New York adjusts terrorist death toll downward

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August 22, 2002 Posted: 7:27 PM EDT (2327 GMT)

Almost a year after the attacks on the World Trade Center the death toll on September 11 is still being revised

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From Phil Hirschkorn
CNN New York Bureau

NEW YORK (CNN) — Less than three weeks before the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, New York is still unsure how many people were killed at the World Trade Center that day.

The city’s police department now counts 2,807 victims in Lower Manhattan. But the total is expected to go lower.

Earlier this week, the city’s medical examiner released a list of victims’ names — the same list provided to city hall for a public reading at next month’s commemorative ceremony at the Trade Center site. But names continue to be deleted.

The list released Tuesday, obtained by CNN, contained 2,819 names. That was four less than the 2,823 that had been reported since April. Now, 12 more names have been removed from the total.

"These are people who have been reported to the police department as having been in the World Trade Center. But the [medical examiner] has not been able to verify the deaths of those people," said NYPD Detective Walter Burns.

"There is no DNA or no body has been recovered, nor have the families applied for death certificates."

"There have been cases that have come off because fraud has been involved or duplication of names. We’re probably down to the last part of that," he said.

For example, one name removed this week was a woman who had been counted twice — by her married and maiden names.

Many other individuals reported as missing actually aren’t. At least one woman on the list, a 31-year-old doctor, had been reported missing on September 10, 2001.

The Manhattan district attorney and New York state’s attorney general have charged more than two dozen individuals for falsely filing for death certificates and claiming that relatives died in the Trade Center attack. Several defendants are from outside the New York metropolitan area or even the United States.

The police department’s missing persons bureau continues to investigate possible erroneous or fraudulent claims.

"We would like to have this stuff cleared up a long time ago," Burns said. "If it gets down before September 11, all well and good."

Part of the confusion stems from the medical examiner’s policy of issuing death certificates without a body to families of September 11 victims that request them.

The unusual practice, ordered by former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was to accommodate families trying to collect life insurance or charity benefits.

According to the Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner, 1,360 families have received death certificates without the existence of an identifiable body or remains.

An additional 1,374 families have received death certificates upon the identification of a body or human remains. In most cases, only a body part or tissue sample has been recovered. Only 292 bodies were recovered from the site before the cleanup ended in May, Borakove said.

No death certificates have been issued for 73 people reported as missing.

"There will be more names being removed," Borakove said, adding that a new list of victims’ names will be released next week.

The medical examiner has identified approximately 4,000 of nearly 20,000 partial human remains it has collected. DNA samples have helped identify remains in more than 500 cases. Dental samples have helped identify more than 300 victims.

The 2,807 victims range in age from less than 1 year old to 85. Four out of five victims were men.

The New York death toll does not include the 10 hijackers who slammed the two airliners into the twin towers.

It does include the 127 other passengers and 20 crew members on the two hijacked airliners.

At the Pentagon, there were 184 victims of the September 11 attack — 125 people in the building plus 53 passengers and six crew members on the third hijacked plane, not including five hijackers.

In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the fourth hijacked plane crashed, there were 40 victims — 33 passengers and seven crew members, not including four hijackers.

That makes a total of 3,031 victims of September 11.