On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Neil Haarmann, father of Guilford sophomore Landry Haarmann, experienced first-hand what the rest of the nation watched on television.On his way to work, Mr. Haarmann rode a train from his home in New Jersey into the subway station that used to be in the World Trade Center. At 8:40 a.m., he left the World Trade Center, walking north towards his office.

Two minutes later, on the corner of Liberty Street and Broadway, he looked up to see an airplane crash into the first tower, where his cousin worked on the 98th floor.

Later that morning, he stood two blocks away when the first tower fell, showering him with ash. It was, he said, “the worst day of my life.”

For the families of victims of Sept. 11, 2001, the wounds of the tragedy were reopened on Oct. 20, when construction workers at Ground Zero found dozens of human remains that range from small fragments to identifiable bones nearly a foot long. The remains were found alongside wallets, watches and other personal effects in an abandoned manhole beneath a service road.

Of the 2,749 victims from the World Trade Center, 40 percent were never identified.

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg initially said that construction on the World Trade Center memorial site would not be halted, the families of the unidentified victims became outraged.

On Oct. 27, a week after the remains were found, Bloomberg made another statement, saying that the city will renew their searches of Ground Zero, even expanding beyond the 16-acre World Trade Center site.

Mr. Haarman’s family later recovered remains of his cousin, and they were buried during a memorial service last Sept. 11, exactly five years after his death.

“The families of (Sept. 11) have an awful lot of say in this area,” Mr. Haarmann said. “It would be a crime not to take every measure to identify these people. “There were a lot of people in those two buildings that I knew. I don’t know how many of them have been identified.”

In April, several hundred bone fragments were found on a damaged building south of the World Trade Center, causing a heated debate between families, firemen and city officials about how the clean up of Ground zero may have been executed too quickly

“The mentality up here at that time was to clean it up as quickly as possible and start rebuilding,” Haarmann said. “They had to take all that debris out of there, so they made service roads. There were manholes under these roads. It was done, in hindsight, too quickly and too haphazardly.”

Now, more than five years later, a renewed search for remains is underway. “We’re going to search high and low for anything we can find,” New York’s Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler told The New York Times. “And if the result of all this work is only one more remain or one more piece of personal property, it will still have been worth it.”

“This site has an incredible symbolic and emotional value to New Yorkers, and Americans as a whole,” said Ken Gilmore, associate professor of political science. “We’re all attached to that piece of ground. I think it is important that the community provide these remains with a certain amount of respect.”

Anne Haarmann, Landry Haarman’s mother, once worked on the 96th floor of the first tower to be hit, and knew many that died on Sept. 11, 2001. “I think they need to move forward, and as they move forward they need to be more cautious, maybe bring in archaeologists as consultants. It can’t go on the way it has.