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Families piece together lost loved ones' stories

By VERENA DOBNIK | Associated Press Writer

12:35 PM EDT, August 12, 2005

NEW YORK - Emotional family members of firefighters killed on Sept. 11 spent Friday morning poring over newly released transcripts and recordings to find out what happened to loved ones trapped in the World Trade Center towers.

A half-dozen family members and two fire officers bent over laptops in a 29th-floor office building in midtown Manhattan, reading the transcripts of more than 500 firefighters' oral histories, released by the Fire Department. Dispatches of some firefighters' frantic emergency calls, recorded on CDs, played in the background.

Fire Lt. Jerry Reilly, who escaped the trade center's north tower, said the transmissions were almost too painful to hear. "I never heard any of this before _ the chaos," he said, his eyes tearing up.

Reilly said the dispatches made it clear that "the radio communication was terrible. But I knew before that the radios were terrible in the field."

Reilly and the family members took notes as they pored through 23 CDs of recordings and thousands of pages of transcripts.

"It's very emotional. It's very difficult," said Sally Regenhard, mother of 28-year-old Christian Regenhard, killed along with most of his company's firefighters that day. "But it's no harder than knowing every day that my son is gone."

Regenhard, who said she has still never found out exactly how her son died, said she knows the records will prove that firefighters weren't able to communicate effectively with each other.

"I want the world to know about the wholesale failure of the radios," she said.

She also said she was angered by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's statements that one group of firefighters had chosen to stay in one of the towers after they were told to evacuate.

"That's a lie," she said. "That's why I'm here."

The family members planned to speak further at a news conference later Friday.

The fire department made public the 15 hours of radio transmissions and oral histories after The New York Times sought the records under the freedom of information act. The rush to the trade center saved an unknown number of civilians and cost 343 firefighters their lives.