Politics & Government

Providing Closure Becomes Important

When no survivors were found at Ground Zero by rescuers, Redlands Fire Battalion Chief David Graves said finding any remains to provide closure became important.

For Battalion Chief David Graves, the toughest thing about participating in the search and rescue efforts after the 9/11 attacks was seeing the pained faces of the living.

“There were (thousands) of people out there trying to find family members just outside the Javits Center,” he said. “There was poster after poster of loved ones that people were trying to locate.”

Graves, an engineer with the Redlands Fire Department at the time, and his wife Sheila McKee, joined a group of canine handlers as part of Riverside Urban Search and Rescue Task Force Six sent to Ground Zero to help with the search for survivors following the attacks.

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Both are canine search specialists. Graves, and his dog Coby, a black Labrador retriever, arrived at “the pile” on Sept. 12.

“It was pretty incredible the first night that we got there because there was still a lot of panic about what was going to happen,” he said. "We didn’t know if there were going to be secondary collapses. Were there going to be explosions? Were there other terrorist attacks?”

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As rescuers, Graves said they pushed to search for survivors, but found none.

“One of the trainers who I worked with had a very hard time,” he said. “He took it very hard that he was going out there and not finding anything out there.

“I had kind of made some decisions before I went that the odds of anybody surviving something like that were pretty slim,” he said.

But seeing the family members had a big impact on Graves. And when Coby showed an ability and willingness to detect human remains, Graves searched for anything he could take to coroners to identify through DNA.

“When the dogs started to find primarily human remains, it became important to give families' closure,” he said.

Coby died last year at age 16. But Graves memory of the work is still fresh in his memory. The lab help 18 to 20 families find loved ones, he said.

“That was important to us,” he said.

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