For Families, 9/11 Pain Never Ends

Last weekend, a woman stepped into her elevator and opened an express-mail envelope from the city of New York. What she read made her knees buckle, and she collapsed to the floor.

Hers was among 24 families to receive news that the city had a recording of a loved one -- in the woman’s case, her husband -- talking on the phone to a 911 operator from the smoke-filled top floors of the World Trade Center towers. It was up to her, the letter explained, to decide whether she wanted a copy.

This week has ripped open old scars in New York. William Doyle, who advocates for relatives of Sept. 11 victims, got an angry call from the woman, who asked not to be publicly identified. It was the first of many.

“When is it going to end?” said Doyle, 59, a retired stockbroker from Staten Island whose son, Joseph, was killed in the attacks. “Why do this now? Why not let these people be on the mend?”

Sept. 11 filled local headlines all week. On Monday, Zacarias Moussaoui testified that he was supposed to have crashed a fifth plane that day into the White House. On Tuesday, the medical examiner’s office here announced that workers had found four more body parts in a vacant skyscraper beside the twin towers.

And today, the city will publicly release more than nine hours of recordings from distress calls made to 911 operators and dispatchers. The release is the culmination of four years of legal wrangling between the New York Times -- joined by relatives of nine victims -- and the city, which said the recordings were of an “intensely emotional and private nature.”

The newspaper, which requested the recordings under the state’s Freedom of Information Law, maintains that they will reveal how emergency services functioned in the moments after the two planes hit.

The New York Court of Appeals ruled in March 2005 that the city had to release transcripts containing the 911 operators’ and dispatchers’ words, but that the victims’ words could be redacted.

“It is normal to be appalled if intimate moments in the life of one’s deceased child, wife, husband or other close relative become publicly known, and an object of idle curiosity or a source of titillation,” read the majority decision, written by Judge Robert S. Smith. City attorneys since have been working to identify voices on the recordings and to notify the victims’ next-of-kin, as the court ruling dictated.

Out of 103 recorded calls, they succeeded in identifying 28 people, 27 of whom died. Late last week, the city delivered letters to the 24 families that researchers could locate, informing them that they could pick up unedited recordings of their loved one’s exchanges with 911 staff members.

That presented families with a wrenching decision.

Joe Hanley, whose 34-year-old son got trapped in Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the north tower, was afraid he would hear chaos or panic on the recording. On Wednesday, with much trepidation, he and his wife played the CD.

“I thought I owed it to him,” Hanley said.

What they heard was the calm, polite voice of their son, Chris, who told two operators that he was stuck on the 106th floor with about 100 people.

He did not sound afraid. After listening, Hanley said, he and his wife, Marie, felt comforted by “how well he behaved under all that stress.” On Wednesday, the Hanleys released the recording to the New York Times.

“He sounded like someone I could be proud of,” he said.

The most compelling part of the recording, he said, were Chris’ final words to the fire dispatcher: “Please hurry.”

“That’s nice,” Hanley said. “That he said ‘please.’ ”

So far, only four or five families have picked up the recordings, which vary from the “very, very emotional and painful” to “factually oriented,” said Kate O’Brien Ahlert, a spokeswoman for the city’s law department. Whether they listen to them, she said, is “a very individual decision.”

“We hope families will weigh what makes sense for them,” she said. “We hope [the recordings] in some cases might bring families closure.”

The Hanleys are the only family to have released a recording.

“Almost every family would prefer to think that their husband, wife, daughter died instantly -- but that’s not the fact,” Doyle said. That realization dawned, he said, “when they opened that FedEx.”

However painful the 911 recordings may be, they contain “crucial information of a historical nature,” said Norman Siegel, an attorney who represented nine victims’ families that joined in the New York Times lawsuit. Siegel said his clients sued “on the assumption that the tapes will reveal how chaotic the situation was and how unprepared the [Mayor Rudolph W.] Giuliani administration was.”

“I think you’re going to hear operators saying: ‘Go to the roof’ even though the roof was locked. Some operators are going to say: ‘Stay where you are, we’re coming to get you,’ and some are going to say: ‘Get out as soon as you can,’ ” he said.

Monica Gabrielle, one of Siegel’s clients, said the city’s delay in releasing the 911 recordings had made their effect far more painful.

Immediately after the attack, “we were in the oven and on the floor looking for any piece of information,” said Gabrielle, whose husband, Richard, died in the attack.

“It was in the midst of all the other horror. Now it’s four years later, people [may receive a recording] and put it in a little box.”

For some relatives, the 911 recordings hold promise. Cindy McGinty said she hoped the tapes would help her understand what happened on the 99th floor, where her husband, Mike, was trapped.

“Your mind has made the story so much worse than what it probably is,” said McGinty, who lives with her sons in Foxboro, Mass. “Once you hear it, it hurts you, and then it’ll never hurt you that badly again.”