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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, November 23, 2001

The September 11th attack
Forensics sleuth returns for O'ahu visit

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

The voices on the cockpit recorder have given the crash scene in rural Pennsylvania an uncanny reality for Kim Murga: Yells, screams and shouts that sound like "stay out of here!"

Chaminade professor Lee Goff recently returned from New York where he assisted in recovery work at the Trade Center site.

Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

She also knows that in the back of the plane, flight attendants who hadn't been stabbed were boiling water to throw on the terrorists as passengers rushed the cockpit.

All of that has given added poignancy to Murga's job of assembling scraps of human tissue left after United Airlines Flight 93 crashed at 10:10 a.m. on Sept. 11. The plane may have been bound for Washington as a weapon of mass destruction against the Capitol or White House, and it is Murga's task to unravel some of its mysteries.

For Murga, 29, a Chaminade University graduate with degrees in biology and criminal justice, the job is so precise that she sometimes loses sight of the reality of the lives that ended. It's when the compelling objects of everyday life, like a child's small shoe, come along with tissue samples that her emotions overtake her professionalism.

"When it's a jumble of flesh and bone and you see something like a wedding band or an ID tag, and you could see what they looked like. ... It bothers everybody," she said, during a recent Honolulu visit to lecture to forensic science classes at her alma mater.

As supervisory DNA analyst for the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md. Murga is in charge of identifying the victims in Pennsylvania. Her boss is handling the same task at the Pentagon, although the two teams often work together in a facility at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, three hours from her office outside Washington.

"It's the only facility in the world that can handle mass deaths at one time," she said.

Murga's team will also be responsible for identifying American dead if casualties begin occurring in large numbers in the war in Afghanistan. In the past she has been in charge of identifying those killed in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in the Persian Gulf, the 1999 Egypt Air crash off Rhode Island and the crash last year of an Alaska Airlines plane off the California coast.

Murga's job is so gruesome that even her husband won't let her tell him any details, she said. But others she meets are sometimes curious to know how they would be identified if they were the victim of a bomb blast.

She explains the painstaking process of matching samples of tissue found at the crash site with examples of DNA on file. If it's a military person, she said, the services have a bank of 3 million blood samples to use in matching DNA. If it's a civilian, the analyst will turn to dental records, medical evaluations such as pap smears or biopsies that may have been done previously, even brushes still tangled with a victim's hair.

"In the Pentagon crash, everyone from the plane totally disintegrated," she said. "We've received 950 samples representing 188 people."

In the Pennsylvania crash, 600 specimens have been used to identify 44 dead.

Many victims on the ground in the Pentagon were caught by flames from the crash, Murga said, although some died from smoke inhalation. Preliminary identifications were often based on dental X-rays.

The work of identifying the Pentagon dead is almost done, although six people are still unidentified, Murga said — one from the plane and five on the ground. "We think some people may have been directly in the path of the plane and may never be accounted for, so the case is not closed," she said.

In Pennsylvania, so far, 36 positive identifications have been made. "We'll probably make the last four (passengers on the plane) by the end of the month," Murga said. "The final four will be the terrorists."

Murga's team attempts to keep what is left as intact as possible. It's the marrow of a tooth that will be removed for analysis, leaving the outward surface intact. In the case of a toe, the bone is removed, leaving the form intact. When analysts' work is done, Murga said, the remaining body pieces will be returned to families. In some cases, only a tooth may rest in a casket.

A few years ago Kim Smigielski Murga had little idea of what forensic science was all about. But after earning an EMT certificate as an 18-year-old in her home state of California, qualifying her as an emergency medical technician, she was drawn to study the medical science used in police investigations.

As a Chaminade student she'd often curl up in the aisle at the Hawai'i Medical Library next to The Queen's Medical Center and read book after book on the science of forensics. Her internship with the Honolulu Police Department in evidence collection and crime processing initiated "a whole new relationship between Chaminade and the department," she said.

"Chaminade will say they have forensic science because of me," Murga said, "but it's not really true. They were able to see with the O.J. Simpson case that this was something up-and-coming. By the time they got it off the ground I was within a year of graduating." She earned her master's at George Washington University.

Though Chaminade has a bachelor's of forensic science, the school is also looking to create a master's program under Lee Goff, a nationally known forensic entomologist who also helped identify remains after the terrorist attacks.

"Science is developing all sorts of new techniques that have provided a lot of new tools for forensic scientists, and therefore, there are a lot more people needed to carry out these techniques," said David Cooke, chair of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics Division at Chaminade. "There's a booming market for forensic scientists."

Just a week ago Goff returned from the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York where experts from around the nation are working in two-week shifts to match DNA found at the site with samples from family members.

Goff is known for his groundbreaking work using the life cycles of insects to set time and place of death as he reconstructs crime scenes. His book "A Fly For the Prosecution," published last year, details cases in which he's been involved, and he is often called to testify at difficult trials.

As Goff returned and others replaced him at Ground Zero, he was left with haunting images from an attack scene still on fire. "Underground fuel tanks they can't get to are just burning off," he said. "It's as close to hell as I'd like to get."