planes, the people on the lowest level of the building when the they collapsed . . . many of their bodies will have been incinerated or annihilated totally.
I recently read The Circus Fire, about an event in which some 250 people died, and one of the saddest things about it was that some of the victims’ families clung to hope for years that their loved one could have survived, because no body was ever found. They would not or could not accept that the enormity of the fire meant that some bodies were simply gone.
Carrying it a bit further - what happens to body parts (or fully-intact victims) that are unclaimed by relatives, or whose relatives cannot be found? Say perhaps, someone who has no offspring or living relatives, someone who is living under a different name (for whatever reason), someone whose relatives are in a different country and cannot be located? Are these kept for a limited time?