Sneha Philip

What happened

Sneha Anne Philip, 31, was a physician in internal medicine residency at St. Vincent's Hospital on Staten Island who lived with her husband in Battery Park City, a short walk from the World Trade Center. On the evening of September 10, 2001 — a day off from work — she left home at about 5:00 p.m. and went shopping. Credit-card records and store surveillance videotape place her at the Century 21 department store near the World Trade Center that evening; the last confirmed sighting of her is on that footage, at 7:18 p.m. She never came home that night, and no confirmed trace of her after she left the store has ever been found. Her remains have never been found or identified.

Because she vanished hours before the September 11 attacks, blocks from the World Trade Center, her official status was contested for years. She was initially listed among the missing after the attacks; in January 2004 the city medical examiner removed her from the official victim list, and in 2006 the Surrogate's Court set her legal date of death as September 10, 2004, three years after she disappeared, finding the evidence insufficient to place her at the World Trade Center on September 11.

On January 31, 2008, the Appellate Division, First Department, reversed that decree in Matter of Philip. The court declared that her death occurred on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center, holding that the evidence made it “highly probable that she died that morning, and at that site” — while acknowledging there is no direct evidence placing her there. She was restored to the official list of victims and her name is inscribed at the National September 11 Memorial. She is officially counted among the victims of the September 11 attacks, but she was never found, and what happened to her after she left Century 21 on September 10, 2001 remains unknown.