International Aviation Safety Association
Media Watch
Reference:
Date:
August 30, 1999
Organization: The New York Times
Title:
Honouring unidentified remains is a difficult task: Religious, legal
fight goes on as final burials near
Word Count: 1033
WASHINGTON, D.C. - In hindsight, finding the remains of the 229
people who perished when a Swissair jet crashed a year ago, and
retrieving them from the ocean floor off Canada's Atlantic coast, may
have been the simple part.
The harder part was deciding how to handle 23 coffins that will be
buried this week, mostly filled with remains so small they have not
been identified. Only in the last few weeks have Nova Scotia officials
and religious leaders of several faiths agreed on a solution: a mass
burial and funeral rites to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 2 crash.
To some people involved in the investigation, it was also a case of
technology creating possibilities and problems faster than ethics,
religion or the human heart could deal with them.
Yet because of modern engineering and science, including what
Canadian officials say is the largest use of DNA testing thus far, about
90 % of the recovered remains were identified. The family of every
victim was given at least a fragment to honour at individual
ceremonies, as their feelings or religious traditions dictated.
But in at least five cases, families held funerals and then got another
call from the medical examiner's office saying that more pieces of their
relatives had been identified. Some families said they could not face it;
as a result, some of what will be going into the mass grave has been
identified.
So thousands of fragments -- some 2,300 pounds of flesh and bone -are still in Halifax. Burial has been complicated in part by the
conflicting traditions and rites of the many faiths represented on Flight
111, bound from New York's Kennedy International Airport to Geneva,
Switzerland.
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DNA analysis could probably be used to identify virtually all the
fragments, and there was considerable pressure to do just that.
"We have the capacity to do extraordinary things," said John
O'Donnell, the director of administration at the Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of Halifax, reflecting on the DNA analysis and marine
salvage technology. "Then there's this relentless, inevitable trudging on
to complete things as fully as possible."
But John Butt, the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner, said that with divers
recovering fragments by the thousands, he had to draw the line well
short of analyzing everything. Otherwise, he said, the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police would have faced a backlog of cases and been unable
to solve rapes and murders or to identify victims of other crashes and
crimes. And burial of the Swissair remains could have been delayed for
years.
Most families supported Dr. Butt's decision to stop the DNA testing, but
some families were distraught.
Plans for the mass burial have created problems, too. O'Donnell helped
design a service with a committee of Anglican, Muslim, Greek
Orthodox, Presbyterian and Jewish clergy members, whose burial rites
are often incompatible.
Lyn Romano, of Goldens Bridge, N.Y., whose husband, Ray, was on the
plane, called the mass burial plan "an atrocity." She said "time and
money" were all that was needed to identify more remains and
Swissair had a moral obligation to provide both.
Dr. Butt said there was no Canadian law to guide him in deciding when
to cease identification, but he did find one relevant religious rule.
Rabbis advising him said the Talmud, which predates the discovery of
DNA by more than 1,000 years, specifies that fragments too small for
their source in the body to be determined do not have to be linked to a
specific person.
Dr. Butt drew a similar line at human remains too small to identify
anatomically, but he said, "Moral issues are tough to deal with in the
law, and tough to deal with administratively."
The problem is not unique to Halifax. The Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology in Bethesda, Md., intermittently receives shipments of 100 or
200 fragments of bone from 30-year-old plane wrecks in Vietnam,
often involving cases where the records indicate there were two
crewmen.
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"You do DNA on the first 15 or 20 pieces, and it indicates they're all
from the same person," said Lt. Col. Brion Smith, the chief deputy
medical examiner. "So you do another 15 or 20, and it's still from one
person. How long do you keep on going, using your resources, to look
for that second person who may not be there?"
The nature of the Swissair crash added to the problems in Halifax.
Unlike the TWA Flight 800 crash, which also occurred at sea, the
Swissair crash caused extensive fragmentation. The TWA plane, a
Boeing 747, broke up in flight. While many bodies were mangled, they
remained mostly intact because of the speed and angle at which the
plane entered the water, according to people involved in the accident
investigation. Frank Carven, a vice-president of the Families of the
TWA Flight 800 Association, said that as a result the recovery of
unidentified body parts was less of an issue.
In the crash of a USAir 737 near Pittsburgh in 1994, which also
involved virtual disintegration, the airline buried several coffins of
mixed parts without notifying the families.
The incident was one reason that Congress put the National
Transportation Safety Board in charge of co-ordinating the treatment
of families in crashes in this country.
In Halifax, Dr. Butt used fingerprints, jewelry, dental records and
tattoos to identify many body fragments, and then DNA to match other
fragments to them. More than 100 people were identified by DNA
alone, and about 1,400 body fragments were analyzed.
Mr. O'Donnell of the archdiocese said many Christians assumed that
the remains would be cremated, but the Muslim and Jewish clergy
members objected.
Coffins were another issue. Jewish tradition is to use only wood,
unadorned and without nails. Such coffins eventually deteriorate. Nova
Scotia officials insisted on metal coffins that could be exhumed later if
necessary.
Several memorial events will be held in Halifax this week, including one
in which relatives can meet the people who aided in the recovery.
But it will not end there. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada,
still investigating the crash, plans to carry out several more days of
dredging, looking for more pieces of the cockpit. That, Dr. Butt
expects, will turn up more remains.
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