Families of 9/11 victims killed at the World Trade Center site have expressed their unhappiness with the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum's plan to place the unidentified remains of over 1,000 victims placed in the museum's underground portion. Sally Regenhard, whose son Christian was a firefighter who died on 9/11, said, "We were always led to believe by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation that we would have a separate, above ground tomb-like structure."

According to the NY Times, the officials' plan is to "take the remains seven stories below ground and place them in the new museum behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil about never forgetting, studded in letters of World Trade Center steel." The museum's director, Alice Greenwald, told the Times that the WTC site has significance and there are other precedents of victims' remains being part of museums, "When you go to the genocide museum in Phnom Penh, when you go to genocide museums all around Rwanda, there have been decisions in those places to present corpses, skulls, evidence of human remains. When you go to Auschwitz, the entire facility is made up of human remains."

Norman Siegel, who is representing the protesting families, said yesterday, "We are against the remains at the museum," and especially at the proposed location, 70 feet underground. Regenhard, who had called it a "post-traumatic stress situation waiting to happen," also told the Daily News, "The city is making human remains an attraction of the museum. We demand a separate [location] above ground, fully accessible to the public area - not in the basement of a museum." The group also wants Mayor Bloomberg to contact families of all 2,749 9/11 victims to ask their opinion of where the remains should be placed.

The Mayor's office told the Times yesterday that a coalition of victims' families were "consulted during public hearings and private meetings with officials, where they repeatedly stated it was essential the remains be located at the sacred bedrock of the site, along with a private room for families, exactly the plan that is being enacted. We note respectfully that many of the individuals speaking today disagreed with the majority of families consulted back then as well." Still, one angry mother of a firefighter killed on 911 said, "[Mayor] Bloomberg does not own the remains."