Report: Unidentified remains of 9/11 victims may never be identified

The unidentified remains of more than 1,000 victims found at the World Trade Center after the 2001 terror attacks may never be identified through DNA, the findings of a new study by the New York City Medical Examiner's Office has concluded.

While officials in the office believe that advances in DNA analysis may make new identifications imminent, a statistical modeling study expected to be published in the journal Forensic Science International and prepared by OCME staff estimates that of the 1,106 still-unidentified victims, about 90% may never be identified, officials said.

“Regardless of the DNA testing we do, we will never [identify] all of the victims,” OCME forensic anthropologist Bradley Adams told Newsday.

Victims' families had a range of reactions to the study, just as many of them were getting ready to mark the 21st anniversary of the attacks on Sunday.

Anthony Romagnolo, 28, of Miller Place, lost his father, Joseph Michael Romagnolo, an electrician under contract with Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the north tower when a plane flew into it.

He said it would be traumatic for his mother if remains were found and identified. "It would bring up old wounds," he said. "I've moved on. The bottom line was he didn't come home that day."

But he said his paternal grandmother would appreciate it because she's "old school" and it would be important to bury whatever was recovered. 

The family had a memorial in Rocky Point without a body or remains. His father's 1999 Harley-Davidson was front and center, where the casket would be. It was surrounded by photos and mementos from his father's life. "We did as much as you could do for someone who was not there." 

Mark Herencia, who lives in Washington, D.C., and lost his mother, said he had "mixed emotions" about the fact that no remains of his mother were ever found or identified. "I know she was there," the former New York City resident said, "and I know that she is gone." 

Herencia's mother, Mary Herencia, was an insurance broker with Aon and worked in the south tower. Herencia said his mother's co-workers told him that they last saw her in the sky lobby, waiting for an express elevator on the 95th floor. She would have turned 47 years old on Sept. 19, 2001. "I miss my mother every day," he said.

Herencia said he goes to the ceremony at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum every year. "I figure that is her grave site. It's better than a cemetery," he said.

Thomas Smith, a firefighter in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, lost his father, Kevin, who was an FDNY member with Hazmat Company 1, Squad 288, based in Queens. Kevin Smith was supposed to be off on 9/11 but picked up a shift for a colleague. He was last seen alive in the north tower that morning, his son said. The unit was on a call in Manhattan when the planes hit and was one of the first units on the scene. The unit lost 19 firefighters. 

The son said he spent about three weeks on the pile looking for his father and others, often sleeping at his father's firehouse. But remains were never found or identified.

"There's no closure," Thomas Smith said. "That has been the hardest thing for my family." 

He said he feels like the lockers containing unidentified remains at the memorial site in lower Manhattan are his father's grave.

The main problem is that scientists still face great difficulty in extracting usable DNA from the human fragments, which are being held in a special private repository at the National September 11 Museum complex in Manhattan.

Some fragments have no usable DNA because of the fires that burned for months at Ground Zero, the massive recovery and shifting operations that took place at the Staten Island landfill, as well as the destructive kinetic forces involved in the crash of the two aircraft and the collapse of the towers, Adams said.

The projections estimate that up to 75 new identifications will be made if viable DNA can be obtained from the remains, said Adams, who added those projections don’t take into account future advances in DNA technology that could improve the odds of identification. 

The remains of 40% of the 2,753 victims who died at the World Trade Center have yet to be identified, officials said. It has been a percentage that has barely moved in recent years.

The last new public identification occurred in September of last year when the remains of Dorothy Morgan, a 47-year-old grandmother from Hempstead who died in the north tower, were identified.

Already in the past year, an updated method of preparing bone samples for testing allowed OCME scientists to identify 15 previously unknown World Trade Center samples and match them with victims who had already been linked to other remains, said Mark Desire, head of OCME’s missing persons and body identification unit.

But the big breakthrough looming in DNA analysis involves a system called Next Generation Sequencing or NGS, which the Department of Defense perfected, Desire told Newsday last month. Desire believes OCME is on the verge of a breakthrough in identifications with NGS.

“It is only a matter of time,” Desire said.

NGS is an advanced method of testing DNA samples, which, among other things, allows scientists to retrieve genetic materials from small areas of a cell known as the mitochondria.

OCME had some success this year in using NGS to identify remains of 10 missing persons who were found in the city over the years.

Another study by OCME officials found that for World Trade Center victims — including firefighters and other first responders — the place where they died in the towers appear to have little bearing on the chance of having their remains identified. Of the 1,673 victims whose remains were partially or fully identified, there was only slightly higher rates of identification for victims who were below the impact zones of the hijacked aircrafts in both towers, compared with those who were at the jet impact areas or above. 

“There was always the assumption that you had lower levels of identification at the [aircraft] impact zones,” Adams said. “The study showed this wasn’t true.”

But for those victims on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane that struck the north tower, and United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the south tower less than 20 minutes later, the success rates for body identification were significantly different, the study found. Some 76% of the victims on Flight 11 [excluding the terrorists] had remains identified, but just 47% for Flight 175, according to the analysis, which was recently published in Forensic Science International. 

The Sept. 11 families have been briefed by Adams and others from the OCME in an effort to explain the identification process and what the future might hold.

Mary Fetchet, who heads “Voices: Center For Resilience,” a support and advocacy organization for families of those lost on Sept. 11, said the briefing shed light for the families on the fact that it will always be unclear exactly where the victims were when the towers collapsed around them.

 “You don’t know if they went up, if they went down,” said Fetchet, of Connecticut, whose 24-year-old son Brad was killed in the south tower.

The recovery of remains presents families with the need to choose what they want to do next. In Fetchet’s case, she has received about a half a dozen of her son’s remains and is waiting to decide what their final disposition will be.

Some families have said they don’t want to be notified when there are additional identifications made of their loved one’s remains. Others want to know but ask for privacy and no publicity.

For Rosemary Cain of Massapequa, whose 35-year-old FDNY firefighter son George died at Ground Zero, she has received additional remains of his over the years and will continue to want whatever might be found. When George’s remains were recovered, Cain said, she buried them at St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale.

“It was probably the most important thing we thought about after the attacks and coming to reality that George was a victim,” Cain said this week about the cemetery burial. “It does bring peace and comfort.”

Former FDNY Chief Jim Riches of Brooklyn lost his firefighter son — known as Jimmy — and was part of a recovery team that retrieved his body for later burial at St. John Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens. Riches said this week he feels lucky to have recovered his son but feels that other families will not be as lucky.

“I think the day is going to come when they will close the book on this [process],” Cain said. “I think after 21 years most people have come to accept it.”

Families often ask how much of a body was recovered and Adams said the OCME compiled body charts to come up with percentages of “body completeness” to answer such questions.

“The lower you were [in the towers], the more complete you were,” Adams noted. “The people at [plane] impact zones and above tend to have lower body completeness scores.”

The body fragmentation was a grim testament to the severe traumatic injuries the victims suffered. The bodies of only 20% of the victims from the towers were virtually intact, according to the OCME. One of the victims in the south tower whose body was found in a state of near completeness was Welles Remy Crowther, the fabled “man in the bandanna” whose exploits of helping people out of the tower — while wearing the bandanna — have been told in documentaries and countless stories.

Crowther, 24, died in the tower as he was helping others and several weeks later his body was recovered, recalled his mother, Alison Crowther, 72, of Nyack.

“It was somehow settling and centering that we know we were able to bring him back home and complete the circle,” Alison Crowther said in a telephone interview. “To have his body brought back to us was a closure of sorts.”

Crowther’s family had him cremated, and his ashes are in a special repository for such remains at the Grace Episcopal Church in Nyack, Alison Crowther said. It is a place she said she and her late husband, Jefferson, would go to spend time for reflection. Other families whose loved ones haven’t been identified don’t have that opportunity.

“My heart really goes out to families who never were able to receive remains. I know how cold it is not to have a place [to memorialize],” she said.

About the continuing effort to push the boundaries of science to identify the World Trade Center victims: “Bless them for keeping trying,” Crowther said.