Some (100) 9/11 families choose lawsuits over federal fund

The U.S. government made two promises to the families of those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks: A special Justice Department (news - web sites) fund would compensate their financial losses, and official investigations would uncover the security failures that enabled al-Qaeda to kill 3,027 people.

Uncle Sam asked one thing of the families in return: Don't drag the battered airlines and their affiliates into court. Many members of Congress wanted to avoid the sad spectacle of victims' families suing another hard-hit group.

Nearly two years later, many families of 9/11 victims are rejecting that guidance.

With the Dec. 22 deadline to apply for government payments nearing, the relatives of 1,995 deceased victims have submitted claims. The families are lining up for settlement checks that are averaging nearly $1.5 million, and they are agreeing not to sue airlines, airports, security companies or other U.S. entities that might be faulted in the fatal hijackings.

Meanwhile, with official findings of blame for the attacks slow in coming, hundreds of victims' survivors are spurning the government cash and flocking to federal courts. Undeterred by the difficulty in proving that anyone was culpably negligent -- or by roadblocks set up by Congress and the Bush administration -- the determined survivors are seeking money and facts on their own.

''Someday, please God, I will see my son again,'' says Kathleen Ashton, of Woodside, N.Y., whose son, Thomas Ashton, 21, died at the World Trade Center. ''I need to be able to look at him and say, 'Tommy, I did the right thing.' The right thing is not to take the (government) money. The right thing is to try to get answers, to see what sort of lapses allowed the murderers to do what they were able to do.''

more