Don't Abandon My Son
& Others Buried at WTC

Ground Zero is sacred ground where the remains of more than 3,500 people still lie in the rubble. Our son, Firefighter Michael Lynch, Badge No. 2315, is one of them.

Some grieving families have had remains returned to them and have been able to lay their loved ones to rest in a dignified, reverential way. But now Mayor Giuliani, with the apparent backing of Gov. Pataki and other elected officials, has effectively abandoned the recovery effort at Ground Zero and turned the site over to the Department of Design and Construction. This means the remains of my son, and of the other thousands still missing, will probably be bulldozed into a truck along with tons of debris and carted off in a garbage scow.

I have visited the site every week, and I have seen a drastic change. The care with which the operation was conducted is gone. The workers now are indiscriminately scooping up debris that could contain human remains and dumping it into trucks.

Unless the mayor, governor and other officials are pressured to change this decision, my son will be denied the dignity and my family will be denied the comfort of a decent funeral.

The city has a history of treating burial sites with reverence. When a cluster of Colonial remains was found during excavation work for a new federal building in lower Manhattan, construction came to a halt and a new plan was painstakingly put into place that incorporates a large grassy memorial called the African Burial Ground. When human remains were found near City Hall Park, an archeological supervisor was assigned to the site, and no backhoe was allowed to dig until an inspection for bodies had been performed.

For the city to treat the heroes and victims of the World Trade Center with less dignity is incomprehensible.

The memorial service held at Ground Zero on Oct. 28 was no substitute for a serious effort to identify the remains of the fallen. It now seems that the service was a gesture toward "closure" to make way for the bulldozers. Immediately following the service, the number of firefighters involved in recovery was drastically cut for "safety reasons." But Ground Zero is still a fire scene, and the FDNY should be in charge of recovering the missing 3,500. Surely, dignity for these fallen firefighters; police officers; Port Authority and emergency service workers, and civilians should not be overshadowed by financial concerns or any other pressures.

The soul of the Fire Department is the pledge that no brother member or his family will ever be abandoned. For Commissioner Thomas Von Essen to go along with the mayor's decision means he has broken that pledge and abandoned his men.

Both the mayor and Von Essen are parents themselves, so it only adds to our grief that they don't seem to understand how the families feel betrayed. My family accepts that we will never again be able to go fishing with our son Michael and watch his beautiful smile when he hooks a big one. We and the other families ask only that the recovery effort continue until evidence of our loved ones can be found. That is the right thing to do.

Giuliani has instructed us to take a lesson from the Yankees and "never give up." We are not giving up, Rudy. Why are you?

Ground Zero is a battlefield. When thousands of New Yorkers went to work that morning, they were going to war, but nobody told them. This country has gone to great trouble and expense to find the remains of missing-in-action soldiers in Vietnam and rightly so, even though there were few clues as to their location.

Now we have more than 3,500 American MIAs in New York, and we know exactly where they are. But the city will not take the time and trouble to recover the bodies.

In dedicating the national cemetery at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said: "We cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it."

The World Trade Center has entered into history. The heroes of Sept. 11 consecrated the ground. Those who desecrate it will be subject to the harsh judgment of future generations.