NEW YORK - They held hands and wrapped their arms around each other. At times, some cried, flinched or buried their faces in their hands. Many winced at one especially gruesome image - a body plummeting to the ground.

For families of Sept. 11 victims, a federal commission's hearing Tuesday was an excruciating event - starting with a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the catastrophe that included video of the planes' impact with the towers and the skyscrapers' collapse.

But families also expressed hope that the hearing yields answers about how, when and why their loved ones were lost.

"You just look at it and think a million horrible thoughts," said Katie Murphy, whose brother, Charlie, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, in the trade center's north tower.

"I'm really wondering: `Were you able to get out? Were you injured and suffering? Were you in the stairwell, or heading up to the roof? Where were you? Are you one of those people waving from the windows?'"

The Sept. 11 commission is holding two days of hearings this week on New York's response to the attack. The panel will issue its final report this summer.

The first day was marked by heated exchanges between commission members and the police and fire chiefs who were praised after Sept. 11 for their response to the attacks.

Family members applauded at times when commissioners implied, or said outright, that the city was ill-prepared to deal with the attack. They murmured disapprovingly when former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen disputed that notion.

During Von Essen's testimony, Sally Regenhard - whose son, Christian, was among the 343 firefighters killed - held up a piece of paper that said, "LIES."

And when Von Essen insisted under tough questioning that there was nothing scandalous about the city's emergency response, one woman among the families yelled, "Yes, there is."

About a dozen rows of seats were set aside for the families at New School University in Manhattan - about 1 1/2 miles from ground zero. But so many families came that they sat throughout the auditorium.

Some came wanting to know who was responsible for failures in preventing the attacks and rescuing more people. Others just sought reassurance that their family members didn't suffer.

Wells Noonan had imagined until Tuesday that her brother, Robert Noonan, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 102nd floor of the north tower, had died a painful death from smoke inhalation.

But after she learned the commission's official account that the impact zone went up as high as the 99th floor, she said she was comforted by the idea that her brother could have been killed instantly.

"It definitely changed my idea of how my brother might have died," she said. "We had our own timeline of what we thought happened, and we now have this timeline. You try to make sense of this on an individual basis."

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