City of Dust

14. Missed opportunities

On a blustery late summer morning in 2007, with heavy rain and flashes of lightning across the city, Joseph Jones finally had the chance to hear his wife publicly acknowledged as the 2,750th victim of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Felicia Dunn-Jones was just one of so many, yet six years after the fires at ground zero were extinguished, she was the only person till then whose death had been officially attributed to exposure to the dust. With his daughter, Rebecca, at his side (son Joe junior was too emotionally distraught to be there), Jones, along with Kiki and Rick Bennett, the lawyer who had helped him get Dunn-Jones’s death classified as murder, listened intently as a New York City firefighter intoned “Felicia ...