A Special 9/11 Message
Matthew Horning, 26, lost his life on 9/11. On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, his mother, Diane, shares her thoughts. Scotch Plains is dedicating the weekly council column space to her.
Kurt and I, as well as our daughter, Dana, continue to be grateful to this community for your support of us and remembrance of our son and brother, Matthew. The services represented here were impacted 25 years ago and served us personally, and our nation as a whole, on that fateful day. They are to be honored and respected for their service.
I usually try to speak this day about memories and a positive impact, but this anniversary has made me realize that some truths about what happened 25 years ago have started to fade. I want to address one such truth that has left us scarred forever.
When I was a student at Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, I had an English teacher who started each week with an essay assignment. She would give us a lead line with which we could start an essay or which we could use as a jumping off point for an essay. I remember one in particular. She quoted a tombstone that held the words: “All of Our Hopes Lie Buried Here.”
I wrote a rather inane essay for which I got a rather mediocre grade, because, at 17 years old, I was clueless about loss. But I was profoundly struck by the fact that the people who had erected that stone had a place to mourn, respect and reflect. Now, many years later, I know that the 9/11 families have been denied that right.
Firemen worked the pile at what became known as Ground Zero. The government allotted 2 years to complete the efforts. Instead, the local entities rushed the search and finished in ten months and way under budget. The firefighters and Port Authority police refused to leave the site because they knew their brothers and sisters would be left behind. A haul road was built to make emptying the pit faster. At FDNY insistence, that road was later excavated revealing more human remains. The workers were thwarted at every effort while the Twin Towers area was scooped, loaded into barges and trucks and dumped at the world’s largest garbage dump, ironically called Fresh Kills.
The powers-that-be called it a “landfill” making it more palatable, but it was the site for dumping of household waste. Once there, workers were given pails and rakes and told to see what they could find. There was no training, no protective gear, no priority. After 10 weeks, contractors with sifting equipment came into Fresh Kills. The material dumped in the first 10 weeks was never resifted.
We families were told we could visit that sifting site. We asked where the final siftings were going and we were told they were being kept separate and available. We asked if we could have those siftings when operations were finished so that we could provide a common, yet decent burial place. We were told that yes, it would be kept separate.
A representative from then-Senator Corzine’s office was with us and heard this promise too. We were later told the same by a liaison to Mayor Bloomberg’s office. Once the operations at Fresh Kills ended, we went back to work out a reclamation plan. We were told we were wrong and that what became known as “the fines” had been systematically dumped back into the most recently used part of the dump on a daily basis. In fact, some of these “fines” had been used to pave roads at the site.
They insisted everything that could be found had been extricated. They insisted they had examined everything down to a quarter of an inch. However, when we visited the “finished” mounds, we found a doll, a bible, shoes, a watch, a credit card with a victim’s name on it, and a complete backpack and many other personal items.
We asked permission, at our expense, to do borings to show remains still existed. We were refused. Widow Marion Fontana, having lost her firefighter husband, sneaked into Fresh Kills when it was operational. In her book, A Widow’s Walk, she described unattended conveyor belts as material passed through. We formed an organization; we gathered 60,000 signatures on a petition, we enlisted endorsements from religions, unions, organizations, state and federal senators and representatives.
We had legislation passed in New Jersey which had no clout without a sister legislation in New York State. We went to court and were told by a judge that our “fines” were just dust. We sat in court where we were actually told that commingled human cremated remains could properly be flushed down a toilet. We sat as a little girl cried out, “My daddy is not garbage.”
We appealed this judgment, fighting all the way up to the Supreme Court, where they refused to hear our case. We offered 7 possible venues for burying these fines, these human remains. One place was actually a part of Fresh Kills where garbage had never been dumped. We were denied because the City wanted that spot for a yacht marina.
During our efforts we asked that JPAC (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command of the US Department of Defense) be allowed to help with the search. We asked permission that the DPMO (Defense POW/MIA Personnel Office, which oversees accounting for missing Americans) be enlisted, as well.
The City denied these requests only to find a few years after 9/11/01, when Con Ed went into a manhole near the WTC site, that almost 300 fragments of human remains had been left in a sewer. Near the same time, we found that human remains had been discovered months later atop the Deutsche Bank building, where our request for a more careful search had been denied.
So, what we families and friends, and indeed our nation, have been left with is not a decent, respectful burial of our dead where we can inscribe an epitaph not unlike the one I was asked to write about so many years ago. We have been left with a site in lower Manhattan which has no tangible evidence of what happened there and a field whose legacy is its history as the world’s largest garbage dump.
The powers that be gave us such platitudes as, “your loved ones were taken into incorporeality.” We do not have a field like that given to the victims in Shanksville or a tomb of the unknown in Arlington National Cemetery like that for the victims of the Pentagon. Our dead have been erased.
Remember that 1,100 victims have never been identified, and the ashen remains that could have been given a decent burial have been left above household waste. And, yes, the NY Medical Examiner wrote telling us that these “fines” most certainly contained human remains.
I do feel your love and support, but I also feel the incredible pain of having been denied a decent and proper burial site. In many ways, this is why this thoughtful, beautiful memorial is so very meaningful to our families.
