CHICAGO — For Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy, Sept. 11 never comes easy.
Every year on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center towers, the former New York City police deputy commissioner gets slugged in the gut by scarring memories of all that was lost right before his eyes at Ground Zero.
“It’s tough, very difficult to deal with. It’s when I take stock of where we are in the world, how life has changed and question things and think, ‘What the hell will happen tomorrow? Will I have the option to go on and live the life I want?'” McCarthy said.
“It’s that time of the year, like the holidays for a lot of people who get depressed. … It’s when myself and some friends who were there get taken back to that place and time.”
This year, the raw emotions of that day started to return six days earlier than expected.
On Saturday, a jogger spotted a baby’s severed hand along the shore of the Garfield Park lagoon. And later, investigators discovered the baby's badly decomposed head and limbs.
As McCarthy headed to a news conference at the lagoon where divers continued to look for the child’s torso on Thursday, Chicago’s police superintendent couldn’t ignore the gruesome irony: As they had in post-9/11 New York City, officers under his command again searched for bits of a life torn to pieces.
RELATED: Police Sketch Shows Toddler Whose Remains Found in Garfield Park Lagoon
Finding body parts "brought it all back, big time,” McCarthy said, after releasing a forensic sketch of what the baby found in the lagoon, likely a boy between 2 and 3 years old with twisty black hair and brown eyes, may have looked like before the unthinkable happened.
For McCarthy, the indelible memory of planes crashing into the towers on Sept. 11, 2001, was hardly the worst of it.
“Just to be clear, 9/11 was a lot less traumatic than the post-9/11 stuff we had to deal with, whether it was rescue and recovery, which went on for months and months and months, memorial services and recovering friends' bodies and dealing with the families, who basically took up residence in police headquarters, every single day and trying to move everything forward at the same time,” he said.
McCarthy still criticizes himself for being blind to how the horror of it all left officers who surrounded him with deep emotional and psychological scars.
“I literally lost three people psychologically who ended up retiring shortly thereafter, one of them being my driver who was with me the whole time. I didn’t realize the toll it was taking on him. And two others who were working at the morgue where we were recovering body parts and bodies on an ongoing basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week in refrigerated trucks,” he said.
“I wasn’t sensitive enough to the effect everything they saw after 9/11 had on them.”
Fourteen years later, McCarthy says he’s learned from that mistake.
After baby's dismembered body parts turned up in Garfield Park, McCarthy sent word to recovery effort supervisors to be mindful that officers searching the lagoon might see horrible things that shake them to their core — and to make sure those officers know the department is there to help them cope if they need it.
It was a message the superintendent just couldn’t deliver to those officers himself.
“Honestly, I didn’t talk to them. I didn’t do it today,“ McCarthy said Thursday. “I will do it, but I just didn’t feel up to it, quite frankly.”
Come Friday, the 35-year police veteran expected to struggle coping with emotional aftershocks of 9/11 like he does every year. He does the best he can.
“There are about seven people who I don’t always get to keep in touch with that I will talk to tomorrow,” McCarthy said. “We always speak to each other and try to break chops to keep it a little light.”
The superintendent ticked off the names of a few guys he plans to call, including Tom Purtell, then NYPD’s chief of special operations, whom McCarthy remembers seeing heading toward the World Trade Center’s north tower before it collapsed.
“I was looking for him all day and calling him on the radio, but he never answered until I finally ran into him. He was OK, at least physically. He was bleeding from a cut on his head, but only because he cut it shaving it,” McCarthy said. “I gave him a big punch in the chest the second I saw him because I was calling him on the radio for about four hours.”
Eddie Hartnett, head of the NYPD’s intelligence division at the time, will surely get a call from McCarthy, too.
McCarthy has vivid memories of spotting Hartnett on the street after both towers came down. That’s when McCarthy became Hartnett’s savior, the buddies like to tease each other.
Hartnett was covered head-to-toe in dust and appeared “out of it.”
“I called him and called him, and finally he responded to me, came over. I had a bottle of water for some reason. I made him put his head back and poured water over his eyes,” McCarthy said.
“We jokingly say that I saved his life, which isn’t true at all. I poured water over his face.”
McCarthy finds some comfort in those stories, mostly because he gets to tell them again when he call his pals on the anniversary of a day that changed them, and everything, really, forever.
“On 9/11 we lost friends. John D’Allara had a locker next to me when I was a police officer. Mike Curtain was a sergeant in emergency service. I knew 13 of those 23 officers that we lost. It hurts,” he said.
“There’s trauma caused by things you see that you don’t even realize.”
McCarthy learned that after Sept. 11 and never forgot.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here: