Flight 232: A Story of Disaster and Survival (53 page)

Hangar 252, the temporary morgue, with refrigerated trucks awaiting the dead. Note the double-wide modular home on the left, where the white boards were set up and paperwork was done.

Inside Hangar 252 before it was transformed into a morgue. Guardsmen gather to prepare the tags that would be wired to the wrists or ankles of the dead.

Several trackers stand before three body bags that had been set on the floor because the morgue ran out of gurneys. Left, two dentists (red shirts) work in the dental section. In the upper left, FBI technicians take fingerprints. To the far right, funeral directors embalm a body. Behind the blue partition in the foreground, pathologists perform an autopsy. Note the body bag labeled
E
awaiting autopsy. Only one body at a time was handled at each station.

Thomas Randolph was a DCI special agent who worked both in the crime lab and on homicide investigations. He suffered severe post-traumatic stress after having to photograph all the victims as they were admitted to the morgue. He died at the age of sixty-four in 2005 and was considered by friends to be a casualty of this crash.

One of the most prominent forensic dentists in America, E. Steven Smith, came to Sioux City from Northwestern University. He brought with him Apple SE/30 computers, a new addition to the practice of forensic dentistry at the time. The new technology made the process of identifying bodies easier and faster.

The last two rows in the plane, 37 and 38, remained inside the tail as it broke away from the fuselage on impact. Most of the people in those seats survived. But 41-year-old Jasumati Patel was in 35-A, and the plane broke apart across her row, inflicting multiple fatal injuries. Her jewelry was used to help identify her.

An attempt to record the remains of a passenger.

In the office space beside the morgue, forensic dentists and volunteers work to identify a victim. Just above the woman on the left is Robert Sorenson, a legendary dentist who was self-taught in the discipline of forensics. On the right, center, with the bald head, is Raymond Rawson, a forensic dentist who helped to identify the eighty-five people killed in the fire at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. In the upper right, with his hands on his hips, is Forrest Lorz, the programmer who wrote ToothPics, the computer software that helped to identify victims.

White boards were used to track any information that might help to identify a victim. The check marks show that a body had been processed through the various stations in the morgue.

When National Guard employees returned to work Monday morning, the halls were lined with caskets in shipping containers ready to be shipped home to the families awaiting the remains of their loved ones.

The seven-foot titanium fan on the front of this engine was mounted on the driveshaft, seen here sheared away at the center of the circular structure. As soon as investigators saw this, they knew that they would have to find the pieces of the broken fan, which had fallen into the summer-high corn somewhere to the northeast.

The tail, already separated from the rest of the aircraft, is lifted into position to be brought into a hangar for reconstruction. Robert MacIntosh, the Investigator in Charge, ordered the pieces of the tail reassembled and then had ropes strung from the origin of the explosion to the holes in the horizontal stabilizer, so that each piece of shrapnel could be accounted for.