Tell Maura I Love Her

Construction workers building the transit hub on the site of the World Trade Center found human remains in an abandoned manhole last Thursday morning, victims of the Muslim atrocity of Sep 11. The manhole covers were paved over during the initial recovery effort to bring in the cranes needed to move the ruins. A hundred bones have been found, from an inch to a foot long. They look like ribs, arms, legs and vertebra. Personal effects were found, including a wallet.

"Oh my God, is that more of Matthew?" said Diane Horning the day after the discovery. Diane's son, Matthew Horning was a database administrator for the Marsh & McLennan insurance company on the 95th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. He was 26. They found parts of his body near the manhole over four years ago. Matthew's family has long ago held a funeral and it is distressing to have remains continuing to show up that may be their son. Says Diane, "But it's been sitting there for over five years."

Matthew had graduated magna cum laude from James Madison University. He loved the Mets and the Jets and animals and played the guitar a little. He loved Star Wars enough to think that he might write his own fantasy novel or comic book someday. He lived in Hoboken, NJ and had worked for Marsh & McLennan for a couple years. Matthew told a coworker at an office Christmas party in 1999 that he had two major goals in life: play the guitar better and find someone to love.

He met Maura Landry the following August at a Mexican restaurant where mutual friends had gathered for dinner. She lived in Hoboken, too. "Hi!" he called down to her at the other end of the table. "We're neighbors." He started coming home with what his family called his "Maura smile." His sister, Dana, said he was getting pretty sappy.

After a year, Matthew was planning to pop the question to Maura. He had asked his Dad how to buy an engagement ring. They planned to go shopping for it the next Wednesday, September 12th. Matthew was hoping for a future with Maura that included children and a big dog. Says Maura, “We didn’t have to live in the biggest house on the street, but the people inside had to be happy.” Maura wanted four children but Matthew talked her down to three. He was hot to walk her down the aisle to the "Star Wars" theme. Said Maura, "We’ll see."

Muslim fanatic Mohammed Atta piloted American Airline's Flight 11, a Boeing 767 jumbo jet, directly into the floors where Marsh & McLennan did business, hitting seven out of eight of them. Matthew survived the initial impact and the intense fire that followed. He made a couple cell phone calls to his family. He asked his father to tell Maura he loved her. He text-messaged a co-worker outside the building: "Tell Maura I love her." He kept communicating right up until the end. His last text message said simply, "Scared."

His father watched the North Tower collapse from his office window. Kurt says of his son, "Funny, handsome, millions of friends. We had so many people who came to tell us he was their best friend, and I thought you could only have one. I still can't believe it happened."

Of the 2749 people who are believed to have perished in the World Trade Center, remains of 1599 have been found. Three hundred intact bodies were found, of which only a dozen were identifiable by sight. The rest were found in pieces, over 20,000 individual body parts in total. That's an average of fifteen pieces per victim. A single tooth was all that was found for one person. One man was broken into two hundred pieces.

For 1150 of the victims, there are no identifiable remains at all. The three billion tons of debris acted like a giant mortar and pestle which ground the bodies to bits. Much of the remains were burned to ash and mixed with pulverized concrete and building materials. Unrecognizeable.

The first forensic teams from the FBI and New York Police sifting through remains at Ground Zero found a few of Matthew's personal effects and three small fragments of his body. They were returned to his family. That's what they buried.

The remaining rubble from the World Trade Center was hauled by the truckload to the Fresh Kills dump on Staten Island, where New York City had taken its trash for a century. The forensic teams sifted through it again for human remains. That's when Matthew's company security badge, which he hung around his neck, was found.

The forensic teams sifted through the debris again. A year after the badge was returned to them, Matthew's wallet was found and returned. It contained his company ID, a subway fare card, five scorched twenties, and a ticket stub from a baseball game. His Mom, Diane, says, "It just makes me shake when I open it. Because I know he touched his Blockbuster card ..."

Sifting through the two million tons of debris trucked to Fresh Kills culled out the identifiable remains larger than one-quarter inch. Of the remains found, 53% of them have been identified, mostly through DNA analysis. However, the medical examiner's office can not identify 9328 remains. No good DNA could be extracted from them because they are too scorched, soaked or decomposed. Work has stopped on them while they are stored in the hope that future technology will reveal their identity.

The future came faster than anyone expected. A Virginia company developed new methods of DNA identification that may identify more of the remains. Technical progress does not translate into emotional progress as it is terribly painful to have the remains dribble in over years. Kurt Horning says, "It's a horrible way to have your loved one returned to you, bit by bit by bit. We'll never say no to the medical examiner, but you think you're finished getting calls at dinner time. Now all the doors are open again. What was returned was so small — not even one-half of 1 percent of what my son was. It's just such an unusual and unnatural situation. This could go on forever as science catches up with technology."

Emotions are also churned up by the discovery of remains in new places. Workers demolishing the Deutsche Bank building, damaged in the Sep 11 attack, found 760 bone fragments evidently tossed there from the World Trade Center. There is another neighboring building where cleanup work is due to begin which may also yield fresh remains.

The 1.2 million tons of remaining debris from the World Trade Center covers 48 acres of Fresh Kills to a depth of ten to twenty feet, lying on an eighteen inch bed of dirt that separates it from the century's worth of city trash beneath. The debris that was screened for human remains, much of it ashes, was buried on Hills One and Nine. There is a strong smell of methane from rotting garbage at the site. The city plans to eventually make the site into a Ground Zero memorial. Presently, only family members may visit with an escort by the Sanitation Department.

Diane Horning visits the site and does not like what she sees: "I don't go because it gives me any sense of connection or peace. I feel his presence, but in an unsettled way, that in essence I'm being asked not to leave him there." Diane and Kurt believe that their son is buried there among tons of crushed concrete, sheetrock, and glass with thousands of other victims. Says Diane, "The dead are not here at Ground Zero, though for many of us their spirits are still here. Their corporal bodies are in a garbage dump." Diane calls it a "national shame."

So Diane Horning, retired school teacher, co-founded "WTC Families for a Proper Burial." They don't want the remains of their families buried in a dump. They demand the city sift through the ashes again to retrieve the bits of their loved ones they fear still remain there. Diane argues, "This is Matt's ID badge from Marsh, and it was found at Fresh Kills."

Maura is outraged, too. In a letter to the New York Times, she wrote, "While I am deeply grateful to the men and women who worked diligently in the Fresh Kills landfill, I cannot help but be horrified that minuscule particles of human flesh and bone from the victims were left among common household trash when the recovery operation was complete in July 2002. I am glad that items were saved to document the horror of that terrible morning for future generations. But as the fiancée of Matthew Horning, who was killed on Sept. 11, I do not find much comfort in those relics being saved when his ashen remains have been treated like trash."

New York City doesn't want to do it. The city says the 500,000 tons of ashes have been sifted three times already and that moving them would cost $450 million. The Hornings dispute that, noting that the initial sortings cost $67 million. They think the federal government should pick up the tab.

Kurt made the argument during the Republican Party convention in New York City in 2003. He made his protest at the World Trade Center site, arguing that the money spent on the Republican "coronation" could have been spent on moving the ashes out of Fresh Kills.

Kurt has taken it further than that, falling in with the Truther movement that promotes the theory that the US government was complicit in the Sep 11 attacks which killed his son. He has signed a "911 Truth Statement" from the 911Truth.org that claims that half of New York City thinks the government knew of the attack and sat on its hands. They want a Congressional investigation to get to the "truth."

It's crazed nonsense supported by lefties who want to throw tar on the Bush administration, people like Ralph Nader, former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, actor Ed Asner, Medea Benjamin & Jodie Evans of Code Pink. Most of these conspiracy theories are neatly answered in the State Department's Misinformation website. Nevertheless, they have filed a criminal complaint with the New York State Attorney General that charges that "there is ample evidence and probable cause to believe that many grave and still unresolved crimes were committed by US officials prior to, during and after the events of 9/11."

And so Sep 11, which began in madness, spawns more madness.