Elaine Mar Cash, Howard Cash and their new baby, Raphael Mar Cash. Raphael Mar Cash is a 7-pound-2-ounce embodiment of how chance and coincidence – some might say fate – conspired on and after 9/11 to preserve lives and even create new ones.
Raphael’s mother, Elaine Mar Cash, 35, was a forensic expert in the city’s Office of the Chief Medical examiner. She was flying to San Francisco on Sept. 11, 2001. Rather than take United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, she found a cheaper seat from La Guardia. United 93 was hijacked. Her flight was grounded in St. Louis. After returning to New York, she was named supervisor of the World Trade Center DNA Identification Unit.
Raphael’s father, Howard Cash, 47, is the president of the Gene Codes Corporation of Ann Arbor, Mich. His company was brought in by the chief medical examiner in October 2001 to help manage the extraordinary amount of data being generated in the effort to match and identify DNA samples. He and Ms. Mar worked closely together.
“By the end of the first year,” Mr. Cash recalled, “something of a battlefield romance developed.”
That led to a marriage, performed in March 2006 by Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan. Ms. Mar retired from city service a year ago. She was praised by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
for her “unwavering dedication to the heartbreaking duty of identifying the remains of the World Trade Center victims.” She joined Mr. Cash in Ann Arbor.
Now comes word (a few days late because of mislaid e-mail) of Raphael’s birth on Oct. 7 at the University of Michigan Hospital – “something good that actually came out of the tragedy of Sept. 11,” as his father says.
Comments are no longer being accepted.