Discovery of new remains gives hope to some 9/11 kin

James McCaffrey, whose brother-in-law Battalion Chief Orio Palmer of Valley Stream is among the 1,123 missing victims of the World Trade Center, thinks that new finds of human remains may help some families - perhaps even his own.

"It does give us some hope we may get something," said McCaffrey, an FDNY lieutenant from Yonkers. "But it shows how little the city has done so far."

He, like members of many other families, said the city did not do enough in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks to aggressively find and identify remains.

"My concern is that there are areas of Ground Zero that have not been searched," said Sally Regenhard, one of the most vocal Sept. 11 family members on a wide range of issues. Her firefighter son, Christian, is also among the missing.

For Rosemary Cain of Massapequa, the city's nearly nine-year forensic operation at Ground Zero seeking to identify remains has been a bureaucratic misadventure.

She credits the persistence of the medical examiner's office for helping families like hers recover even small remains of their loved ones, including her son. But Cain is part of a group of family members claiming that some human remains have been commingled with garbage at Fresh Kills landfill. The group is appealing a federal judge's 2008 decision to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the families against the city.

In the suit, the city denies any wrongdoing and said it treated the remains with respect. City officials have defended the pace of the identification process and said they have acted in good faith. The judge said in his decision that the city sought "a swift and efficient recovery" from an unprecedented event.

Regenhard lauded FDNY participation at the screening operation of 844 cubic yards of new debris found at Ground Zero. But she thinks in all this time if the search had been done right, with the help of U.S. military forensic experts, all of the remains would have been found.