Did Dr. Sneha Anne Philip Die on 9/11—or Was She Already Missing?

The last time anyone saw Dr. Sneha Anne Philip, she was shopping.

It was the evening of September 10, 2001. A camera inside a New York City department store about a block from the World Trade Center captured Philip, 31, moving through the aisles.

By the next morning, the Twin Towers were gone, and so was Philip.

Philip, an internal medicine intern who lived with her husband in Manhattan’s Battery Park neighborhood, has not been seen since. Her body was also never recovered, including in the rubble of Ground Zero, nor was any DNA evidence.

Her family fought for years to have her counted among the dead of September 11. They believed Philip had rushed toward the disaster to help the wounded and died there.

Investigators were not convinced.

Philip’s name was eventually added to the official list of victims. But more than two decades after the towers fell, the question of what really happened to her remains unresolved.

Philip left her apartment at approximately 5 p.m. on September 10, 2001. About an hour later, she used a credit card at Century 21, the discount department store near the towers, to buy a dress, linens and other items.

After that, her trail went cold.

Her husband, Ron Lieberman, later said Philip never came home that night. That alone did not alarm him, he told New York Magazine: It was not unusual for his wife to stay out overnight. 

But when the first plane hit the North Tower the next morning and Lieberman still could not reach her, he became concerned. He filed two missing-persons reports. But New York City police detectives initially seemed to believe Philip could be among the World Trade Center victims, Lieberman told New York.   

At first, Lieberman wasn’t convinced his wife had died in the attack. He wanted her photograph circulated in case anyone had seen her—and as the media frenzy centered on the thousands of people missing from the World Trade Center, he struggled to get journalists to pay attention to Philip’s disappearance. So, Lieberman told the magazine, he asked Philip’s brother to tell reporters that she had likely rushed toward the towers to help the wounded. 

And over time, that theory became the family’s conviction.

Proving someone died on September 11 typically required finding identifiable remains or evidence that the person had been at or near the towers that morning.

Philip left neither behind.

Approximately 1,000 victims of the World Trade Center attacks have never been identified, says Amy Mundorff, a biological anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville who served as New York City’s only full-time forensic anthropologist in 2001 and spent years helping identify the dead. 

There are many reasons why, Mundorff tells A&E Crime + Investigation: There may not have been enough ante mortem to compare to remains, she says, or the remains were too pulverized or burned to be useful. Thousands of fragments of human remains have never been linked to a specific person, she notes. 

Without that evidence, “we can’t draw any conclusions regarding whether someone was there or not,” Mundorff says. “If there are no remains recovered, forensic science cannot contribute to an ID.”

Seeking answers in Philip’s disappearance, her family hired a private investigator. While Lieberman was positive his wife had never returned to their apartment on September 10—and the items she purchased at the department store were never found in their home—the investigator found surveillance footage from the lobby of their her and Lieberman’s apartment building showing a woman resembling Philip leaving at 8:43 a.m. on September 11, just minutes before the first plane struck. The footage, however, was too poor for Lieberman to positively identify her as his wife.

The investigator also found no evidence that Philip had been preparing to abandon her life: She left behind her passport, license and eyeglasses—and she never used the credit card again. 

To Philip’s family, the clues, as they were, pointed toward the World Trade Center. Philip was a physician in the immediate vicinity of the attacks at a moment when emergency workers were desperately calling for medical professionals. If she was nearby, they believed, she would have helped.

The official New York City police investigation, however, produced a different picture.

Detectives uncovered what they described as problems in Philip’s professional and personal life: Philip had been dismissed from an internship at Cabrini Medical Center and disciplined at another hospital over what detectives said were alcohol-related issues. She had also been charged with filing a false report after accusing a male colleague of groping her at a bar. Philip was arraigned on the charge the morning of September 10 and pleaded not guilty.

They also said they found that Philip had frequently visited gay bars, and even claimed she’d had an affair with her brother’s girlfriend. The detectives decided it was more likely that Philip had died for reasons unrelated to the attacks—or that she had deliberately left her life behind.

Her family rejected the detectives’ findings and vehemently denied them in interviews with New York Magazine. A spokesperson for Cabrini told the magazine at the time that they have “no knowledge of any sexual harassment allegations made by Dr. Philip.”

In 2003, Lieberman petitioned New York County Surrogate’s Court to have Philip declared a victim of the September 11 attacks.

He presented the family’s theory, while a guardian appointed in the case presented information from the police investigation and argued there was no clear evidence Philip had even been near the World Trade Center when the towers collapsed.

The judge ruled that Philip had not died in the attack. Instead, the judge set her date of death as September 10, 2004—three years after she disappeared, the default timeline that New York law sets for someone who simply goes missing. The city’s medical examiner also removed her from the list of World Trade Center victims.

But Lieberman appealed the decision to the New York Supreme Court, and won. 

In January 2008, a four-judge majority reversed the lower court and ruled that Philip died in the attack. Writing for the majority opinion, Justice David Saxe said New York law allowed a court to declare someone dead when they had been exposed to a “specific peril of death,” and that it was “highly probable” Philip had perished at Ground Zero. 

The alternative explanations, he also wrote, amounted to “the rankest speculation.”

The ruling restored Philip to the city’s official list of World Trade Center victims, and her name was later inscribed on the National September 11 Memorial.

The high court’s decision came too late for Philip’s family to benefit from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which had already closed and distributed its awards. 

But the legal recognition likely had significance beyond money, experts tell A&E Crime + Investigation.

“Once something is committed ‘in stone,’ it is viewed as definitive truth,” Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, who studies September 11 memorial landscapes at the University of Florida, says, “even if the historical record is more complex.”

That tension was built into the memorialization of the attack from the beginning, she says, due in part to “the human desire to mitigate and minimize this complexity—and the anxiety it generates about not knowing.”

For families left without definitive answers, that uncertainty can create what psychologists call ambiguous loss, says Pauline Boss, a psychologist who coined the term and author of Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief and The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change. 

People can become caught between grieving as though their loved one is dead and holding on to the possibility that they are alive, she says. That “frozen grief,” Boss says, can persist across generations.

Philip’s family created its own ways of preserving her memory. They buried an urn containing ashes from Ground Zero at a cemetery near their home. Her parents have also kept her room in their house much as it was when she lived there.