9/11 relatives in court battle for formal burial place

An to forge an agreement over the handling of debris from the World Trade Center became a raw, sorrowful exchange on Friday between relatives of Sept. 11 victims and a federal judge.

The relatives sued in August to try to force the city to separate at least 360,000 tons of finely filtered debris, known as "fines," from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, and to create a formal burial place for it.

The judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of US District Court in Manhattan, has adopted an unorthodox approach to the suit. He discouraged the two sides from filing the usual contentious motions and offered instead to hold a public discussion in his courtroom between the families and the city's lawyers, to try to resolve the painful issue of the remains without a drawn-out fight.

Hellerstein to summarize the city's position on Friday by saying it hoped to turn "what we thought of as a garbage dump" into a "beautiful park."

In a startling break from normal courtroom decorum, however, Laura Walker, the wife of a victim, jumped up from her seat in the gallery.

"Are you crazy?" she asked the judge. She had to support the lawsuit, she said, "so my children don't have to think that their father is buried in a garbage pile."

"You should be ashamed of yourself," she told the judge, leaving the courtroom. Walker's husband, Benjamin J. Walker, was an insurance broker at Marsh & McLennan, whose offices were at the trade center. Another victim's relative, Rose Foti, also walked out.

Rather than gavel the session to order, Hellerstein apologized.

"I'm trying to deal with this as a human problem," he said: "I only lost friends and associates at the World Trade Center. I did not lose family."

If the suit has to be handled as formal litigation, he said, he will be bound by cold "statutes and technicalities," and the outcome may be worse for the families. He appealed for "a little slack."

The judge had invited the relatives to his courtroom on Friday to watch videotapes presented by lawyers for the city. One showed the careful process of sifting and sorting of huge steel beams and mountains of wreckage at the landfill after Sept. 11. The other showed drawings of a park that the Bloomberg administration plans to create on the landfill, which has been closed.