Presentation for identification of a corpse carried out to establish his identity. The place of identification may be a morgue or other premises convenient for visiting citizens. Identification is best carried out in the morgue, since before presentation there is a need for a special toilet for the face, and sometimes for restoration if the corpse is disfigured or dismembered.

If there are assumptions about the identity of the victim, then the circle of identifiers is small, they are interrogated in the usual manner. However, more often than not, the persons who can identify the corpse are unknown. The investigator asks local residents to appear for identification. The investigator interrogates the person who recognized the deceased, and then together with him and the attesting witnesses in the morgue draws up a protocol on the identification of the corpse.

The preliminary interrogation of the identifying person is necessary in two cases: first, if the person who has appeared before the investigator declares that he can identify the deceased; secondly, if there is some information about his personality, but the investigator wants to clarify them with those who knowingly know the identifiable.

During the preliminary interrogation, not only the signs of appearance are established. Particular attention is paid to special signs, usually hidden by clothing (birthmarks, postoperative scars, joint deformities, etc.), their type and localization on the human body. The peculiarities of the items of clothing, things, ornaments worn by the victim are also being clarified.

First, the corpse is presented without clothes, covered with a sheet. After viewing his head and face, the sheet is removed from the body and limbs. In a number of cases, relatives, acquaintances or other persons who knew well the external appearance of the deceased, identify his corpse by the features of the skull, the structure and defects of the teeth, or by signs of other parts of the body. The protocol describes in detail the individualizing signs and special signs by which the identity of the deceased was established.

Identification of a corpse can also be carried out by photographs made according to the rules of signaling (identification) shooting. It is advisable to entrust photography to a specialist who, having photographed the head of the corpse from the front, both profiles and 3/4 turn, separately captures parts of the body with special features. It is more expedient to use black-and-white photographic materials, since color abrasions, wounds, cadaveric spots, post-mortem skin changes can complicate identification. Color separation filters are used if necessary. Video filming can be recommended in cases of natural disasters, catastrophes, terrorist acts with a significant number of deaths, when there are no conditions for long-term storage of corpses.

An unidentified corpse must be fingerprinted for checking the records. All things and objects found with him are described in detail. Sometimes it is practiced to remove a plaster mask from the face of a corpse.

Today's post will focus on the identification of a corpse. So, the identification of a corpse is an investigative action that is carried out by methods and allows you to establish the identity of a deceased person. Sometimes the identification of a corpse may be the only means of establishing the identity of the deceased.

The investigator shall present the corpse for identification in the event that the identity of the deceased has not been established at the scene of the incident.

Due to the specifics of this object for identification, the rule on presentation among similar objects (part 4 of article 193 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation) does not apply to it, however, all other requirements of the criminal procedure law regarding presentation for identification must be observed.

When identifying a corpse, primary attention is paid to the special features of the lifetime (traces of operations and wounds, tattoos, birthmarks, features of the dental apparatus, etc.).

In order to avoid mistakes due to the similarity of the clothes on the corpse and the clothes of the sought-after person, it is advisable for persons who knew the deceased well to present the corpse without clothes, covering the body with a sheet and opening its individual parts to demonstrate special signs. To persons who knew little of the deceased or who saw him once, the corpse is presented in clothes.

As in the identification of living persons, those who identify the corpse must first be questioned in detail about the features of the person being identified.

The presentation of a corpse for identification can be carried out both at the scene of the incident and in the morgue.

In the first case, the corpse is usually presented for identification after inspection of the scene. The "toilet" of the corpse is not done at the scene of the incident; it is presented in the same clothes in which it was found.

Often a corpse has to be presented to a large number of persons for identification. So, when a corpse is found on the road, it is presented to residents of the surrounding settlements. In these cases, the preliminary interrogation of persons who can identify the corpse is not carried out, since they do not know whose corpse will be presented, however, if the corpse is identified, they are interrogated in detail about the signs by which it was identified.

It is advisable to consistently present the corpse to several persons, taking measures to prevent their communication with each other and the undesirable influence of the opinions of some on the conclusions of others.

The presentation of the corpse for identification in the morgue is carried out by the investigator. In cases of rapid natural modification of a corpse, as well as damage as a result of an accident, transportation, disfigurement by rodents and predators before presenting the corpse for identification, it is subjected to a special toilet, and sometimes restoration, which is done after a forensic medical examination, including an expert one.

The presented object (corpse) is specific in itself, since the identifying signs that characterize a person's appearance on the corpse quickly change, and then quickly disappear.

For identification of a corpse, along with data on signs of appearance, the pathological features of the victim, scars,
gunshot wounds, deformities in the skeleton, tattoos. A very valuable circumstance for personal identification is the properties and characteristics
dental apparatus.

If the corpse is disfigured, then a forensic physician is invited to restore or "toilet" the corpse. At the same time, the identification of the corpse is complicated by the unusual situation and peculiarities of the object itself. The corpse is presented for identification alone.

If the corpse is not identified, it is recommended to remove the plaster mask from the face, as well as to take signal pictures and photograph special features. In the event that a part of a corpse is presented for identification, the same conditions are observed as for the presentation of a whole corpse.

After presenting the corpse for identification, the investigator draws up an identification protocol in the presence of attesting witnesses. At the same time, the correctness of the identification of the corpse is checked by interrogating other persons, as well as by means of forensic and forensic medical examinations.

From an interview with the head of the department of the Emergency Psychological Aid Center of the EMERCOM of Russia - Larisa Pyzhyanova:

"We often hear from journalists:" How do you comfort people? " I answer that you can comfort a child who has lost a toy, but you cannot console a mother who has lost a child.

The only thing that can be done for her at this moment is to help her realize the loss and its irrevocability. That is, to do something against which her whole being, soul and consciousness resists, because it is easier for a mother to die herself than to accept the death of a child.

And it is very important to realize and accept, otherwise she will not be able to live on, freeze and stop in her grief.

In moments when a person is experiencing acute grief, we never say that “you don’t worry, this is all natural, all people die”. We can accept the inevitability of death with our mind, but not immediately with our soul. And to say to a person who has just lost a loved one: “Everything will be fine, everything will work out for you,” is like forcing him to betray his love for the departed, to devalue his grief.

There was a plane crash, and a young woman came for identification. Her husband was in the crashed plane; he died on his birthday. The woman was pregnant with her third child, she and her husband were expecting a boy, the older two were girls. A very beautiful woman who is very fond of her husband, her family, her children. The plane crash became her personal disaster, at which point her whole previous life collapsed.

She and I are standing in front of the entrance to the forensic morgue, a very difficult moment - to go or not to go for identification, to look or not to look at her deceased husband. People after a plane crash look very different. And then there was a very difficult identification, because many young people died, and their mothers and wives arrived. In general, it was a difficult story ...

When this family arrived, there were only a few unidentified dead - three burned bodies that could no longer be visually identified, and one dead was absolutely identifiable - only the face was damaged, and everything else was completely intact. At the sight of this pregnant woman, my first thought flashed through: "Let it be her husband, let her say goodbye to him." And it really turned out to be him.

We will certainly accompany relatives during identification, this is a very complex process that includes serious preparatory work. A person has the right not to go if he has identified the deceased by photographs or things. And in this case, there was someone to go for visual identification - besides his wife, a brother and a friend of the deceased arrived. But the woman said, “I want it too. It's important for me". The men stood up in a wall and said, “No. You won't go, we won't let you in. You don't need to see it. "

And we had already talked with her for several hours, talked about children, about the family, and it was clear how close there were, how many feelings there were, how much love. However, she did not cry. This was due to the fact that, on the one hand, she is a strong, restrained woman, and on the other hand, she cannot realize the death of her husband, does not accept her. She also had a bracelet, which her husband forgot and asked to bring. She asked: "I would like to put a bracelet on his arm, if possible."

And I made the final decision - yes, we are going with her for identification, because she needs it and it is important. The face of the deceased was covered, but otherwise he lay completely intact. The woman came up, put a bracelet on her husband's hand and said words of farewell, words of love, everything that she wanted to say at that moment. Then she began to cry: “Thank you. I understood everything, but before that I was in a fog. "

When the moment comes of realizing the loss and its irrevocability, there can be different reactions, and at this time one must be very attentive to the person. And I also think: she is pregnant, she was holding the hand of her deceased husband, she needs to wash her hands, but how can I tell her about this ?!

Suddenly she herself says: "I need to wash my hands, I was holding my husband's hand and in my condition I cannot touch myself now." It became clear that she was aware of her responsibility to the child, and she would not do anything to herself and would not harm herself in any way. And the fact that she is crying now is normal and correct - she is experiencing her great grief.

We washed our hands, stood there, she calmed down a bit, and then one of the external specialists involved in the work came up. He watched from the outside what was happening, and it was clear that he was overwhelmed with sympathy for this woman, he wanted to somehow support her: "Well, you don't cry like that, please, you are in this position." She nods, "Yes, yes." - "You are so young, beautiful, you will still get married, do not cry, everything will still be fine with you!"

I was just numb at this moment. The words were spoken with the best intentions, but they sounded monstrous. Fortunately, the woman was wise, restrained, she just nodded her head and turned away. I supported her: "Come with me." And we left. "

Since the day of the tragedy, we have been living in the headquarters - in the hotel "Crown Plaza", - the voice Alexandra Voitenko sounds hard. - Today we took Alice and took her to Pskov.

Sasha had two loved ones on board the fateful flight 9268 from Egypt. His older sister Irina and her daughter Alice. Both Vitalievs. Ira was 37 years old, Alisa was a 14-year-old schoolgirl. They lived in Pskov. They flew to Sharm el-Sheikh for only a week. It was Alice's first plane ride.

There are a lot of impressions. Ira finally relaxed. I sent my relatives photographs with picturesque views from Egypt, sea trips on a yacht. Nobody had a presentiment of trouble ...

Thoughtlessly look at the water, hug from the bottom of your heart. Laugh and cry heartily, - wrote my sister. - Accept without judging. Draw pictures of other worlds. Do stupid things and not regret them. Do it not because you "have to", but because you "want". And do not be afraid of mistakes: they do not exist, there is experience.

On that day, Irina's young man arrived at Pulkovo to meet them. She has been divorced from Alice's father for several years.

For some reason we thought that they would arrive on Sunday, - Alexander recalls that terrible day. - Mom heard that the plane crashed, and immediately called me, asked to clarify which flight Ira and Alice were flying. I immediately found these two names in the lists. Then he called the hotline, they confirmed.

It's scary to imagine what the family is going through now. Sasha took over all the trouble. The parents arrived in St. Petersburg the next day. Alice's body was delivered to St. Petersburg with the second board of the Ministry of Emergencies. They were invited to the crematorium on Shafirovsky Prospect for identification.

RELATIVES ARE NOT TOLD WHICH PART OF THE AIRCRAFT THE DEATH SITTED

We are grateful to the Emergencies Ministry for preparing us for this, ”recalls Alexander. - We were first shown the photographs. And that's only a part. Before that, we also clarified what the injuries were. Then they ask, "Are you ready to see more?" We were ready for this. In the end, they showed us the body.

By the moles, by the scars, the relatives still managed to identify Alice.

Where the Vitalievs were sitting, they refused to tell their relatives, citing the fact that this was the prerogative of the Investigative Committee.

On Wednesday morning, Alice's body was loaded onto a Gazelle and taken to Pskov. The girl is accompanied by her grandfather.

But Irina has not yet been found.

If they don’t find it today or tomorrow morning, they won’t find it at all, ”sighs Alexander. - Tomorrow, identification by external data ends. In the morning we were told that 33 bodies had been identified. The specialists have about 800 fragments at their disposal. They can no longer be identified - then only by DNA examination. We are told that it can take at least two months.

It seems that the mother and daughter will be buried at different times.

Well, my relatives are still busy with paperwork.

We left an application for compensation with Ingosstrakh. We were told that there would be a simplified list. It didn’t seem to us like that: they demand to bring a bunch of documents, - say the relatives of the victims of the disaster. - It is not clear why a person from "Inosstrakh" cannot go to the headquarters himself and help relatives with the registration of the application? Why don't they want to meet us halfway?

Relatives receive compensation only upon presentation of a death certificate. And such is issued only after the identification of the body of the deceased. Accordingly, for those families whose relatives will be determined by DNA examination, these terms are greatly extended. In the meantime, the authorities are trying to help people with funerals. The Vitalievs' family was guaranteed assistance for one victim, only 12 thousand rubles.

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Flight 7K9268. We remember. We grieve.Anatoly ZAYONCHKOVSKY

Robert Jensen has built a career in cleaning up after major disasters: identifying remains, caring for the families of the victims and restoring their personal belongings. This is how he became the best specialist for the world's worst job.

The team stumbled through the jungle. The group had little idea of ​​where they were going or what they would find there. A few days ago, search planes flying high above the Andes foothills spotted the wreckage of a crashed helicopter that dotted the steep, rocky slope. It was impossible to get to this chaos from the air, so the team had to dismount.

The group through the thicket was led by Robert Jensen, a tall, strong man in a white helmet with the letters BOB scrawled on the front with a marker. They had to fight the bushes for two days to get to the place. Six days later, Jensen will be the last person to leave. It was with Jensen that the Rio Tinto mining group, which hired the crashed helicopter to transport workers from the Peruvian copper mine to Chiclayo, was the first to contact. It was Jensen who developed the strategy for how to get to the crash site when it became clear that all ten people on board had died and debris was strewn across the winding mountain ranges of tropical Yosemite. Jensen put together a team: two Peruvian police officers, two investigators, several forensic anthropologists, and a group of National Park Rangers, accustomed to climbing mountains on search and rescue expeditions. They all knew that this expedition would not be a rescue expedition.

Jensen is the person that companies call when the worst happens. The worst refers to all those events that inspire such horror and panic that most people prefer not to think about them, such as plane crashes, terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Jensen has no special gift for collecting bodies, identifying personal belongings, or talking to family members of the victims. What he has is experience. Over the course of his long career, Jensen has earned a reputation for being the best at this extraordinary business for decades. As the owner of Kenyon International Emergency Services, Jensen accepts 6 to 20 applications per year worldwide (9 in 2016, not counting since 2015). Because of his work, he is constantly involved in events that give rise to the saddest headlines in modern history. He handled funeral affairs after the Oklahoma attack, flew straight to the Pentagon after 9/11 and was involved in the search for bodies when Hurricane Katrina passed.

The 2008 helicopter crash in Peru did not make international news, but the mission is memorable for Jensen because of its complexity. Everything was sticky from the heat, the dangers of the jungle lay in wait everywhere. Jensen decided that the team would move in pairs, fearing the cougars and snakes. Before leaving, he conducted a risk assessment and learned that 23 species of poisonous snakes live in this area. He had only three or more antidotes, so he urged his team members to try, before losing consciousness, to have time to take a good look at exactly who bit them, should this happen.

They were there to collect whatever they could - personal belongings, skeletal fragments and any evidence that would help the families of the victims understand how their loved ones ended their days. Before doing all this, they had to get to the place. Jensen works as efficiently as possible: all possible difficulties have already been taken into account and resolved in a cold-blooded military manner. Jensen instructed his team to begin clearing the landing site for the helicopter, and the climbers to pull ropes up the slope so they can climb up and down. They collected each fragment in containers, so that they could then be handed over to the archaeologist, who sifted through them in search of bone fragments. To an inexperienced eye, it might seem that nothing of value could be found: the flight data recorder had already been removed, and it was clear that there were no survivors. Still, Jensen was looking.

In total, he and his team collected 110 skeletal fragments from the mountain, as well as some personal belongings and a recording device from the cockpit. The remains found by Kenyon made it possible to identify almost everyone on board, which is a great rarity and a sign of skill when dealing with high-speed accidents. Each night, the team buried what they found with a moment of silence. In the morning, all the remains were exhumed, and they were taken away by helicopter, and the team began work again.

After many days clearing the slope, collecting everything they could, Jensen suddenly sees something high up in a tree up the slope - a large piece of human tissue caught in a branch. Getting there was incredibly risky, even with the cables, but Jensen couldn't leave the find. He climbed up, collected what he found and placed in a plastic bag. His job was done. Everything he found will be given to the families of the victims. "So they know for sure that the bodies of their loved ones weren't just left in the jungle," Jensen recalls. "Not a piece."

Context

Tu-154 plane, missing near Sochi, crashed in the Black Sea

RIA Novosti 12/25/2016

Jerzy Bar about the Smolensk disaster

Wirtualna Polska 12.04.2016

More than 60 people died in the crash

Reuters 03/20/2016

Why does EgyptAir have so many problems?

Expressen 05/20/2016
Jensen doesn't have any heartbreaking rescue stories in store. What he is looking for has a more abstract value - this is a part of a person, literally or figuratively, that he can return to the family of the deceased with the words: "We tried." He knows from experience that when someone's life is destroyed, even the smallest debris can bring comfort.

Many of the items Jensen and his team found went to Kenyon's office in Bracknell, a town about an hour's drive from London, where there are as many carousels as people. Outside, you can't say that this building was built for a service that deals with the consequences of mass loss of life. The facade of the building is completely ordinary: a rough concrete box, indistinguishable from the other offices surrounding it. A small disco ball gleams through the blinds of one of the office windows. But behind the facade of the office building is a huge hangar-like warehouse, where collected personal belongings are photographed, identified and restored.

In perfect order, metal shelves throughout the warehouse are stocked with the tools needed for the millions of tasks that Kenyon performs in line with his duty. One closet contains all the clothes and the like that Jensen needs to process quickly, each item in a signed zip-top bag. It has everything you need to provide any type of first aid on the spot, and body armor for when Kenyon is called to hot spots. There is a basket of prayer rugs for Muslim families and a box of teddy bears in Kenyon T-shirts for children at Family Help Centers. A refrigerated truck, a mobile morgue, is in the corner, its door ajar. A coffin wrapped in purple cloth is seen against one wall — Jensen explains that it’s a "trainer" for training team members, but it still looks ominous. A student works at his desk, using photoshop to place photos of personal items found on a white background so that families can easily identify them later. Rain is drumming on the roof, but otherwise there is a grave silence.

Kenyon has only recently moved into this space, chosen for its proximity to Heathrow Airport, but Kenyon itself has a rich history. In 1906, Harold and Herbert Kenyon, sons of the director of an English funeral home, were asked to help identify and bring home the 28 bodies of those killed in the train crash when the train derailed near Salisbury. The Kenyons, as the company's employees still call themselves, got down to business as soon as they heard the terrible news of a major disaster. Then they could not yet identify people by DNA. The victims were identified by fingerprints and dental formula records, if they had any, or by personal belongings, if not. As technology became more sophisticated, disasters with mass loss of life became more and more widespread. Traveling by air became faster and more accessible, and plane crashes claimed more lives. The weapon became more and more powerful. The need for specialists grew and Kenyon became an international company.

Most people today believe that governments are dealing with the aftermath of massive disaster. Often it is: Jensen's extensive experience before joining Kenyon in 1998 came from the Army handling mortuary affairs. But this is not only done by the military, there are plenty of things to do for companies like Kenyon, not only because of their high competence, but also because it is useful to have a team on hand without political affiliation. In 2004, after the tsunami in Thailand, more than 40 countries lost their tourists, and each worked to return the bodies of the victims to their families. After the tsunami, the bodies are not so easy to identify, and ethnicity gives a faint idea of ​​nationality: “I will get up in Phuket and tell all Swedes to get up. And no one will answer, ”says Jensen. “We all have to work together.” Kenyon provided the equipment and worked as an honest broker, not privileging one nationality over another.

Along with terrorism, Jensen's work is often associated with plane crashes. Many passengers believe that in the event of a plane crash, the airline takes on many of the associated responsibilities. More often than not, they don't. Airlines and governments keep companies like Kenyon close at hand because they can't afford to make the mistake of being so responsible. In addition to ethical incentives to do the right thing with the families of the victims, there are huge financial losses at stake in the event of poor quality work. Years of litigation and waves of oppressive negativity and grievances from disgruntled families can be critical. Malaysia Airlines, for example, has struggled to cope with widespread criticism of its responsibility for the MH370 and MH17 tragedies (Malaysia Airlines, Jensen reminded me several times, is not a Kenyon customer). Airlines can outsource everything to Kenyon; their services include organizing call centers, identifying and transporting bodies home, mass graves and restoring personal belongings of the victims.

Some of what is expected of an airline in the event of a disaster was laid down in federal law 20 years ago. Prior to that, carriers got away with a rather disorderly performance of their duties. Families that have succeeded in getting federal tightening on the issue have lost loved ones following the accident with U.S. Flight 427. Air when a plane crashed near Pittsburgh in 1994. According to heartbreaking letters from the families of the victims to the airline, the U.S. The air crash was unsatisfactory to say the least.

“When it turned out that personal belongings were in trash containers,” writes one of the deceased’s relatives, “this was enough to piss off any caring person. Who decides which personal items are important and which go to the trash? After all, we are talking about human lives !! Sometimes a luggage tag is the only thing that a person has! "

Some countries are still lagging behind in resolving such situations. Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former Chief Inspector for the Department of Transportation, told me that after one disaster in Venezuela, authorities carried out a casual search for remains and then dug up what was left with an excavator from a nearby farm. “I do not mean that someone is not kind enough or sensitive enough, because, without a doubt, the people with whom I have worked all these years have tried to be both kind and empathetic in handling the remains,” added Mary Schiavo. “But sometimes they didn’t have the experience to pay the attention to detail that the National Transportation Safety Board or professional groups like Kenyon would do. More precisely, I mean the Kenyon group. " Kenyon makes the difference between perfect response and decades of litigation.

When a commercial flight crashes, the customer immediately notifies Jensen. Usually the customer is the airline, although in some cases it could be a company like Rio Tinto or even the country where the plane crashed. He collects all the information he can. First, he tries to figure out who is responsible for what. Kenyon is a privately held company, so if the government decides to take over the administration of the clean-up operations, Jensen makes way for them while remaining on hand for consultation. In a few minutes of the phone call, Jensen learns enough information about the incident to understand what the airline's most pressing needs are. In a matter of hours, Kenyon's staff could swell from 27 full-time employees to 900 contracted independent contractors, depending on the severity of the disaster. Kenyon's team members do not work in the same industry, although many of them have experience in law enforcement. They all have one thing in common: they are very empathic, although they retain the ability to emotionally distance themselves from disaster victims. You don't have to get involved, Jensen reminds them. Jensen prefers not to keep in touch with the families of the victims, considering himself to be a kind of activator of their grief.

Each employee and team member has their own responsibilities, and they carry them out as needed. In the long hallway of the building in Bracknell, there is a graph showing the emergency procedures. It is crowded with countless color-coded circles, each representing work to be done. At the very top is a red ball representing the Senior Incident Coordinator, Jensen.

Around the world, crisis communication team members keep their phones nearby, ready to answer media questions. At this time, the hotel liaison team travels to a hotel located near the crash site. Families of victims from all over the world fly into the disaster zone, so the hotel needs to be large enough to accommodate them all. Once the families and Kenyon staff have reached the location, the selected hotel is mailed or faxed a manual on how to select rooms and prepare them for grieving guests. Over the next few days, the hotel is being transformed into a Family Assistance Center, where family members of the victims will wait, grieve together, and spend as good time between briefings as possible.

While his plan to set up a Family Assistance Center is carried out, Jensen is already on his way to the scene. Once Jensen gets an idea of ​​the state of the bodies, he will start giving directions about the morgue. For this, it is not so much the number of victims that is important as the condition of the bodies. A small plane crash that crashed in Mozambique in 2013, for example, required more effort in organizing the collection and storage of bodies than the disaster with large commercial flights. Although only 33 passengers died, 900 body fragments were found.

Often, Jensen has to act as a liaison between the families staying at the hotel and the specialists at the crash site. All fatalities are different, but Kenyon employees rarely work alone on the crash site - even in the case of the Rio Tinto crash in Peru, the government demanded that two Peruvian police officers join the team. Kenyon works alongside local law enforcement, medical examiners, firefighters and the military. Each of them works quickly so that weather conditions do not further damage unprotected remains and personal belongings.

As soon as Jensen finds out more details about the disaster, he arranges a meeting for the families of the victims. These briefings are very difficult. “You can't undo what happened, so all you can do is not make it worse,” Jensen says grimly. "You have a very difficult task." Jensen desperately wants to give families a glimpse of hope, but instead he must tell the ruthless facts. First, he warns families that they are about to hear very specific information. Parents take their children out of the room. “You have to realize that there was a hit at high speed, which means that your loved ones now do not look like us,” he says something like that. "This means that we are likely to find several thousand fragments of human remains." At this moment, suffocation begins. Jensen siphoned all hope out of the room. Now his job is to help people undergo transformation.

When the remains and personal belongings are collected from the crash site, the canyons collect dental and other medical records and hold lengthy conversations with families, trying to figure out any details that might help identify the victims. Each family must choose one person to receive the remains and personal belongings. Some disputes end up in court. Kenyon employees explain what procedures are carried out with personal belongings and ask families the necessary questions: do they want the items found to be cleaned? Do they want to receive them from hand to hand or by mail? Jensen leaves every little detail to the discretion of the family members of the victims. They have little control over the circumstances they find themselves in, and decisions about personal things give them back a sense of some sort of control.

Families may also decide not to participate in the process. For some, personal belongings don't matter. For some, the remains are not important either. But almost everyone wants to take part. Hailey Shanks was just four when her mother, a flight attendant, died in the crash of Alaska 261 in 2000. Her grandmother received her mother's belongings - a button from a mold and a ring from a navel - and it would never have occurred to her not to take them. “I think the thought of throwing away any memory of what happened just couldn't attend,” Shanks says. Granny Shanks keeps them in a small box in her bedroom. Sometimes Shanks takes them for himself, but the trauma associated with them torments her too much. Nevertheless, she is glad that the grandmother keeps them. “I think she is very worried that she could not be there - not in the sense that she would like to be there - but that her daughter was in that situation. I think any memory of her and what happened is very important in itself. Any piece. "

At the crash site, Jensen and his team remove any hazardous substances that could cause further damage to things, but items end up in Bracknell in different states. They are wet from the weather and from the water that extinguished the fire, they smell like aviation fuel and decay. When the container is delivered, team members carefully unpack each box and arrange items on long tables in the middle of the room. Objects are studied and divided into two groups: "correlated" - things with the names of passengers on them or things found next to the body or on it, and "unassigned" - which includes everything, from watches found in a pile of rubble to a suitcase, marked with a name that is not on the passenger list. The related items are returned first, and the unassigned items are photographed and placed in an online catalog that the families of the victims can study in the hope of finding out some of the items.

Before catalogs of photographs were available on the Internet, they were made in paper form, with six or more items on each page. I spend an hour flipping through one of those directories left over from a plane crash a decade ago. Regardless of the purpose of its creation, the catalog provides an excellent representation of the style and popular culture of the time. There is Jessica Simpson's music CD "Irresistible" and a water-tainted book by Ian Rankin. Some things are badly damaged. A blackened Lego construction set and several pages of glasses without glasses and with terribly twisted arches, like from Dali's paintings. Here are some black boxes with the South Park Chef on the lid. Here is a page with engraved engagement rings - Patricia, Marise, Marietta, Laura, Giovanni - and a small airplane badge. Next to each item there is a column describing its condition, and everywhere there is a mark “damaged”.

As the families of the victims of the disaster identify whatever they can from the catalog, Jensen continues to work on matching the remaining belongings with the deceased. He works tirelessly. He and his team are using every possible piece of evidence, including camera photos and recovered cell phone numbers. Jensen even brings car keys to dealerships to try and get a vehicle identification number. Usually dealers can only report the country in which the car was sold, but even this can be important evidence. For example, Jensen learned that the set of car keys found after the Germanwing crash was from a car sold in Spain, which greatly reduced the number of victims to whom they could belong.

Identifying personal items can be much more difficult than identifying bodies. “When you examine human remains, you do a physical exam,” Jensen explains. “You talk to your family and ask them questions to gather information and identify an individual — this is not personalization. But when you deal with personal things, you can learn everything about a person. For example, what's in his playlist? Of course, your goal is not to find out what they have in the playlist, you just study what is on the computer to try to figure out who it is. " The body is the body, but personal things are life. There is no way to isolate yourself from the deceased when you view his or her wedding photos taken just a few weeks ago.

Jensen has encountered things that, under other circumstances, would have seemed personally outrageous to him. “Just think that all this baggage went through airport control. Imagine all the different societies, religions, and groups that people on the plane represent. Their personal lives tell about all this. You take a thing and think: "Oh my God. Who could need it? Why did you need this picture or this book? Why did you support this organization?" ...

Each stage of the return of things is a decision that must be made by the family of the deceased. You cannot simply assume that relatives will want to get cleaned things. Jensen tells the story of a woman who lost her daughter in the Pan Am 103 crash when a plane exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. At first, when the woman received her daughter's belongings, she was upset that they smelled of fuel. He infiltrated the whole house. But after a while, the woman began to value him as the last reminder of her daughter. “You should not deprive anyone of a choice, because you can, for example, meet a mother who says:“ I washed my son's clothes for 15 years, and I want me to be the person who washes his shirt for the last time, and not you"".

Many of the things Jensen found will never be returned. After two years, or no matter how long it takes to complete the search procedure, the lost items Jensen has collected will be destroyed. But the impressions and experiences he received will remain in memory and will often return to him and help.

Jensen, for example, knows why you shouldn't inflate a lifejacket before leaving a sinking plane: he has been to crash sites where he saw a terrible scene of people floating inside the plane, trapped by their vests, while how the rest survived. He knows that it is useless to spend his whole life afraid of dying in some kind of catastrophe. He thinks of the woman whose body he found in the rubble after the Oklahoma bombing. She wore a high-heeled shoe on one leg and street shoes on the other. He realized that this woman had just come to the office and changed her shoes. If she had been five minutes late for work that day, she would have survived.

Like the others, Jensen wonders how he would feel and lead at the very end. “I know what things belonging to my family members I would like to be returned to me. I know what, I wish Brandon got it, ”he nods towards his spouse, Kenyon CEO Brandon Jones. “The wedding ring, the bracelets (Jones and Jensen wear the braided bracelets they gave each other) are special things. He might want to sell them, ”he jokes.

Jones thinks for a second. “It's strange,” he says. “I'm not afraid to fly. I didn't look at life differently than I did before Kenyon. But I began to evaluate the importance of things in a different way. For example, there are things that I always carry with me, they are always in my bag. Souvenirs that he brought me from the places where he visited, and which are always with me. Things that I may not see every day, but I certainly always see when I fold my passport. And laying out my things on the plane, I think they would mean something to him, that he would keep them if they were returned to him. "

Jensen’s work taught that fear of disasters doesn’t help, but he always counts the doors to the exit before entering the hotel room, and when traveling by plane, neither he nor Jones ever take off their shoes before turning off. sign "fasten your seat belts" (most accidents happen during takeoff and landing, and you don't want to be barefoot on the runway if you have to urgently run out). I wondered if Jensen had any secret on how to stay calm in the age of terrorism, and here it is: allow yourself to worry about everyday worries and don't waste time with horror.

Most families prefer to receive personal items by mail, then wrapped in white wrapping paper if they are large, or put in small boxes. Some families want things to be delivered to them personally. And then it can be very difficult.

Jensen once needed to return the personal belongings of a young man who died in a plane crash. Early in the morning of the day the disaster struck, he called his mother and said that he was boarding a plane. She found out everything later that day when she turned on the TV and saw that the plane fell into the ocean.

But after that, Jensen recalls, she still wasn't sure. Could her son have sailed to the nearest island? Maybe the Coast Guard will check? They checked, of course. A few days after the crash, almost all of the passengers were identified by DNA samples, but none of the pieces of tissue belonged to her son.

When the passengers' personal belongings washed ashore, fishermen and sheriffs delivered them. They found several of her son's belongings, including two water-soaked passports (one with a visa) and a suitcase that apparently belonged to him. The company called his mother and asked if she wanted the items delivered or mailed. She asked for someone to bring them, and Jensen volunteered to do so.

Jensen remembers driving to the woman's house and seeing her son's truck still parked outside the house. His room has not been touched since the moment he set out on his journey. The woman quit her job and lived in suspended animation. “She couldn't handle it,” Jensen recalls. - There was no evidence. There was no body. " Jensen and one of his employees have cleared the table and covered it with a white cloth. They asked the mother to come out and began to unpack her son's things. They covered them up so that the sight of all the things at once did not overwhelm her. They asked her to enter.

They showed the mother two passports. She dropped her head into her hands and swayed back and forth. The next item astonishes Jensen. When they opened the suitcase, they found a set of orange hair curlers, similar to the ones Jensen's mother used in the 70s. The young man had short hair, which was very strange. Jensen guesses that the fisherman found the suitcase half open and put another passenger's belongings in it. “Please don't be offended,” he said, pulling out his curlers.

The woman looked at the curlers. She said they belonged to her son. He took to use her mother's suitcase, in which she kept her curlers. He knew how much they meant to his grandmother, the woman told Jensen. He didn’t put them anywhere, but simply left them in their place. Jensen remembers the way she looked at him after that: "So, Robert, you want to tell me that my son is not coming home."

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