Despite what you may have heard, it was 9/11 family members who conceived the idea to bring the unidentified and unclaimed remains back to a repository and viewing room at sacred bedrock at Ground Zero.
Multiple mailings from both the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the Coalition of 9/11 Families (an umbrella group of seven major family advocacy groups) solicited input from thousands of 9/11 family members, who responded with overwhelming approval. Word was also spread through emails, public meetings and news stories. Showing their passion for the idea, the coalition threatened to veto the selected memorial design unless it included a repository in the area encased by the slurry wall.
The government and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation delivered on their promise. When the museum opened to family members May 15, the repository and private reflection room were everything we had asked for. They are hidden from museum visitors, protected by double steel doors and staffed by officials from the city chief medical examiner’s office, and every family member must show proper identification before being allowed to enter. It all could not have been done in a more respectful manner.
But since 2010, a small group that calls itself 9/11 Parents & Families of Firefighters and WTC Victims has falsely insisted that 9/11 family members were not consulted on the housing of the remains, and that the city and museum forced this plan on us. This group, which lists just seven families on an associated website, also falsely insists the museum is using the remains as some kind of exhibit among the other artifacts and displays.
One of the group’s leading members, Sally Regenhard, who led the way for safer buildings in the first years after the attack, was formerly an advocate for the very repository plan she’s now fighting against, and — contrary to her group’s suggestions that the plan was rammed through without discussion — was well-informed about it as a member of the 29-person Families Advisory Council to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. With the museum’s opening, the group’s protests have been gathering media attention. Many 9/11 family members are now upset at the prospect that these claims will cause their loved ones’ remains to be moved once again — and this time needlessly.
They also fear they will lose their chance for identification of their loved ones as DNA identification technology advances in the future, the reason for housing them in a climate-controlled repository instead of a mausoleum.
The turmoil is unconscionable. That this group didn’t get what it wanted — for the remains to be housed aboveground — is no excuse for its members to cause renewed grief, emotional trauma and angst among the more than 1,000 family members who never received any of their loved ones’ remains, which may or may not be among those housed inside the museum. The mere possibility of the remains being moved again is causing fear and an emotional toll that can undo years of healing and psychotherapy. Sept. 11, 2001, the most publicized mass killing in world history, is not easy to get beyond.
How do I know the facts surrounding the repository plans? I was there. I was on the Families Advisory Council. I was at the redesign meetings in 2006, when family members asked that the repository be placed — as it finally was — in between the two footprints, so as not to privilege one over the other. Minutes of council meetings going back to 2002, and emails in 2005 from two successive Lower Manhattan Development Corp. presidents, affirm that the pledge to house the remains in the bedrock — publicly made and widely endorsed by the 9/11 families — was kept.
When everything was said and done, New York promised to provide what we asked for, and lived up to that promise.
It’s time for this group to stand down from the revisionist history they have been spouting, and to stop causing pain and anguish to fellow 9/11 family members.
Wolf lost his wife in the 9/11 attacks
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