9/11 victim identification emotionally gruelling It was a beautiful Tuesday morning in September and Juliana Kim had a meeting in Manhattan. She also intended to return a wallet to a store on the ground level of the World Trade Center, but forgot her handouts for the meeting and had to stop by her office in Jersey City to get them. That’s where she was when, just across the water, she watched as the second plane flew into the south tower. “I saw the whole thing happen from my office window,” she said. “We saw the towers crumble.” What Kim, a 1993 graduate of Old Dominion’s bachelor’s program in dental hygiene and a 1995 master’s recipient, did not know at the time was that her involvement with the tragedy unfolding across the river was just beginning. Kim, along with countless others she is quick to credit, volunteered to help the victims, families and city cope. While many people gave blood, assisted with the clean-up and staffed information centers, she used her training in forensic dentistry to help in victim identification. Like many of her colleagues, Kim worked her regular job during the day (at the time she was manager of professional relations for GlaxoSmithKline), and came to the Dental ID Office at night and on weekends. The volunteers worked in one of three areas – postmortem, antemortem or comparison. Postmortem team members worked with human remains and the antemortem team worked with victims’ dental records. The most experienced volunteers worked on the comparison team, using computer software to compare records with remains in hopes of identifying victims. Each action by a volunteer – whether entering a piece of information in a computer or making a physical comparison of evidence – was confirmed by two team members to ensure accuracy. Kim was a member of the antemortem team, a position she thought would be less emotionally grueling. She was wrong. She chronicled her experience in a first-person story for the November/December 2001 issue of Contemporary Oral Hygiene magazine. “Entering dental records was the easy part. Entering personal data was very difficult. I didn’t realize a significant number of the victims were so young – entering birth dates of 1978, 1980, 1975, etc., seemed so senseless and unreal. Each file contained photographs, mostly of their college graduations or weddings. They were all somebody’s loved one – son, daughter, wife, husband, mother or father – and now I was invited to be a part of their tragic story.” Kim’s involvement with the team lasted about a month. Prior to Sept. 11, she was in contract negotiations with Philips Oral Healthcare Professional Group Inc. and was preparing to move to Seattle for a job as director of professional relations, domestic and international. By the end of October she had accepted the position and, although she was on the opposite side of the country physically, the emotional memories of New York remained. “It didn’t really hit me until I moved,” Kim said. “While I was there I was immersed in it, but when I wasn’t there and wasn’t helping out, that’s when it was hard.” – Elizabeth V. Harders