Sifting through rubble for human remains: ‘The world was put on mute...’
Retired FBI agent is just starting to heal from trauma and poisoning
FBI agent Martha Heston was disappointed — at first.
Like most law enforcement agents, Heston wanted to be on the front lines after the 9/11 attacks.
But her evidence collection team stayed in Chicago while a different team got dispatched to the United Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, Penn.
Weeks later, Heston talked to a friend on that other team. Her colleague found three fingers attached to each other — and one of the fingers had a wedding band on it.
“There was a wall of photos of the victims there the families had put up. As she left the site at the end of day, she’d look at the faces and think, ‘Is that the woman whose fingers I found?’ “
Three months later, Heston and her team were sent to the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, N.Y., to sift through rubble from Ground Zero. They looked for human remains, personal keepsakes or anything else that would help bring closure for victims’ loved ones.
Her mother cried at their 2001 Christmas gathering in Nashville when Heston told her where she was going the next day.
Heston’s flight from her hometown of Nashville to Newark, N.J., was tough.
“For a brief moment, I had a fleeting panic attack,” she said. “I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this. What am I going to see?’”
What Heston saw and experienced knocked her flat, physically and mentally.
Nearly 20 years later, Heston is just starting to find healing from the toxins and trauma that gave her complex PTSD and rare, debilitating diseases. The 52year-old, living in Nashville again, has been through intense, elongated therapy and nine surgeries.
“I don’t think anybody can say it’s worth it to endure what she has,” her dad, Hollis Johnson, said. “But she said one time, she’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
‘When are we going?’
For Heston, being a federal agent was a lifelong ambition that started on an eighth-grade field trip to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The 1991 psychological horror movie “Silence of the Lambs” sealed the deal — Heston wanted to be FBI agent Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster.
Heston joined the Brentwood Police Department after college, then became a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation fingerprint expert.
After her 1997 divorce from her first husband, Heston called an FBI recruiting office and was told the bureau needed women agents. She started on the evidence response team in the FBI’S Chicago office assigned to drugs and gangs and then moved to the organized crime unit.
Heston worked overnight from Sept. 10 to Sept. 11, 2001, and was asleep when the first plane hit the tower in lower Manhattan. A friend in the bureau called and woke her up with news.
Heston hung up and called her team leader: “When are we going?”
Three and a half months later, Heston and her teammates got orders to go to the landfill.
The instructions:
You’re looking for human remains and personal effects.
Rubble will be spread out on large tarps covering the landfill. Each agent will have a foot-wide lane to walk, exploring every millimeter of debris.
Human remains go to a forensic anthropologists’ tent. Personal effects go in one group of plastic buckets, identifiable pieces of the World Trade Center in another; pieces of the aircrafts in a third.
Each agent will wear masks, white zip-up Tyvek suits, gloves, rubber boots and hard hats. Safety briefings at 4:30 a.m.; daily searches last until 2 p.m. No days off during the two-week tour.
The stench was the first thing agents notice, methane bubbling up from the landfill below. Dust clouds put a haze over everything, even on sunny days.
Heston found tiny, pulverized human bones a few times in those two weeks. That was tough, but It was the personal items — a locket with a picture inside, pieces of eyeglasses, a chunk of an officer’s FOP card, patches from a firefighter’s uniform — that devastated her.
“Before I put it in the bucket, I held it for a few seconds and thought, someone was wearing this that day, not knowing they’d never see their family again. It was almost too much,” she said.
The ‘toxic soup of Ground Zero’
One morning, the agents, one by one, started staring at a crane moving some debris. Hanging from the debris was a work boot with a foot inside.
“We all looked at each other,” Heston said.
“There was a hush. At that moment, it was like the whole world was put on mute for a few seconds.”
Most times, though, Heston kept her head down and worked through, pushing aside her feelings.
“My brain comprehended it, but I couldn’t let feelings affect me. I never allowed myself to fully emotionally get into the depth of what it is we were doing. I became such a pro at disassociating.”
In the cold bleakness, some warmth came from school children who sent socks to those searching through the rubble. Each pair came with a message written by the kids — “God bless you.” “You’re a hero.” “Thank you for what you’re doing.”
Heston got choked up talking about those messages.
“I hope those kids and teachers know that we got their messages and what an impact they had on us,” she said. “I would hope they’d know how needed it was.”
Shortly after returning to Chicago, Heston’s hands started shaking occasionally, sometimes badly, and she had no idea why.
Two months later, she went back to New York for another two weeks of searching through rubble.
After work, the agents would scrub themselves off in a tent that had a dry erase board listing what had been found that day — and what toxins inspectors had discovered.
“I remember seeing ‘asbestos’ on the board, and I smiled and thought, I’ll probably wake up sometime with a third eye on my forehead.’
“Now,” she said, “I don’t think that’s funny at all.”
Neither does her friend and mentor from FBI service, John Cardinal, a scientist who said at the time he was worried about toxins exposure for the agents.
“Martha said they’d provided them with protective clothing,” Cardinal said, “but I feared no one knew how bad the toxic soup of Ground Zero was.”
Heston started to discover how destructive it was about eight years later.
‘I’m not crazy’
She went through hip reconstruction, a dozen miscarriages, carpal tunnel syndrome, stabbing shoulder pain, rotator cuff tears, knee surgery and more. Then there was weight gain and fatigue, horrible nightmares, a ringing in her ears and a crumbling marriage.
Several doctors agreed so many sicknesses were unusual, but none could find or treat a root cause.
Eventually, a rheumatologist suggested her time searching through rubble likely made her sick. And Heston did her own online research and found lots of 9/11 first responders were getting rare illnesses — and getting very sick.
So Heston called the head of the FBI Agents Association, who told her that yes, more than a dozen FBI agents sifting through 9/11 had gotten sick and six had died.
Heston lost it.
“I was sobbing,” she said. “I called my parents, and I was crying so hard. ‘I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.’”
That led Heston to get some help from the World Trade Center Health Program, which covered some medical expenses that her insurance did not.
Heston marched through one procedure, surgery and appointment at a time, trying to stave off a medical retirement as long as possible.
“This career I had literally sacrificed my life for, all of a sudden I’m just going to walk away? It was very difficult,” she said. “This isn’t how I pictured it was going to be.”
Heston retired in 2018 and moved in with her dad in Nashville.
Without daily stresses from her job, Heston better was able to focus on her mental and physical health.
In therapy, she started to open up about what she saw and how it affected her. Heston said she feels much better now, sleeps through the night, lost 40 pounds and exercises every day.
She said she hopes to do what she can for 9/11 responders — and for any law enforcement officers — to reduce shame about getting help. And that starts with sharing her story.
“Even though it’s painful,” she said.