Lucy Sullivan
speaker
311 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6d ago
Lucy Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
On the morning of September eleventh, two thousand one, Charles Hirsch rushed downtown to the site of the Twin Towers.
Hirsch was the city's chief medical examiner.
He knew his team had to move quickly.
They would need to set up a temporary morgue.
When the North Tower collapsed, Hirsch was hit with debris and badly injured.
Mayor Giuliani spoke to the press.
Leaving ground zero, Hirsch was caked in dust.
Later, he reached into his pockets and found fistfuls of it.
He told the New York Times that's when it dawned on him.
If concrete was pulverized into dust, it wasn't much of a mystery what might have happened to people.
It wouldn't be thousands of bodies, but thousands of body parts.
So he made a promise.
This is Jay Aronson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
He wrote a book called Who Owns the Dead?
The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero.
Nine eleven was the first time in modern history that Americans were dealing with this scale of dismemberment on US soil.
And right then, DNA technology had evolved to be able to identify the dead in a way that was never possible before.
This meant, on the one hand, that there was a chance that anything with a trace of the victims could potentially be identified for families.
But it also meant that the promise Charles Hirsch made, to identify every remain found, and not to rest until they did, would lead to big expectations from the public.
There were rumors in those first few days that tens of thousands of people might be missing or dead.
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