The name of Dr. Sneha Anne Philip, who lived in Lower Manhattan and disappeared without a trace just hours before the attack on the World Trade Center seven years ago, was added to the official death toll on Thursday.
Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, now says that 2,751 people died as a result of the twin towers’ collapse.
Though there is no body, Dr. Hirsch’s office has ruled — by order of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court — that the cause of Dr. Philip’s death was blunt trauma and that the manner of death was homicide.
In February, the Appellate Division reversed a Surrogate’s Court decision and concluded, in a 4-to-1 decision written by Judge David B. Saxe, that “demonstrated facts strongly support the inference that her death occurred in the context of the World Trade Center attack.”
Dr. Philip, an internist, was 31 years old. She lived with her husband, Ronald Lieberman, at 225 Rector Place in Battery Park City, a few blocks south of the trade center.
The opinion said that Mr. Lieberman “established with his testimony that his wife was away from home overnight on Sept. 10, 2001, which was a common occurrence in their marriage, and that whenever she was out overnight she consistently returned home between 7:00 and 9:00 the following morning.”
“Consequently,” the opinion said, “it may be inferred that she was returning home on Sept. 11, 2001, within that time frame. He also established that his wife was a physician whose outgoing personality made it likely that she would volunteer to aid injured people, which takes on particular importance in view of the testimony of the police detective that the first responders at the World Trade Center had called out for the assistance of any medical professionals nearby.”
The court concluded that the “testimony powerfully suggests that she was in the area at the time of the attacks, either returning home, or having just left home again five minutes before the first attack at 8:48 a.m., whether on her way to shop at the mall, to look at Windows on the World, or do some other errand.”
This is the second time the death toll has been revised since New York City set the exact number at 2,749, four and a half years ago.
In May 2007, Dr. Hirsch said he was certain “beyond a reasonable doubt” that exposure to dust from the collapsing towers had contributed to the death of Felicia Dunn-Jones, 42, a lawyer who was running from her nearby office that morning. With that, the official toll increased to 2,750.
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