Directors Of Funeral Homes Help ID Victims

40 volunteer to interview relatives

By Martin C. Evans | STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2001

Tom Kearns spent Sunday on the telephone, calling one family after another, painfully asking each one for details of relatives who had disappeared into thin air.

Did a daughter wear a wedding ring? Did a mother have blond hair? Did a husband have a faded tattoo on a bicep he flexed in happier times?

"It's my business, my profession; a lot of people call it a ministry," said Kearns of Merrick, whose family runs a string of funeral homes in Queens and Nassau County. "But you never get used to tragedy. A lot of these are kids who are my kids' age. You can't get used to that."

Men and women whose daily job is to bury the dead are being tested by the harrowing task of asking grieving families to describe minute details about missing loved ones.

Kearns is among about 40 New York City funeral directors, working as volunteers, who on Saturday began interviewing relatives of passengers and crew members of the two airlines that crashed into the World Trade Center towers.

The detailed physical descriptions will be forwarded to the New York City medical examiner's office to help in identifying remains of crash victims.

The identification effort, run out of a building near LaGuardia Airport, is a joint task of members of the New York State Funeral Directors Association and the federally run Disaster Mortuary Operations Response Teams.

But even for people who deal with grief on a daily basis, asking families to share such intimate details about loved ones has been draining.

"I'm looking forward to going home now," said volunteer Frank Cieri yesterday. "I need to get away from it for a little bit. Funeral directors deal with families at bad times, but this is indescribable."

Kearns, who volunteered from 9 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. Sunday, said he had to pause between interviews - which typically lasted about 45 minutes - to collect himself.

Emotionally drained by day's end, he called his wife to let her know he was on his way home.

She told him he had one more phone call to make.

The son of a neighbor had not been heard from since the World Trade Center swallowed 5,000 lives.