Picking up the Pieces: A NH Native Leads Pentagon Evidence Search
WASHINGTON – On the one-month anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the FBI has alerted all local law enforcement to be ready to act.
“Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to believe that there may be additional terrorist attacks within the United States and against U.S., interests overseas over the next several days,” said an FBI news release.
Meanwhile, the investigation on information gathered from the first attacks continues. Much work is still being done to sift through the wreckage of the Sept. 11 attacks and recover evidence to make a case against those responsible.
The FBI is in charge of this effort and leading one of the evidence recovery teams is FBI. special agent Jeffrey Bedford, a native of Exeter, New Hampshire.
“Evidence doesn’t lie, and it usually doesn’t change,” said Bedford, whose field office is in Washington D.C.
That reliability is a major reason the 43-year-old former Manchester police officer says he likes his current job as an FBI special agent specializing in evidence collection in Washington D.C. Bedford has been working for the FBI. since 1989. He is trained specifically to handle evidence collection at crime scenes, from rubble, to clothing to computers.
“If you can find good evidence, and its handled appropriately, you can build a case,” Bedford said. “We’re going to do whatever we can to piece together a case on this, in the event that anybody can be arrested.” Bedford said he wants to be able to support with evidence any eventual arrests related to the Sept. 11 attacks.
“It’s a matter of painstakingly going through everything,” Bedford said. “I have about 15 to 20 people each day at a warehouse,” he said, “going though the evidence to sort out what’s valuable, what items might have been in possession of the terrorists who took over the plane, and determine which items might be appropriate for DNA analysis.” Bedford did not say where the warehouse was located, but did mention that DNA evidence was sent to a lab in Delaware.
Bedford and his team of ten began collecting evidence almost immediately after the attacks. Bedford said he had been ready to head to New York City after hearing of the first attacks on the World Trade Center, but when the news came that the Pentagon too had been hit, he was assigned to that crime scene. Thirty other agents trained in evidence response from various teams arrived to work at the Pentagon as well, Bedford said.
“I was probably there around 10:30 or so, and set up a command post,” Bedford said. “I was handling all the evidence that was brought to us.”
“The scene was quite confusing,” Bedford said. “So initially people were just bringing us stuff.” Bedford said firefighters and rescue workers were basically handing over what they found as they walked around the area, from airplane parts to the metal pieces of desks.
“Firefighters were still putting out fires,” Bedford said. “There was a lot of smoke. The impact on the building was pretty amazing in terms of the size of the hole. The whole area surrounding it was affected by smoke, discolored. The debris was just kind of hanging off the building.”
Bedford held his hand out an angle, fingers limply pointing downward as he described the way the roof looked that morning. “The roof just kind of collapsed, but then it held where it connected to the top of the building, so you could see this pancake effect on the floors below it.” Because of the tight collapse stacking the floors, Bedford said it was hard to see inside.
“It sounds cold almost, but I did what I needed to do,” Bedford said. “I didn’t pay much attention to the building. It’s funny, because really training kicked in. I knew we had a job to do, and the search and rescue people had their job to do. Our job usually comes after a search and rescue team leaves, but in the meantime we had to get organized.”
Bedford has been to attack sites before, three bombings, two in Saudi Arabia, and one in the American Embassy in Kenya, which he said helped give him the background to be a team leader for the FBI’s evidence response team.
“Each one you learn from,” he said. “This one was different. There was no bomb. The airplane was the bomb.” But he said the evidence collection strategy was basically the same as when dealing with the other bombings.
Eventually, Bedford said he got an overhead blueprint of the Pentagon, with all the streets surrounding it, which he put it up on a board as soon as he could, to more formally organize searches through each area. The teams attempted to set up a grid to define search areas, and also orchestrated line searches, in which people walk side-by-side to scope an area. Bedford said that is the most effective way to find evidence in and on the ground.
But in two words Bedford simplified the reality of being an evidence collector at a crime scene, especially one as massive as the Pentagon. “It’s gross.”
“I didn’t even go in the building to help with the recovery effort of bodies. But what happened is the rubble was brought to us, as the heavy equipment knocked down the building, and the body parts coming out of that smelled awful too. I can’t get rid of that smell.”
As for what made Bedford go from Manchester cop to FBI. agent, he said it was the lure of the F.B.I’s reputation, and the chance to travel. He said law school helped him be able to “deal with bigger cases and have better organization, and big crime scenes require a lot of organization,” to piece together all the elements. From the rubble at the Pentagon, to clothes strewn around an apartment, to someone’s personal computer, Bedford has learned how to pick apart a crime scene.
“There is another little incident,” he said with a chuckle, when asked if the Pentagon case was his biggest. “I was assigned to independent counsel Kenneth Starr. In fact, my team searched Monica Lewinski’s apartment.”
Bedford said he was in charge of handling all the evidence for the Lewinsky investigation, including the infamous stained blue dress. He also investigated Chandra Levy’s personal computer, when she disappeared last year. And even with a case as seemingly vast as the attack on the Pentagon, Bedford said “it’s essential for attention to detail.”
The evidence response teams finished at the Pentagon Sept 28, but are still going through the evidence back at the office.
“You can’t make judgments about what you have until you actually have the time to take a breath and see what’s there, which is the same as a regular criminal case,” Bedford said. “If you do a search on a house, you grab stuff that’s relevant, and then you go through it piece by piece and that’s when you start seeing the things that are valuable.”
From Bedford’s perspective “there will be an ongoing investigation for years.”
