Team Begins Grim Identification Task

The tiny Ventura County coroner’s office, bolstered by a large federal disaster team, has begun the difficult task of identifying 88 victims of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 from body parts and clothing gathered after the crash late Monday.

But officials say it will be months before the identifications are complete, because the crash tore so many people apart and trapped them in the plane at the bottom of the 700-foot-deep Santa Barbara Channel.

Evidence suggests, in fact, that the bodies of most of the 83 passengers and five crew members remain in the sunken MD-83 jetliner, said Ventura County Sheriff Bob Brooks, who is assisting the investigation.

“It’s going to be a very long, hard road,” Brooks said. “They don’t anticipate having a lot of easy identifications. . . . And we don’t expect a recovery of the plane for some time because of the depth.”

Only four bodies--those of an infant, a man and two women--have been recovered in two days of searching. Human remains also have been retrieved floating near Anacapa Island about nine miles off the Ventura County coast.

Forensic experts from Ventura, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties examined the four bodies Wednesday afternoon in a makeshift morgue set up with help from a 17-person disaster team from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“Those [four] are the ones they think they have the potential to identify right away through dental records, clothing or tattoos,” Brooks said.

The morgue is on Wharf 3 at the Port of Hueneme, where recovery boats are unloading aircraft debris and human remains for storage in a large, gray warehouse. Recovery is expected to continue for up to a week, Brooks said.

“All of the remains will probably require DNA analysis,” he said. “Based on prior crashes of a similar nature, that is expected to take weeks or months.”

The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Md., is sending a 20-person team to conduct those genetic-coding tests at the port with the help of its off-site laboratory, the sheriff said. The work would have overwhelmed Ventura County’s small DNA lab, he said.

Los Angeles County sent six investigators and forensic attendants and an anthropologist to help identify the dead. Santa Barbara County sent two deputy coroners.

“It’s for the benefit of the families to expedite this as quickly as possible, so these people can get on with their lives,” L.A. County coroner’s spokesman Scott Carrier said. “We’re here for as long as it takes.”

Ventura County Medical Examiner Ronald O’Halloran has set up a detailed identification process to catalog bodies, body parts and other evidence, officials said. The process has two main elements: the collection of information from the crash site and the assembly of records from victims’ families.

Once the crash evidence is examined, investigators then compare it with photos, X-rays, fingerprints, dental records and the type of clothing and jewelry worn the day of the crash. DNA tests are not done unless absolutely necessary because they are expensive.

DNA analysis was not used routinely in U.S. plane crashes until the 1996 TWA crash in the ocean off New York that killed 230. Because of recent advancements, DNA results are often known in days, not weeks. Still, the process of gathering and comparison takes time.

Dr. Charles Wetli, medical examiner in Suffolk County, N.Y., said identification of all victims in the TWA crash took a full year. Some were identified via DNA tests from bone fragments no larger than a finger. Bone samples had to be sent to the Armed Forces Institute for repeated testing.

“We had a situation where a piece of bone an inch long was lodged in the fuselage, and we figured out who it was,” he said.

DNA tests are done by using blood or tissue samples from unidentified bodies and comparing them with blood drawn from close relatives of flight victims.

“You need both mother and father for as close a genetic match as you can get,” Wetli said.

No matter how quickly the process goes, he said, it often does not move fast enough for the grieving families eager to collect their loved ones and put an end to a horrible chapter.

“It’s always very difficult,” Wetli said. “and the families are very anxious. And the public doesn’t understand why this can’t be done right now.”