" I don’t know how many remains from the World Trade Center attacks I personally processed. It’s impossible to know. I had 598 DM01 cases officially assigned to me. That makes arithmetic sense: the individual pieces of recovered remains numbered 19,956, and there were 30 medical examiners. Around 600 each. We would try to make sense of it by thinking of the victims as numbers, remains, specimens. A year after the event, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner had issued 2,733 death certificates for the victims of the World Trade Center bombings—1,344 by judicial decree and 1,389 based on identified remains. The count of Members of the Service confirmed dead was 343 firefighters, 23 NYPD officers, and 48 others, most of these Port Authority police. The dead left more than 3,000 orphans. It was the largest mass murder in United States history. "

― Judy Melinek , Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner