Speaker 1: This episode contains graphic depictions of violence that listeners may
Speaker 1: find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. January thirty one, two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, nearly two hundred days after Snay had disappeared,
Speaker 1: her mom on suit gets an email. She opens it,
Speaker 1: reads it, her stomach starts to hurt. Her daughter is
Speaker 1: a nine eleven hero. Finally, in a four to one decision,
Speaker 1: the New York State Supreme Courts Appellate Division rules that
Speaker 1: Snayhow died at the World Trade Center. The court overturns
Speaker 1: an earlier decision by Judge Rene Roth, who said the
Speaker 1: theory that Snayhow died at the Trade Center was quote
Speaker 1: rank speculation with absolutely no foundation in the record. This
Speaker 1: court disagrees quote only the rankest speculation leads to any
Speaker 1: conclusion other than nine eleven. So this is how it
Speaker 1: ends in court, at least, dueling judges a battle of
Speaker 1: the speculations, rank speculation that saying How died at the
Speaker 1: Trade Center versus rank kissed speculation that any other explanation
Speaker 1: makes sense. Maybe this seems like semantics, but really it's
Speaker 1: the heart of the show, the heart of this case,
Speaker 1: because in the absence of evidence, every single explanation, including
Speaker 1: nine eleven, requires speculation. No speculation, no closure, no answers
Speaker 1: at all. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Bernard J. Malone wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: since it is not known where the decedent spent the
Speaker 1: night of September, it requires speculation to say that her
Speaker 1: route home took her across or dangerously near the World
Speaker 1: Trade Center grounds, or that when the attacks began she
Speaker 1: was even in the vicinity of the World Trade Center.
Speaker 1: And it is equally probable, in light of evidence concerning
Speaker 1: her professional and personal problems, that the decedent died on
Speaker 1: or about September eleven one by some other unfortunate fate.
Speaker 1: From my Heart Radio, this is missing on nine eleven,
Speaker 1: the story of one woman who vanished on the eve
Speaker 1: of history and my quest to find her. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: John Wallzac. I understand that nine eleven makes intuitive sense.
Speaker 1: A comes razor, right, but take emotion out of this case,
Speaker 1: take away the desire to manufacture a hero. Does nine
Speaker 1: eleven really makes sense? I'd say no, or at the
Speaker 1: very least, it's not an instant, irrefutable answer. Look at
Speaker 1: the facts. Fact snay has DNA was never recovered. Fact
Speaker 1: of civilians at the Trade Center below the impact zones escaped. Fact.
Speaker 1: Debris killed very few people before the towers fell. Fact,
Speaker 1: there were hundreds of cops, firefighters, and paramedics on site quickly,
Speaker 1: within minutes. Snay Ha wasn't needed even if she wanted
Speaker 1: to help. Thousands of people with minor injuries flowed out
Speaker 1: of the towers into nearby triage areas where she could
Speaker 1: have volunteered, where she likely would have been directed by
Speaker 1: firefighters and paramedics. Fact. No eyewitnesses saw a petite, beautiful
Speaker 1: woman in a brown dress and sandals running into the towers.
Speaker 1: Fact no photographs or videos show SNA on nine eleven
Speaker 1: at or near the Trade Center. So let's dig deeper,
Speaker 1: piece by piece. First, d n A. There are two thousand,
Speaker 1: seven hundred and fifty three Trade Center victims have been identified,
Speaker 1: mostly by DNA, but also via dental X rays, fingerprints, photos,
Speaker 1: personal effects, tattoos, etcetera. For twenty years, the New York
Speaker 1: City Office of Chief Medical Examiner or o CME has
Speaker 1: led a herculean effort to identify victims. That effort continues today.
Speaker 1: Earlier this year, I sat down in Tribeca with Mark
Speaker 1: desire the O c m S Assistant Director of Forensic Biology.
Speaker 1: On that frigid day January, nearly four thousand Americans died
Speaker 1: of COVID, a greater death hole than nine eleven. We
Speaker 1: sat with masks on windows, open, cold air flowing in
Speaker 1: as dark fell. An interview about one mass casualty event
Speaker 1: during another on nine eleven, Mark got to the trade
Speaker 1: center right after the planes hit. We pulled right on
Speaker 1: the vesse. There's an open spot. We pulled on a
Speaker 1: vest which is right in the shadow of the North
Speaker 1: tower where debris were falling. We got out of the truck.
Speaker 1: It wasn't more than probably five seconds. Victim had fell
Speaker 1: right in front of us. You know, I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: say jump er. I don't know if they jumped, but
Speaker 1: they fell right in front of us. And it was
Speaker 1: this part of our job. With one of the dead,
Speaker 1: we tagger, we collect a sample. We're sort of We
Speaker 1: still had to find our chief. Our chief was down there,
Speaker 1: but we got out of that. The fire depart made
Speaker 1: sure by screaming at us to get the hell out
Speaker 1: of that that circle around the tower, because that's where
Speaker 1: all you were. People were being killed, debris and people
Speaker 1: falling out of the upper floors were killing those on
Speaker 1: the on the streets. So we made her away away
Speaker 1: from that. And I remember there was this old fire
Speaker 1: chief there. It looked like Sam Elliott if I had
Speaker 1: the big mustache and like the leather, and he was
Speaker 1: just stare at the top and I'm watching people hitting
Speaker 1: the concrete and he's like, they're burning to death up there.
Speaker 1: He goes, you you burn to death or you you
Speaker 1: jump out and you get at least ten more seconds
Speaker 1: of living. I'm like, man, then I knew. I'm like,
Speaker 1: this is one of those days that is going to
Speaker 1: change your life and career and everything. Mark found his boss, Dr.
Speaker 1: Charles Hirsch at the corner of Liberty and West. So
Speaker 1: his has his back to the South Tower and I'm
Speaker 1: watching people drop and hit and I'm hearing him go
Speaker 1: through glass and hitting sounds like Saint Lando on a vehicle.
Speaker 1: And there are two people holding hands, and there's and
Speaker 1: you look at the ground, there's just the brain ors.
Speaker 1: I'm like, wow, this is this is And he had said, Yah,
Speaker 1: there's people up to two blocks away. I took about
Speaker 1: one step away in the South tower cracked right there
Speaker 1: within stone's throw of where we were standing. South Tower
Speaker 1: cracked and you just saw that top of the building
Speaker 1: and the steel and the fire just right over top
Speaker 1: of us. And I'm like, I'm dead. This is how
Speaker 1: I'm going to die. Mark ran across West. You really
Speaker 1: don't see it in the in that big mushroom, but
Speaker 1: there are bullets coming out of that and they were
Speaker 1: they're hitting, and I mean shot would be guns. Before
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, that's that's going in. You could feel
Speaker 1: them hit your head. So I put my arms up
Speaker 1: and I was still trying to run, and it was
Speaker 1: almost like a warm like draft and wham that debris
Speaker 1: as it came down. You know, realize it comes down.
Speaker 1: So if you're running, kind of like pits across the
Speaker 1: street and hit right in the ass, right, and he
Speaker 1: asked by I could tell as a piece of rebar
Speaker 1: and from the X ray the next day, I got hit.
Speaker 1: But let's say, let's say in my life that pushed
Speaker 1: me the rest of the way into the building. I
Speaker 1: didn't make the door the doors right here, but I
Speaker 1: went to the window and my arms were already up
Speaker 1: from the sting, and so my elbows and my head
Speaker 1: also broke the glass I wasn't that far in though.
Speaker 1: My bottom of my legs were still hanging out. And
Speaker 1: as the debris hit the building and fell, it fell
Speaker 1: across my last shattered, shattered my foot. I didn't make
Speaker 1: it all the way in. I crawled in. It was
Speaker 1: the darkest, quietest time I've very experienced. All that dust
Speaker 1: made a pitch black, it softened, there was no sounds.
Speaker 1: In a for a second, I'm like, I'm just supposed
Speaker 1: to be I'm dead, right, this is like being dead,
Speaker 1: completely dark and quiet. I didn't feel it any pain
Speaker 1: or I don't even know I was even injured. Then I,
Speaker 1: for the first time that morning, I panicked because I
Speaker 1: try to do this. I try to go take a
Speaker 1: big book. At that point, I was still hold my breath.
Speaker 1: I was running, hold my breath. Hit smack glass, holding
Speaker 1: my breath, dark, crawl in and I got to take
Speaker 1: a big breath after holding your breath for a minute
Speaker 1: or so. Oh, and there was no air. There was nothing,
Speaker 1: absolutely like like trying to breathe under water. And then
Speaker 1: I started panicking, gasping right, I said, hold, so maybe
Speaker 1: if I get into the building. I just ran into
Speaker 1: the darkness, bumping into stuff as it thust started settling.
Speaker 1: Pull my shirt up, I could read a little more.
Speaker 1: Come down right, I'm not gonna die. Despite his shattered foot,
Speaker 1: Mark had a ton of work to do. He and
Speaker 1: the rest of the o CMME team recovered and identified
Speaker 1: thousands of bodies and body parts without being too graphic.
Speaker 1: Are you talking about bones, teeth, pieces of flesh? What
Speaker 1: are you talking when you say human remains beyond the bone?
Speaker 1: Every possible thing you can think of. Yeah, there were
Speaker 1: um limbs, there were organs, hair, There's a lot of fire,
Speaker 1: So tissue, blood, hair is not going to survive the fire.
Speaker 1: You're only going to have remains and teeth. Teeth are
Speaker 1: the hardest part of your body will survive just about anything.
Speaker 1: I've had cremated remains where there was still teeth that
Speaker 1: we've been able to generate DNA profiles from. So bone
Speaker 1: can survive and and even though the outside of the
Speaker 1: bone maybe charred and burn, but the inside might be protected.
Speaker 1: So that's where we go where the marrow is to
Speaker 1: generate a DNA profile. We've gotten plenty of DNA profile,
Speaker 1: especially in two thousand one, from from blood, from from muscle,
Speaker 1: you know, from organs, given the brutality of nine eleven,
Speaker 1: what Mark and his team accomplished is astounding. What are
Speaker 1: things that destroy DNA? Heat and fire, water, sunlight, mold, bacteria,
Speaker 1: nasty chemicals like jet fuel, diesel fuel. Everything that destroys
Speaker 1: DNA was present at ground zero. So this is the
Speaker 1: toughest forensic investigation, the toughest body idea. I've I've had
Speaker 1: scientists from all over the world something that have done
Speaker 1: like UM some projects you've probably heard about the Iceman
Speaker 1: that they found frozen in the bog or some ancient
Speaker 1: um neanderthal remains from thousands of years ago, tens of thousands.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty tough material. I've brought them in and say, hey,
Speaker 1: you've been successful with neanderthal bones and gotten DNA two
Speaker 1: thousand year old mummies. We want to learn from you.
Speaker 1: And and they look at our samples and they try,
Speaker 1: and they're like, this is worse. The world Trade centers
Speaker 1: a thousand times harder than than any Wow. Mark's team
Speaker 1: also sifted through remains from ancient cemeteries below the trade
Speaker 1: center site and thousands of animal bones from destroyed restaurants
Speaker 1: and incinerated office bridges, recovering DNA was only half the battle, though.
Speaker 1: Mark also needed reference samples to match DNA to victims.
Speaker 1: So World Trade Center we have seventeen thousand reference samples,
Speaker 1: seventeen thousand toothbrushes and razors and brushes, and samples from
Speaker 1: moms and dads and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1: Seventeen thousand samples, which is are called the anti mortem.
Speaker 1: You know, this is stuff from when you were alive.
Speaker 1: I have a toothbrush from when Mark was alive. Let's
Speaker 1: take DNA from that toothbrush and compared to these remains,
Speaker 1: because they might be Mark. Without those reference samples. Without
Speaker 1: that anti mortem, you not identify anybody. The post bortom
Speaker 1: side is what you take after you die, so you
Speaker 1: need to equally important. So we have all this information
Speaker 1: from all these thousands of toothbrushes and combs and anything.
Speaker 1: Family members brought to us some very interesting things, including
Speaker 1: a victim's prayer card, the blood of a victim who
Speaker 1: cut himself while working on an aquarium right before nine eleven,
Speaker 1: and a thirty three year old umbilical cord, but most
Speaker 1: samples came from family members, including Snayhouse parents. Ultimately, Mark's
Speaker 1: team identified one thousand, six and forty two out of
Speaker 1: two thousand, seven hundred and fifty three victims, but not
Speaker 1: snay Haw. Now, let's look at where victims died and
Speaker 1: why it matters. In two thousand five, the National Institute
Speaker 1: of Standards and Technology or NIST, released a detailed report
Speaker 1: on the Trade Center disaster. Jason Avril, a fire protection engineer,
Speaker 1: led the team that examined occupant behavior, evacuation, and emergency communications.
Speaker 1: So the goals of my project were to understand how, where,
Speaker 1: and why the people died or successfully evacuated were their
Speaker 1: factors relating to the design and the building, the design
Speaker 1: of the ego system that contributed to success your failure.
Speaker 1: Jason has not only scientific expertise, but also personal experience
Speaker 1: with an air disaster. In his dad, Daniel, died when
Speaker 1: US air flight crashed near Pittsburgh. Jason was in college
Speaker 1: at the time. That experience guided him during the Trade
Speaker 1: Center investigation, especially as the interviewed traumatized survivors and victim
Speaker 1: family members. Jason's work and that of hundreds of other
Speaker 1: NEST experts led to more than forty building code changes,
Speaker 1: things like requiring photo luminescent markington stairs in case the
Speaker 1: lights go out to save lives, steering future disasters, Jason's
Speaker 1: team found that on nine eleven of civilians below the
Speaker 1: impact zones where the planes hit the towers successfully evacuated.
Speaker 1: To be clear, the study came out while Snayhouse case
Speaker 1: was winding its way through court, before she was an
Speaker 1: official victim. It did not include snay and some of
Speaker 1: the data is estimated and imprecise, but the overall picture
Speaker 1: is clear. One thousand, nine hundred and seventy four civilians
Speaker 1: died at or above the points of impact, one, forty
Speaker 1: eight died below, twenty four somewhere unspecified, one and forty
Speaker 1: seven on the planes, eighteen were bystanders nearby building occupants
Speaker 1: killed by debris and or jet fuel, and for seventeen
Speaker 1: there was no information. Four d one first responders also
Speaker 1: died four hundred and three of whom worked for the NYPD,
Speaker 1: f D, n Y or Port Authority, plus two federal employees,
Speaker 1: seven hospital employees and or paramedics, and nine volunteers. The
Speaker 1: first theory about snay Haa is that she ran into
Speaker 1: the towers to help and died, but only two percent
Speaker 1: of first responder fatalities were volunteers two percent. The second
Speaker 1: is that stay Hall was in the towers for some
Speaker 1: other reason, maybe shopping, but only one percent of civilians
Speaker 1: below the impact zones died on the third is that
Speaker 1: snay Hall was killed by debris or jet fuel while
Speaker 1: walking home, but only eighteen victims were bystanders or occupants
Speaker 1: of nearby buildings point o o seven percent of nearly
Speaker 1: three thousand victims two percent, one percent, point o o
Speaker 1: seven percent. So is it possible that Snayhow died while volunteering, shopping,
Speaker 1: or walking home. Yes, but it's extremely and demonstrably unlikely.
Speaker 1: We've looked at DNA and we're victims. Sighed, what about
Speaker 1: just basic logic theory number one? Snayhow ran into the
Speaker 1: towers and died on the surface. It clicks, but dig
Speaker 1: in and it doesn't make sense. The first firefighters reached
Speaker 1: the trade center only four minutes after the first plane.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of other firefighters, cops, and paramedics followed quickly. A
Speaker 1: civilian doctor without supplies would not have been needed after say,
Speaker 1: five to ten minutes, and even if snay Haa was
Speaker 1: near the towers and wanted to help, she likely would
Speaker 1: have been directed to a nearby triage area or hospital
Speaker 1: out of the danger zone, or she could have helped
Speaker 1: any of the thousands of people with minor injuries like
Speaker 1: lacerations the walking wounded. Most victims had either minor injuries
Speaker 1: or they died a few fell in between. The number
Speaker 1: of victims in the lobbies alive but unable to walk,
Speaker 1: for example, was minimal. Here's the other thing. Seventy three
Speaker 1: minutes passed between the first plane strike and the collapse
Speaker 1: of the first tower. It's unlikely that snayhow lingered in
Speaker 1: the towers or would have been allowed to linger for
Speaker 1: up to seventy three minutes as civilians escaped. Theory number
Speaker 1: two snayho was shopping in the mall underneath the towers
Speaker 1: or on her way to Windows on the World on
Speaker 1: top of the North tower when the attacks began. This
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense either. Ron told a reporter that he
Speaker 1: and snay Haa never went to the trade center, that
Speaker 1: she had no reason to be there, and even if
Speaker 1: she was shopping in the all, she would have had
Speaker 1: ample time to evacuate. In terms of Windows on the World,
Speaker 1: snayhouse family posited that she wanted to scope it out
Speaker 1: and advanced of a friend's wedding reception. But the wedding
Speaker 1: wasn't set to take place until April two thousand two,
Speaker 1: seven months later. And if walking home on nine eleven
Speaker 1: after a night out, why would stay how log too
Speaker 1: heavy shopping bags to the top of a skyscraper without
Speaker 1: first stopping at her apartment only nine feet away. Finally,
Speaker 1: that presumes she walked home and didn't take a cab.
Speaker 1: Theory number three. While walking home, snay Hall was hit
Speaker 1: by debris or jet fuel, but out of nearly three
Speaker 1: thousand victims, only eighteen were bystanders or occupants of nearby buildings.
Speaker 1: Is it possible snay Hall was the nineteenth Yes, but
Speaker 1: if debris hit her, it's unlikely she would have laid
Speaker 1: in the street until the towers fell. Most victims hit
Speaker 1: by debris or jet fuel were pulled off the street
Speaker 1: and taken to hospitals. Is it possible that snay Hall
Speaker 1: was crossing between the towers through the plaza, not on
Speaker 1: the street, at the exact moment the first plane hit again, Yes, technically,
Speaker 1: but is it likely Theory number four. On September, attended
Speaker 1: a party at a hotel next to the trade center,
Speaker 1: presumably the Marriott between the towers, hosted by the city's
Speaker 1: South Asian community. She stayed to night, even though she
Speaker 1: lived only nine feet away, and died the next day.
Speaker 1: This theory was put forth by snayhouse older brother Ashwyn.
Speaker 1: I have no idea where he got it. It doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense, and I found no evidence of any South
Speaker 1: Asian party on a Monday night anywhere in the city,
Speaker 1: let alone near or between the towers. Nonetheless, for the
Speaker 1: sake of due diligence, I reached out to a woman
Speaker 1: named Doreen Dunn, who worked at the Marriott World Trade
Speaker 1: Center from until nine eleven. I was an event manager,
Speaker 1: so I dealt with meetings, some weddings, you know, conferences,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, and what I did was planned
Speaker 1: all the details of the event. Dorene got to work
Speaker 1: between seven thirty and eight am on nine eleven. An
Speaker 1: hour later, we heard a huge noise, like really loud noise.
Speaker 1: Are lights in the office flashed for a second but
Speaker 1: came back on and I ran. We had a window.
Speaker 1: I was on the third floor. I had a window,
Speaker 1: so I looked out on the street and there at
Speaker 1: the same time, there was like a ten car accident.
Speaker 1: Like then everyone must have heard it and people weren't
Speaker 1: paying attention, and all of these cars just hit each other.
Speaker 1: And I remember there was a there was construction, and
Speaker 1: the construction person he just started picking up his cones
Speaker 1: like really quick. So I thought he did something because
Speaker 1: I had no idea, you know, that's something that would
Speaker 1: ever happened. And then we could see, you know, things
Speaker 1: falling from the sky, and we just knew it was
Speaker 1: something bad. I asked Dorene what she remembers about September tenth.
Speaker 1: Did the hotel host the party for the city South
Speaker 1: Asian community. I don't remember really anything going on in
Speaker 1: the hotel. Like Monday's were usually because we were a
Speaker 1: business hotel, everything would start like on a Tuesday. People,
Speaker 1: you know, because most of the time people didn't want
Speaker 1: to travel on their personal time, so like a lot
Speaker 1: of the groups would arrive on Monday and then their
Speaker 1: event would start on Tuesday. So Mondays were kind of
Speaker 1: usually a pretty mellow day in my department. But I
Speaker 1: don't remember that. So we've looked at DNA where victims
Speaker 1: died and logic next eyewitnesses, photos and videos. The first
Speaker 1: is easy in twenty years, no one has come forward
Speaker 1: to say they remember a petite, beautiful Indian American woman
Speaker 1: in a brown dress and sandals running into the towers.
Speaker 1: I searched oral histories and spoke to authors, but found nothing.
Speaker 1: The second is more complicated. It's been said that nine
Speaker 1: eleven was the most photographed event in history, but the
Speaker 1: vast majority of photos and videos were captured at a distance.
Speaker 1: Street level. Footage taken near the towers is rare. Images
Speaker 1: captured inside the towers are extremely rare. I looked at everything.
Speaker 1: I crawled into deep corners of the Internet and poured
Speaker 1: through out of print books to find any footage of
Speaker 1: snay Haw would more or less be to solve this case.
Speaker 1: It would prove she was exposed to a specific peril eleven.
Speaker 1: I sifted through so many images looking for the woman
Speaker 1: in the brown dress. I got motion sick, and maybe
Speaker 1: staring at thousands of nine eleven photos while locked away
Speaker 1: in an apartment during a pandemic death winter is not,
Speaker 1: shall we say, great for one's mental health. Anyway, I
Speaker 1: looked and looked, first through public images and videos, and
Speaker 1: then I reached out to twenty photographers, amateur and professional,
Speaker 1: to see if they would grant me access to their
Speaker 1: full archives. Six responded, Two were very helpful, Todd maizel Of,
Speaker 1: former photographer for the New York Daily News, and Massy Swalinski,
Speaker 1: an amateur photographer. Massiege has never been interviewed by an
Speaker 1: American journalist until now. In two thousand one, he lived
Speaker 1: in New Jersey. Every day he took a ferry to Manhattan,
Speaker 1: where he worked as an I T specialist for Goldman Sachs.
Speaker 1: When he got off the ferry, he walked by the
Speaker 1: Twin Towers on his way to work on nine eleven.
Speaker 1: He carried an early model digital camera, a Cannon power
Speaker 1: Shot Pro ninety I s to be exact two point
Speaker 1: six megapixels. It was a pretty day and he figured, pay,
Speaker 1: I'll snap some photos. At am, Messiege was standing directly
Speaker 1: across the street from the Trade Center when he heard
Speaker 1: a loud boom. I had no idea, where is this
Speaker 1: coming from? What is happening? Google was so saddened. And
Speaker 1: then I started to see at West Side Highway, which
Speaker 1: actually was, to my surprise, almost empty. I don't know
Speaker 1: how it happened, but there was no traffic anymore except
Speaker 1: one car. It was passenger car who had tires punctured.
Speaker 1: So driver drove very slowly with that noise of flat tires,
Speaker 1: but was trying evidently to to drive away from that area.
Speaker 1: So the car must have been hit by debris from
Speaker 1: the collision. From that accident, a debris was everywhere. Was
Speaker 1: a lot was covering west side highway and then all
Speaker 1: the streets around. My feeling was, well, what's the tragic
Speaker 1: accident happened? Probably a small a plane hit the tower
Speaker 1: by an accident. I've never thought at that point that
Speaker 1: it is a thirdist attack. So I noticed a fire
Speaker 1: from the north tower, and I was on the south side,
Speaker 1: so I went closer to the south tower and from
Speaker 1: different angles I started to take pictures of the towers
Speaker 1: and the smoke from the north tower. And my next
Speaker 1: that was to take pictures on the ground. Were not
Speaker 1: many people, very few people around. I noticed one of
Speaker 1: the cars on fire somehow he is that the attire
Speaker 1: was burning a lot of the brier around. I was
Speaker 1: really running very quickly around. We fill in the air.
Speaker 1: Something unusual happening for the moment. I went even to
Speaker 1: this the plaza that used to be between two towers.
Speaker 1: This is the area were spear sculpture was back then,
Speaker 1: and it was also absolutely empty from the sky was
Speaker 1: they were falling the hundreds of different documents paper. It
Speaker 1: was like confetti on Broadway on the kindon of Hero.
Speaker 1: So just was falling from the sky from that damaged tower.
Speaker 1: I didn't see any people escaping from the building. It
Speaker 1: was nobody outside. I went back the place I used
Speaker 1: to walk before, so I went south next to the
Speaker 1: entrance to the tower. So I was between the South
Speaker 1: Tower and Deutsche Bank building. And then I stopped after
Speaker 1: thinking a group of pictures and I started to look
Speaker 1: around what is on the ground, and then from that debris,
Speaker 1: I realized that it is not just the debris from
Speaker 1: the building. I realized there are parts of the plane, wires,
Speaker 1: electronics like part of the computers. I also noticed belongings
Speaker 1: of the passengers. I noticed shoes, and the most touching
Speaker 1: was to see human flesh, the parts of it and
Speaker 1: the fresh blood very everywhere. I was really understanding that
Speaker 1: big stragedy happened. But this could not last long for
Speaker 1: me to look at this and really take the whole
Speaker 1: picture of the strategy, because at that moment I heard
Speaker 1: a jet flying very close. I raised my head and
Speaker 1: I saw the plane right above my head, and in
Speaker 1: a fraction of second when I was looking at it,
Speaker 1: I saw that the plane disappeared inside the tower. So
Speaker 1: the whole big plane with the wing just got inside
Speaker 1: and disappeared. I was standing on the street, like I
Speaker 1: mentioned before, It was before the tower and Deutsche Bank building,
Speaker 1: and I had no cover. The breeze started to fall
Speaker 1: all around, noise of metal with different sounds, and I
Speaker 1: just was so scared, so I thought no way to escape.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just just the instinct of their direction.
Speaker 1: I wanted to be as small as possible to avoid
Speaker 1: any hit from the bath, and when this happened, I
Speaker 1: was really really scared, and so in a few minutes
Speaker 1: I decided to go away from this area because it
Speaker 1: was too scary for me. Only one minute after American
Speaker 1: eleven hit the North Tower, Messige took his first photo
Speaker 1: of the tower on fire. He stood at the intersection
Speaker 1: of Liberty and West, two blocks north of Snay House building.
Speaker 1: In fact, he would have been very close to the
Speaker 1: mystery woman who exited the building. At at eight fifty,
Speaker 1: Messige took his first street level photo. Three men are
Speaker 1: visible but their blurry. He kept shooting as he crossed
Speaker 1: west to Liberty just south of the South Tower, crushed cars, fires, pedestrians,
Speaker 1: and disbelief debris everywhere. At Messiege took a photo in
Speaker 1: which about twenty people are visible. The closest is a
Speaker 1: black woman facing away from the camera. At nine who
Speaker 1: united one flew right over Messiege into the South Tower.
Speaker 1: He pointed his camera up and snapped an image as
Speaker 1: debris rained down on him. He stuck around only a
Speaker 1: few more minutes, then walked to his office. Massiege kindly
Speaker 1: provided me high resolution copies of every photo he took
Speaker 1: on nine eleven, so too did Todd Maizel, who worked
Speaker 1: for the New York Daily News for nineteen years. On
Speaker 1: nine eleven, Todd followed a police truck speeding down the
Speaker 1: West Side Highway toward the towers. At nine oh two am,
Speaker 1: he saw a fireball the second plane. He parked at
Speaker 1: West End Chambers in the middle of the street, five
Speaker 1: blocks north of the Trade Center, grabbed his camera and
Speaker 1: sprinted south. I started running down west and I'm seeing
Speaker 1: people fleeing from the direction of the World Trade Center.
Speaker 1: And then I made a left on to what drew
Speaker 1: you to VESI you said you had been drawn to
Speaker 1: h I saw plane ponds. I didn't see much going
Speaker 1: on straight down on West, so I didn't go that direction.
Speaker 1: I just something drew my eye and I said, I'm
Speaker 1: going that way. Todd ran around three sides of the
Speaker 1: Trades Center complex a left on Vessey, right on Church,
Speaker 1: right on Liberty, northeast and south of the towers. The
Speaker 1: entire time he shot photos. So when you were circling
Speaker 1: the trade Center complex, you didn't see anyone laying in
Speaker 1: the streets anyone. Oh no, no, not at that point.
Speaker 1: But most of the people that had been removed from
Speaker 1: the streets already A long church who was absolutely dead
Speaker 1: quiet until I got the Liberty. When I got the Liberty,
Speaker 1: I got to the fire house ten and ten, and
Speaker 1: the people lying on the ground injured, apparently they had
Speaker 1: been heard on the ground. There was fire on the ground,
Speaker 1: plain pots, pieces of building all over the place. On
Speaker 1: the parking lot right across the street on Liberty and
Speaker 1: West Street, a lot. There was big parking lot there.
Speaker 1: Some of the cause were burning. A few of the
Speaker 1: Cause had pieces of metal that had fallen from the
Speaker 1: top of the building and went right into the into
Speaker 1: the cars. Then I saw body parts, body parts on
Speaker 1: the ground on the most famous one, of course, is
Speaker 1: the one I took of the hand. Todd stumbled upon
Speaker 1: a severed hand and shot an image of it. I've
Speaker 1: seen the photo before, but when I looked at it
Speaker 1: again closely, I noticed something new, A small strange rectangle
Speaker 1: next to the hand. At first I saw it and
Speaker 1: I'm like, what is that? It almost looked like a
Speaker 1: dog tag or something. I was like, there's no way
Speaker 1: that that's some kind of identification. And then I zoomed
Speaker 1: in and I'm like, does that say Hershey's? And it's
Speaker 1: just this one single rectangle part of the Hershey's chocolate bar.
Speaker 1: That's right, That's right. It gives it some gives a
Speaker 1: different sense of humanity, um normalcy that it was going
Speaker 1: on prior to the whole horror. Todd shared his photos
Speaker 1: with me, hundreds of them, most of which have never
Speaker 1: been published date. All the narrative of destruction, both grand
Speaker 1: and granular, graphic and compelling, a complete, uninterrupted visceral story.
Speaker 1: Look up the burning towers, looked down part of a
Speaker 1: plane fuselage. Look up again, a man falling to his death.
Speaker 1: Look down again a severed hand. Todd captured history as
Speaker 1: it should be captured, in my opinion, in its entirety.
Speaker 1: You captured images of body parts, the hand, the severed
Speaker 1: hand being the most well known. Why did you choose
Speaker 1: to capture those images that were important? They were important
Speaker 1: that they to minimize the terror and the horror of
Speaker 1: that day would be an injustice to the public. That's it.
Speaker 1: That's it in a nutshell, to minimize the horror? Is
Speaker 1: this censorship? It's wrong. And the Daily News used that
Speaker 1: picture in the paper and they quote a lot of
Speaker 1: flak from it until he edited it caused a took
Speaker 1: it out in a later edition, but it ran, It
Speaker 1: ran the paper. I was shocked when I saw it
Speaker 1: that it ran the paper, But I was proud. I
Speaker 1: was proud that the Daily News had the guts to
Speaker 1: do it, that the editors there said this is a
Speaker 1: powerful picture. They understood it. Todd's photos are graphic and upsetting.
Speaker 1: By the time I viewed them, I had sifted through
Speaker 1: thousands of nine eleven images. I wasn't expecting to feel anything,
Speaker 1: but I felt sick. They made me nauseous. Other than
Speaker 1: the severed hand, the most disturbing images he captured were
Speaker 1: of the death of firefighter Danny. Sir, you saw him
Speaker 1: hit and I saw him killed. He was the first
Speaker 1: one to die. Did you realize that he had been
Speaker 1: hit by a person? No? No, I found out later,
Speaker 1: maybe two weeks later. I found out that that he
Speaker 1: had actually gotten hit by a person. Uh And because
Speaker 1: when what hit him broke upont just a big splot,
Speaker 1: but to him it was like a piece of concrete.
Speaker 1: They loaded him up on a gurney and they saw
Speaker 1: carrying him away. I kind of lost it at that point.
Speaker 1: The sky was dead. I just knew it. Um and
Speaker 1: I started crying a little bit. And another photographer was there.
Speaker 1: I don't know who he was to this day says
Speaker 1: to me, try to keep it together, try to keep
Speaker 1: it together. And uh so I started shooting again. I
Speaker 1: shot a couple of pictures of the Greek church with
Speaker 1: the with the burning cowers in the background, and I
Speaker 1: looked up and buildings coming towards me. Just the sky
Speaker 1: opened up, black pieces of debris. For for one second.
Speaker 1: You saw it, and you said, I said, no pictures,
Speaker 1: Run run, run, And all I had in my head
Speaker 1: was run, run, run, un run. Run, run all the
Speaker 1: way into ninety West Street. I dived into the into
Speaker 1: the lobby of the building, and I swear to God,
Speaker 1: I was midday when that building hit. I hit the ground,
Speaker 1: curled up, and the building crashed into the into ninety
Speaker 1: West and debris came raining down, and the ceiling collapsed,
Speaker 1: wall was collapsing. The whole lobby filled with dust. You
Speaker 1: couldn't see a thing. The lights went out. Darkness, darkness,
Speaker 1: I remember, darkness and dust, and I just stayed down.
Speaker 1: I pulled out a bandanna had with me, I wrapped
Speaker 1: around my face, and I said, I gotta get out
Speaker 1: of him, gonna die. I started crawling out backwards. After
Speaker 1: the South tower fell, Todd in his colleague David Hanshew
Speaker 1: took refuge in a Delhi. David's legs were shattered. Todd
Speaker 1: shot photos of him on the floor covered in dust.
Speaker 1: Then here a raw coming to like a train coming
Speaker 1: towards us. The North tower falls. I just curled up
Speaker 1: next to a refrigerator in the Delhi and bomb. Debris
Speaker 1: was rained down on the front of the building. The
Speaker 1: whole facade collapsed. De Bris everywhere turn pitch black, pitch
Speaker 1: black dust, and I just waited, and you hear the
Speaker 1: firefighters and the cops, and I don't know who it is,
Speaker 1: but they were. They're crying and screaming, we're gonna die,
Speaker 1: We're gonna die. And then all of a sudden, the
Speaker 1: light came through the windows, and I said, we're gonna
Speaker 1: live through this one. Only one professional photographer died on
Speaker 1: nine eleven, Bill Bigger, who snapped his final frame a
Speaker 1: split second before the North Tower collapsed onto him. The
Speaker 1: lack of additional casualties speaks in part to how few
Speaker 1: photographers got so close to the towers by this point.
Speaker 1: I know their names. I've searched their photos looking for
Speaker 1: snay Haaw the woman in the brown dress. It might
Speaker 1: seem crazy, like a waste of time, but it's worked
Speaker 1: at least twice in other cases. In two thousand to
Speaker 1: a man named Mike Rambusk found a photo of his
Speaker 1: son Luke hanging out of a broken window high in
Speaker 1: the North Tower, only fifteen minutes before it fell. And
Speaker 1: in a man named Judgson Box found a photo of
Speaker 1: his son Gary, a firefighter, running through a tunnel toward
Speaker 1: the towers. But to replicate that to find snay haa
Speaker 1: manually would take a miracle, so we decided to automate
Speaker 1: the process. We partnered with two companies, ai H Tech
Speaker 1: and true Face to use cutting edge facial recognition software
Speaker 1: to scan nine eleven images forced ha. Here's a i
Speaker 1: H tech co founder Ben Sue the AI compute vision Definitely,
Speaker 1: we can't help people better uh searching for their loved
Speaker 1: ones and hundreds of, not thousands, a hundred thousands of images.
Speaker 1: To my knowledge, artificial intelligence has never been used for
Speaker 1: something like this to search historical images for a missing person. First,
Speaker 1: we scraped all publicly available nine eleven footage that shows
Speaker 1: people in or near the towers. Then we contacted twenty photographers,
Speaker 1: including Massid Swolinsky and Todd Maizel, to access unpublished images.
Speaker 1: We ended up with a hundred gigabytes of footage, one thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred and seventy three photos, seven hundred and nineties
Speaker 1: seven videos. We also collected fifty three photos of snay
Speaker 1: Haw as reference images. One of the reasons we chose
Speaker 1: to work with both ai H Tech and true Face
Speaker 1: is that they focus on ethical applications of facial recognition technology,
Speaker 1: including the minimization of gender and racial bias. Each company
Speaker 1: helped us in different ways. Ai H Tech trained us
Speaker 1: to use their software directly, and true Face ran a
Speaker 1: search for us. Here's True Face CEO Shawn Moore. We
Speaker 1: are a computer vision company that is is fundamentally trying
Speaker 1: to teach cameras to see like human beings, so to
Speaker 1: ingest a visual field and understand what is familiar and
Speaker 1: what is not familiar and if that is familiar, is
Speaker 1: it important to me? Can you kind of walk me
Speaker 1: through the software just for a great persons like high
Speaker 1: level overview of how it works. Yeah. Absolutely. So we
Speaker 1: take the person in consideration. So in this case it
Speaker 1: was a female, we take the images that we have
Speaker 1: of her that we're looking to reference amongst the broader
Speaker 1: set of images. So think about it as her profile.
Speaker 1: We've got a profile of her that we enroll as
Speaker 1: as person one, and then we look at the overall consideration.
Speaker 1: I think in this case we we found roughly four
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy seven thousand pictures of people are faces
Speaker 1: in those images and videos. Four hundred and seventy seven
Speaker 1: thousand faces. That doesn't mean four hundred and seventy seven
Speaker 1: thousand people because undoubtedly many were duplicates of the same person,
Speaker 1: but still that's a ton of faces, and so we're
Speaker 1: looking then at does this woman match any of those
Speaker 1: faces across the media files, the videos, and the photos.
Speaker 1: And the way we do that is we zero in
Speaker 1: on every face in every frame. We extract what's called
Speaker 1: a biometric temper to facial recognition face template, So think
Speaker 1: about it like a fingerprint of your face. It's proprietary
Speaker 1: to you. You're the only one that has that. And
Speaker 1: then we look at a certain threshold, does the individual
Speaker 1: we're looking for face prints matched the face print of
Speaker 1: anyone in those four hundred and seventy seven thousand faces,
Speaker 1: And so you know, effectively we're programmatically trying to match.
Speaker 1: And what we did was we set a high threshold
Speaker 1: of of what in our case is a similarity threshold
Speaker 1: point six, and we got no matches. And so we
Speaker 1: continue to lower that threshold down until we start to
Speaker 1: see some matches, knowing that there there could be false
Speaker 1: positives that will require human review. And so you know,
Speaker 1: as we lower that threshold, we start to see more
Speaker 1: more hits, and then we went manually through those hits
Speaker 1: and ultimately did not find the person in any of
Speaker 1: those images. In the hundred gigs of data we provided
Speaker 1: two thousand, one hundred and seventy photos and videos captured
Speaker 1: in or near the towers. On nine eleven, True Face
Speaker 1: detected four and seventy seven thousand faces, which is impressive
Speaker 1: but not Snay has, so we turned to ai H Tech.
Speaker 1: Having direct access to their intuitive software allowed us to
Speaker 1: fiddle with things like the confidence threshold. Basically, how confident
Speaker 1: is the algorithm that two faces belong to the same person.
Speaker 1: A H Tech recommended that we start with at least
Speaker 1: a seventy percent threshold, high enough to limit false matches,
Speaker 1: but low enough to grab frames of anyone who resembled
Speaker 1: Snay so we could double check everything manually. Any match
Speaker 1: above we found her. Our assistant producer, Chris, first tested
Speaker 1: the ai H software at a very low threshold. It
Speaker 1: misidentified multiple items like tires as human faces. It even
Speaker 1: detected a morphous faces in the billowing smoke, which was eerie,
Speaker 1: so we stuck with the recommended minimum. Technically, to test
Speaker 1: the epic see of the software, we ran on say
Speaker 1: It worked a ton of matches anywhere. From then, Chris
Speaker 1: ran all the nine eleven footage we collected. We got
Speaker 1: a few hits in the mid seventies, both photos and videos.
Speaker 1: The highest was eighty point a woman captured on video
Speaker 1: by Luigi cuts Aiga running as the South tower fell.
Speaker 1: Definitely not snay ha though. In the end, one hundred
Speaker 1: gigs of footage, two thousand one d and seventy photos
Speaker 1: and videos to facial recognition programs using cutting Edge AI
Speaker 1: no snay ha. So as we consider the likelihood that
Speaker 1: snay Haa died on nine eleven at the Trade Center,
Speaker 1: this is what we're left with. She's among the forty
Speaker 1: of victims whose remains have never been identified. Only one
Speaker 1: percent of civilians below the impact zones died. Only two
Speaker 1: percent of first responders who died were volunteers. Only point
Speaker 1: o o seven percent of victims were civilians killed by
Speaker 1: falling debris or jet fuel. A civilian doctor without supplies
Speaker 1: likely wasn't needed after the first five to ten minutes,
Speaker 1: when hundreds of firefighters, cops, and paramedics arrived. It's unlikely
Speaker 1: snay how would have been allowed to linger for up
Speaker 1: to seventy three minutes until the first tower collapsed. No
Speaker 1: eyewitnesses Saucenah in or near the towers, and we can't
Speaker 1: find any photos or videos showing snay on nine eleven.
Speaker 1: In an earlier episode, I said, there are four possible
Speaker 1: logical explanations as to what could have happened to snay
Speaker 1: haa suicide we ruled out foul play, either random or
Speaker 1: at the hands of some must Snayha new is unlikely.
Speaker 1: Nine eleven seems less likely, and the idea that snay
Speaker 1: How ran away is wild. So what then? There are
Speaker 1: endless other theories, many of which you've shared with us.
Speaker 1: Snay Haw overdosed and whomever she was with panicked and
Speaker 1: hit her body. She stayed to night in the towers
Speaker 1: with someone. The persons snay House stayed with died on
Speaker 1: nine eleven, and that's why they never came forward. There
Speaker 1: are so many theories you'll drive yourself crazy, but most
Speaker 1: make little, if any sense. None are more likely than
Speaker 1: either nine eleven or the idea that Snayha ran away.
Speaker 1: After a year obsessed with this case, to me, no
Speaker 1: theory makes complete sense, but those who make the most sense.
Speaker 1: So how do you prove either first? Nine eleven. The
Speaker 1: most concrete way to solve this case would be to
Speaker 1: identify Snayhouse DNA, and that is possible. The New York
Speaker 1: City O C and ME continues its vital work. It
Speaker 1: still has seventh alson two and four unidentified remains, and
Speaker 1: in seventeen, eighteen and nineteen it made new identifications. Here's
Speaker 1: smart desire we're working on right now. We we spent
Speaker 1: some time with the military UH down in Dover, Delaware.
Speaker 1: They've got an amazing technique that we're bringing on that
Speaker 1: I know is going to make even more I D
Speaker 1: s and it's it takes takes some time to validate it,
Speaker 1: to make sure it's right and it works properly. Because
Speaker 1: some of these remains are very small. We might have
Speaker 1: one shot. You've got a tiny little piece of moment
Speaker 1: about the size of a tic tac A one shot.
Speaker 1: We're gonna pulverize that and try to take DNA out
Speaker 1: of it. If we fail, probably not gonna be able
Speaker 1: to ever get a DNA profile from It's so it's
Speaker 1: very stressful when you're working with these samples. Since this
Speaker 1: new technique or new technology that you're taking from the
Speaker 1: military in Delaware, can you tell me a little bit
Speaker 1: about that. Up until now, you're your your forensic techniques,
Speaker 1: you look at on the on the DNA strand, you
Speaker 1: look at repeat you and it's of d N A,
Speaker 1: a little bits of DNA that are repeated over and
Speaker 1: over again. And this is a norm for for all
Speaker 1: crime labs in New York City. One of the things
Speaker 1: we've been able to do is is take things like
Speaker 1: bone and break them down and pulverize them even more
Speaker 1: very fine tap powder, more access to the cells. Bone
Speaker 1: by itself is the hardest material to work with. Blood
Speaker 1: and saliva and hair, that's easy. Bone it's very tough,
Speaker 1: very tough to work with, so pulverizing it, taking the
Speaker 1: DNA app chemicals extraction, we've improved that process quantitation how
Speaker 1: much DNA is present, improve that amplifying it, taking very
Speaker 1: small amounts and making more of it in the lab.
Speaker 1: A lot of these procedures are for medical research. Some
Speaker 1: of the top top medical research labs, we've taken techniques
Speaker 1: from them. But now we've got this this technique, this
Speaker 1: next generation sequencing it's called and it will look at
Speaker 1: every single base or every single chemical on the strand
Speaker 1: rather than looking at blocks of it like we do now,
Speaker 1: we can look at tiny little sections. And what this
Speaker 1: allows us to do is when I had said things
Speaker 1: like sunlight and fire destroy DNA. Picture of DNA strand
Speaker 1: we've all seen the DNA helix very thin, very fragile.
Speaker 1: The sunlight will just break it up into pieces water
Speaker 1: or insects or moto bacteria. And if it's broken up
Speaker 1: too much, we're not able to count these repeats. But
Speaker 1: that next generation sequencing looks at such tiny, small pieces,
Speaker 1: you're still able to see that information. So very exciting,
Speaker 1: very nerdy stuff, but very exciting. There's also a very
Speaker 1: remote possibility that new remains could be recovered from Manhattan
Speaker 1: rooftops or sewers. After nine eleven. Authorities swore they examined
Speaker 1: everything everywhere multiple times. But in two thousand six, construction
Speaker 1: workers found bones on top of the damage Deutsche Bank building.
Speaker 1: They were on a rooftop and it had rock ballast.
Speaker 1: Some roofs have like stone on them right there, right
Speaker 1: do you have this out there have stone on them
Speaker 1: to protect for the ailment whatever. And as they were
Speaker 1: taking into the construction workers were like, that's not a stone?
Speaker 1: What is? And they immediately we always had people on
Speaker 1: site and they called the medically examiner uh An M.
Speaker 1: L I over and they were like human remains. Halt
Speaker 1: halted deconstruction. We brought our team in seve bones. We
Speaker 1: found if you held your hands out, most of them
Speaker 1: would fit in there. They're very small pieces. For five
Speaker 1: years they sat on this roof in the sun and
Speaker 1: the rain and the insects and the snow, and UH
Speaker 1: brought into my team and said, hey, we just recovered these,
Speaker 1: and we had just improved the DNA process again. I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: let's use the new procedure. These are really tough samples.
Speaker 1: Anytime remains sit out, bone sits out, that just bakes
Speaker 1: that the UV rand. These were such small samples. I
Speaker 1: didn't have any hopes for any of them. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of them, and UH my team went to
Speaker 1: work and they came back there like Boss, we got
Speaker 1: the I'm like what the new technique. I'm like that
Speaker 1: new techniques is awesome. What are the chances that there
Speaker 1: are bone fragments on other roofs that have not been discovered?
Speaker 1: Twenty years later after that, there was another round of
Speaker 1: searching all of the remains at that point. I think
Speaker 1: after that there were still some discovered, but these were
Speaker 1: remains that were really deep in the ground or some
Speaker 1: sowarce systems that kind of got caved in. So we
Speaker 1: continue to find some some remains after that, but there
Speaker 1: wasn't There wasn't that that many like we saw on
Speaker 1: that roof, the small fragments. So is there a chance, sure,
Speaker 1: there could be a tiny fragment that somebody overlooked someplace.
Speaker 1: Possibly there's a lot of buildings down here that are
Speaker 1: kind of close together. You know, those areas were searched
Speaker 1: for something that probably hasn't been searching under ears. You
Speaker 1: never know it could because there was such a a
Speaker 1: large area that that were recovered with remains. I do
Speaker 1: also get asked about Fresh Kills. Fresh Kills is the
Speaker 1: former Staten Island landfill. We're first responders sifted through one
Speaker 1: point a million tons of trade center debris. I get
Speaker 1: asked by by victims families do I think as a scientist,
Speaker 1: are the remains buried at Fresh Kills? And my answer
Speaker 1: is yes, absolutely. Back in two thousand one, two thousand two,
Speaker 1: we were technology, we were looking for larger fragments. Could
Speaker 1: there be um, you know, something a splinter of bone
Speaker 1: buried in the ground up there? Sure? And then the
Speaker 1: next question is can you get DNA from with that,
Speaker 1: I don't know that. I don't know until you try.
Speaker 1: I've had so many samples brought before me. We're gonna like,
Speaker 1: you're not getting anything from this. Looking at it like
Speaker 1: and sure enough, like Wow, it's amazing. Science is amazing.
Speaker 1: The two places where remains could still be located twenty
Speaker 1: years later are near ground zero or at Fresh Kills,
Speaker 1: where trade center debris is buried in Section one nine,
Speaker 1: also known as the West Mound. It's a long shot,
Speaker 1: but it's not impossible. For example, surveyors located a piece
Speaker 1: of a plane wing between two buildings near ground zero,
Speaker 1: and this wasn't some tiny piece four ft wide, five
Speaker 1: ft long, two d and fifty pounds. It sat there
Speaker 1: for twelve years. As for Fresh Kills, some victim family
Speaker 1: members believed that debris wasn't adequately sifted through, or that
Speaker 1: some wasn't served at all. There are human remains at
Speaker 1: Fresh Kills. No one disputes that. The question is whether
Speaker 1: any are identifiable. Probably not, because presumably most are blended
Speaker 1: into what's called the finds anything under the sides of
Speaker 1: a thumbnail. Here's Jay Aaronson, the author of Who Owns
Speaker 1: the dead, the science and politics of death. At ground zero,
Speaker 1: there was this material, this kind of very fine material
Speaker 1: that was a mix of the stuff that the towers
Speaker 1: were built of, you know, you think of dry laws
Speaker 1: and then other materials that had sort of been pulverized,
Speaker 1: and there was certainly so some charge human remains in
Speaker 1: that material as well. Many of the people whose remains
Speaker 1: couldn't be found are parts of their bodies were were
Speaker 1: actually pulverized or sort of ground up in the heat
Speaker 1: and pressure of the explosion of the planes and then
Speaker 1: the collapse of the towers into themselves and into the
Speaker 1: seven story area under street level, And so there was
Speaker 1: really not much that could be done with that material,
Speaker 1: so it was it was essentially left that fresh kills
Speaker 1: past human remains. There's also the chance that some of
Speaker 1: snahs personal belongings pulled from trade center debris could still
Speaker 1: be identified her family wonders, specifically about jewelry. According to
Speaker 1: the New York Post, as of the NYPD still had
Speaker 1: three thousand, four hundred and eighty three unidentified invoices in
Speaker 1: storage with one or more personal belongings wallets, keys, clothing, etcetera,
Speaker 1: and seventy four included jewelry and or watches. For some reason,
Speaker 1: the NYPD has refused to release a catalog of the belongings,
Speaker 1: even to victim family members. I filed a record's request
Speaker 1: seeking a list, index, and or images of the unidentified
Speaker 1: invoices that include jewelry and watches, but the NYPD denied
Speaker 1: my request, citing privacy concerns. I appealed the denial. The
Speaker 1: NYPD denied my appeal at that point. Well, here's part
Speaker 1: of an email I sent. Quote the denial of my
Speaker 1: appeal cites privacy concerns and specifically the necessity of quote
Speaker 1: extensive redactions insofar as they contain personally identifying information. But
Speaker 1: the invoices I'm requesting information about, to my knowledge, concerned
Speaker 1: objects for which owners were never identified. So unless the
Speaker 1: NYPD was actually able to ide these objects but for
Speaker 1: some reason hasn't notified families, or could I d them
Speaker 1: but hasn't, I don't understand how the supplies here, and
Speaker 1: I don't believe it's irrelevant reason in this case to
Speaker 1: deny my appeal. These objects are by their nature unidentified,
Speaker 1: and to state that there might be a necessity or
Speaker 1: quote extensive redactions insofar as they contain personally identifying information
Speaker 1: would indicate that the NYPD could I D the items,
Speaker 1: but hasn't. For some reason. After that email, the NYPD
Speaker 1: stopped responding in terms of whether or not Snay has
Speaker 1: still alive. I had one final idea to use AI
Speaker 1: to search for her in billions of photos taken after
Speaker 1: nine eleven. I had serious ethical concerns about this, but
Speaker 1: like it or not, the technology is available to nearly anyone.
Speaker 1: First I reached out to clear View AI, a sketchy
Speaker 1: company whose database includes more than three billion images scraped
Speaker 1: from public sources, including social media. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: work with clear View, but at that point they were
Speaker 1: the only company I knew of with such an extensive database,
Speaker 1: and I figured, Okay, well, if they solve this case,
Speaker 1: if they find Snay haa, it's worth it. But they
Speaker 1: never responded. I figured, well that's that. Then, twelve days
Speaker 1: before the show premiered, I read a wash Ington Post
Speaker 1: article about a different company called pim Eyes, which says
Speaker 1: it analyzed more than nine million unique faces via billions
Speaker 1: of photos. The company claims that, unlike clear View, it
Speaker 1: doesn't scrape social media. Nonetheless, vigilante detectives used it to
Speaker 1: track down capital writers. A forty year old German man
Speaker 1: uploaded an image taken seventeen years ago and found a
Speaker 1: recent YouTube video showing him and another man found a
Speaker 1: photo of himself from twenty five years ago. Pim eyes
Speaker 1: is a powerful tool, so I used it first. I
Speaker 1: tested it on myself. I ran six photos taken between
Speaker 1: pim eyes, returned a few images. Only one surprised me, though,
Speaker 1: a photo from a concert I attended in New York.
Speaker 1: I also tested it by running an image of me
Speaker 1: in a mask taken during COVID. It misidentified me as
Speaker 1: Billie Eilish, so not perfect. Then I turned to snay Haa.
Speaker 1: I ran seven different images of her through pim eyes,
Speaker 1: old photos and the age progression photo, showing what she
Speaker 1: would look like today. I got back anywhere from thirty
Speaker 1: nine to a hundred and sixty one results per image,
Speaker 1: but they were all old photos, nothing new or not
Speaker 1: snay ha though too made me pause and look very closely,
Speaker 1: one from a party in Greece in and one from
Speaker 1: a hospital in Italy. Again definitely not snay ha. Though
Speaker 1: this case can be solved, I've heard from many of you.
Speaker 1: I'm vetting new information, I'll update you in the future.
Speaker 1: For now, though, since we can't find snay Ha yet,
Speaker 1: I want to use this show to highlight something extremely important.
Speaker 1: Mark desire of the o CMI told me he has
Speaker 1: forty DNA profiles from nine eleven remains that he can't
Speaker 1: match to anyone, meaning forty victims could easily be identified
Speaker 1: if their families provided reference samples. There's also a chance
Speaker 1: that some of the forty profiles belonged to people never
Speaker 1: identified as nine eleven victims, homeless people, undocumented workers, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Up Mark encourages anyone who thinks they're missing loved one
Speaker 1: might have died on nine eleven to contact the o
Speaker 1: c M me. You can call them at two one
Speaker 1: two four four seven to zero three zero. That's two
Speaker 1: one two four four seven two zero three zero. I'd
Speaker 1: like to believe that snay Ha used nine eleven as
Speaker 1: covered to escape and is alive somewhere. It's not necessarily
Speaker 1: what I believe, it's what I want to believe. That
Speaker 1: snay has sent the mysterious postcard saying everyone who knew
Speaker 1: me before nine eleven believes I'm dead. You'll recall that
Speaker 1: Snayhu was born in Kerala, India. Well a few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: a woman named Sajitha, who disappeared eleven years ago, was
Speaker 1: found alive in Kerala. Snay House family wants the world
Speaker 1: to remember her as an undiluted hero, but after talking
Speaker 1: to people who knew snay Ha, I'm not sure that's
Speaker 1: how she would want to be remembered. She was beautiful
Speaker 1: in her complexity, a fascinating character ups and downs. In
Speaker 1: June two thousand one, eighty two days be four eleven,
Speaker 1: she spent a night in jail. That night, she meditated
Speaker 1: with a woman in her cell. Other nights, including September ten,
Speaker 1: she never came home, at least once she returned covered
Speaker 1: in paint. Snay Ha volunteered in Harlem helping single mothers.
Speaker 1: She liked to dance in chaos. She found peace in
Speaker 1: peace chaos. On February one, when nearly two thousand Americans
Speaker 1: died from COVID and eighteen inches of snow fell on
Speaker 1: New York, I walked through Manhattan to ground zero. I'm
Speaker 1: standing right outside the nine eleven Memorial and Museum. Um,
Speaker 1: it's gated off and can't go in right now because
Speaker 1: we're in the middle of a blizzard one hundred feet
Speaker 1: away on panel s sixt six, The name of a Phantom,
Speaker 1: the two thousand, seven hundred and fifty first nine eleven victim,
Speaker 1: snay Haa and Philip. Next week we're going to release
Speaker 1: a special bonus episode. You won't want to miss it,
Speaker 1: so keep an eye on our feed. Homework one. Several
Speaker 1: listeners pointed out that Casey nice Set before he was
Speaker 1: a famous YouTuber, lived on Rector Street near the Trade
Speaker 1: Center and shot video on nine eleven as the attacks unfolded.
Speaker 1: If someone knows Casey or magically Casey, you hear this,
Speaker 1: we'd love to see the full video. Two. If you
Speaker 1: hold sway in New York, find out why the NYPD
Speaker 1: refuses to release a list, index and or photos of
Speaker 1: unidentified nine eleven belongings, even to victim family members. Three
Speaker 1: To the folks who declined to speak with me, I'd
Speaker 1: still love to speak with you. You can reach us
Speaker 1: by phone at one eight three three new Tips that's
Speaker 1: one eight three three six, three nine eight four seven
Speaker 1: seven again one eight three three six three nine eight
Speaker 1: four seven seven, or you can reach us via email
Speaker 1: at tips at iHeart media dot com. That's tips t
Speaker 1: I p S at iHeart Media dot com. Ben Bollen
Speaker 1: is our executive producer, Paul Decan is our supervising producer,
Speaker 1: Chris Brown is our assistant producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson is
Speaker 1: our producer. Sam T. Garden is our research assistant, and
Speaker 1: I'm your host and executive producer John Waalzac. Cover art
Speaker 1: by Pam Peacock. Special thanks to Tamika Campbell at iHeart
Speaker 1: and to Christoph Zapri in New Orleans. Also thank you
Speaker 1: to Mark Desire, Jason April, Doreen, Don Messige, Swollinski, Todd Mazel,
Speaker 1: Ben Sue, Shawn Moore, Jay Aaronson, and ASoP Rock Justice
Speaker 1: Burner j Malone voiced by Mike Smith of New Orleans.
Speaker 1: A shout out to Paul and Chris, our producers who
Speaker 1: helped me report this story on the ground in New
Speaker 1: York during the pandemic, which was difficult, And a shout
Speaker 1: out to my alma mater, unc Asheville. Facial recognition services
Speaker 1: provided by ai H Tech and True Face. Original theme
Speaker 1: music by ASoP Rock. Check out Asop's website at ASoP
Speaker 1: rock dot com. I'd like to dedicate the show to
Speaker 1: three women my Grandma who brought me to the Trade
Speaker 1: Center when I was eleven and a ground zero when
Speaker 1: I was thirteen. My mom and Miss Helen. Miss Helen,
Speaker 1: we love you. You bring us joy every day always.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at at john wallzac
Speaker 1: j O n w A l c z a K.
Speaker 1: If you like this show, check out our first season,
Speaker 1: Missing in Alaska, about the nineteen seventy two disappearance of
Speaker 1: two congressmen. Missing on nine eleven is a co production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Greenfork Media.