New York ? Barbara Minervino has just 40 minutes to describe the lifetime’s worth of grief she suffered when her husband was killed in the World Trade Center attack.

This week, she will be among the first people interviewed as prosecutors begin choosing 30 victims’ relatives who would testify during the penalty phase if Zacarias Moussaoui is convicted of conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Barbara Minervino sits next to a framed photo of her husband, Louis Minervino, a World Trade Center attack victim, at her home in Middletown, N.J.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said Sunday that he would decide by the end of the week whether to seek the death penalty.

“I don’t think a lifetime is enough time to say what it has done to us,” said Minervino, who has two adult daughters. “We have been robbed of the kindest, gentlest man in our lives. We have been robbed of the glue that holds the family together.”

Justice Department officials and FBI agents plan to interview families in 40-minute blocks in New York City, Boston and Arlington, Va., starting today.

Relatives are being scheduled according to where their loved ones worked, with relatives of people who worked at financial companies in the World Trade Center the first in line.

Minervino, whose husband, Louis, was an executive for the financial services firm Marsh & McLennan Co., planned to take photographs of her husband along to the interview.

Families of firefighters and police officers are scheduled for Tuesday. Relatives of employees of bond brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald which lost 658 of its nearly 1,000 employees are on Wednesday. Others are set for Thursday.

Jury selection for Moussaoui’s trial is to start Sept. 30 in Alexandria, Va.

Moussaoui, 33, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, is accused of being an accomplice in the attacks. He is charged with six counts of conspiracy including four counts that could carry the death penalty.