2 Missing After 9/11 Attacks Are Found in N.Y. Hospitals

NEW YORK —  Two men who were reported missing after the World Trade Center attacks have been found alive in New York hospitals, according to officials with the New York City medical examiner’s office.

George Sims, 46, was identified by photographs and DNA samples sent to the hospital earlier this month, after officials alerted his mother, Newark, N.J., resident Anna Sims, that they believed her son was in their care.

Albert Vaughan, 45, a homeless man from Brooklyn, was also removed from the list of those missing after he was discovered in an upstate New York psychiatric hospital, according to family members.

“We’ve had many cases of people initially thought to be missing who were later found and taken off the list, but I can’t recall anything quite like this,” said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office In these two cases, she noted, “somebody missing on Sept. 11 has been found ... long after the fact in a hospital.”

Sims’ mother, who first told the story of her son’s discovery to the Newark Star Ledger, was reluctant to give many details about his life. But she said that her son had been “selling things” near the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. When the family failed to hear from him after several weeks, they contacted New York police on Oct. 7 to list him as missing.

“He’s alive, but he’s not in the best of health,” his mother said, noting that her son has been diagnosed with amnesia and schizophrenia. “When I saw him, he did not know me. He did not know his daughter. He did not know his brother.”

Sims’ brother Jonathan lives in Newark, and his daughter Shalonda Matthews lives in Greensboro, N.C., according to the Star Ledger.

The family is hoping that Sims will somehow regain his memory, because they have no idea what happened to him when the twin towers collapsed and how he managed to survive. “If God brought him this far back to me, he will come back the rest of the way,” his mother said. “I am just grateful he is alive. God worked a miracle.”

In Vaughan’s case, family members learned two months ago that he was being treated at the Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, N.Y. His sister Claudia Benjamin had notified authorities that Vaughan had disappeared after Sept. 11.

Before the attacks, she told police, he was homeless and had spent much of his time in Lower Manhattan subway stations.

The family offered few details of Vaughan’s whereabouts since the terror attacks, but Benjamin told Associated Press that “I was happy because I had been thinking that he’d been blown up in the World Trade Center.”

Like Vaughan, Sims had been included in a missing persons’ list along with 693 other New Jersey victims. The number of people thought to be missing has fluctuated significantly since the attacks, with as many as 6,700 thought to be dead. The official tally has shrunk to 2,819, as many people feared lost were subsequently located, Borakove said.

Sims’ family never gave up hope that he would be found, and they did not apply for a death certificate or survivor benefits in the months after the attacks. Police officials in New Jersey and New York said they would investigate the case to see whether more can be learned about how he survived.