Dead Center

These are stories of crime, investigation, death, and Ground Zero, by the insider who ran the largest forensic investigation ever attempted, the effort to find and identify the victims of the 9/11 attacks. In his fifteen years with the New York City medical examiner's office, Shiya Ribowski has been the primary investigator on more than eight thousand deaths, a harrowing crash course that put him at the scene of the most gruesome and bizarre crimes in the city's history. There was the encounter with mummified human remains, the traveling freak show, bodies dumped under bridges and the crack dens of the nineties and, most challenging of all, the extraordinary task of identifying the bodies of the victims of 9/11, an undertaking that only recently came to a close in April 2005.In "Dead Center", Ribowsky shares his intimate and utterly unique knowledge of death. From the morgue to the examining table to the darkest corners of the forensics industry, Ribowsky reveals the personal ethics and emotional backbone that allow him to do the job. Weaving together fascinating stories from 9/11 and tales of Ribowsky's career at large, "Dead Center" is a riveting tale of forensic science and murder, and a vicarious thrill ride through New York's criminal underworld.