A mission of mercy

Dr. Mitchell levy kept the gas mask that he wore when he worked at the chief medical examiner’s office in Manhattan in 2001 and 2002. He identified victims through their dental work.

Clarissa Hamlin/Herald

By Clarissa Hamlin

Dr. Mitchell Levy talks publicly for the first time about being called to identify victims of the World Trade Center attacks through their dental records.

At 6:30 a.m. on a Friday — either Sept. 21 or 28, 2001; he’s not sure — Dr. Mitchell Levy, of Hewlett, boarded a Long Island Rail Road train bound for New York City. After getting off at Penn Station, he walked to the city’s chief medical examiner’s office at First Avenue and 20th Street. There was a Fort Knox-style barricade set up, Levy recalled, complete with a rooftop sharpshooter. After showing three different IDs, he was escorted to what would become his home away from home for the next eight months.

Emergency, medical, fire and police personnel were still sifting through the rubble at ground zero. Levy, a dentist with a practice on Hempstead Avenue in Lynbrook for the past 22 years, entered an air-conditioned trailer at the medical examiner’s office to begin the work that he was called to do: identify the remains of victims by way of their dental records.

A week or two earlier, Levy had responded to an online advertisement from the Academy of General Dentistry, of which he has been a member since his residency at Brooklyn’s Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in the mid-1980s. The Academy was asking for help from anyone who had forensic experience and trauma training to assist in the identification of Sept. 11 victims.

“I didn’t think about the tragedy,” he said. “I was so stunned that this occurred, I had no choice but to react and go when I was called. I was honored.” He believed he was on a mission of mercy.

His task, as part of a specially recruited team, was to obtain dental records for inclusion in the WinID dental computer system, which matches missing persons to unidentified human remains.

“There were certain times when we were very, very quiet,” he said. “A commander higher up than a chief lost his son in the attacks. The commander was brought in, and we were told, no talking at all. The man gave us a radiograph of his son’s tooth at 12 years old, his molars … I did positively ID him so that the commander knew it was his son. Obviously I will never forget that.”