Identification of 9/11 remains comes to an end

[Jolie Rouge]

DNA technology exhausted, New York officials say
From Phil Hirschkorn -- CNN
Wednesday, February 23, 2005

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Saying it has exhausted all DNA technology, the New York City Medical Examiner has halted the process of identifying human remains from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center site.

Family members are to be notified by telephone calls and letters saying that further positive identifications are not expected, leaving more than four out of 10 families with no recovered remains for burial.

But the medical examiner's office says if new DNA technology emerges, the process could easily resume. "We've exhausted all the DNA technology as it exists today," Ellen Barakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner, told CNN Tuesday. "We are pausing."

For some time, the process has been at a near standstill. Of the 2,749 people known to have been killed at the World Trade Center site, only 1,585 -- or 58 percent -- were identified on the basis of recovered physical remains.

The death toll does not include the 10 hijackers who crashed passenger jets into the twin towers. Two of their remains were identified.

The medical examiner's office received a total of 19,916 human remains, which included fewer than 300 intact bodies or torsos. It identified 10,190 body parts, some as small as a finger tip, primarily through DNA testing. About 9,726 remains remain unidentified. "The identifications have slowed up considerably over that last year or so," Barakove said.

Victims' families have made their preferences known to Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch over the past few years -- to be notified each time a remain is identified, not be notified of further remains, or to be notified only at the end of the process, which is now. "Everyone will be getting a letter," Barakove said. "I wouldn't consider this permanent. Dr. Hirsch has made a promise to the families -- we will never stop trying."

Bill Doyle, whose 25-year-old son, Joey, was a Cantor Fitzgerald broker killed in the World Trade Center's north tower, said he has received word about the process coming to an end. "It's three-and-half years later, and it's a mystery where my son is," Doyle said. "You don't even have a fragment."

Diane Horning, mother of Matthew Horning, a 26-year-old technology analyst for insurer Marsh & McLennan killed in the north tower, has also been notified.

Horning leads World Trade Center Families for Proper Burial, which was formed out of concern that human remains may have been mixed with building materials trucked from Ground Zero to Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island.

She informed families in an e-mail that identifications have reached the point where no further identifications can be made "under current technology." "The ME's office will be keeping all records and will contact families should technology enable more identifications in the future," Horning wrote.

The WTC remains were originally stored in four huge refrigerated trucks near the medical examiner's office in midtown Manhattan, but they have been dried and sealed in deterioration-proof pouches.

The "Reflecting Absence" memorial plan selected for the World Trade Center site calls for the interment of unidentified human remains at the site's deepest point, 70 feet underground, in a sort of walk-in mausoleum. "We will have access," Barakove said. "We don't know what might come down the road whereby we might be able to make identifications, extracting DNA in a different way."

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/22/wtc.identifications/index.html

[Jolie Rouge]

Forensics at New York's Ground Zero Ends

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=ne-main-9-l1&flok=FF-APO-1110&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20050223%2F0911595049.htm&sc=1110

NEW YORK (AP) - The medical examiner's office has largely ended its effort to identify the remains of those killed at the World Trade Center site on Sept. 11, 2001, leaving more than a thousand victims unidentified. ``We've finished making identifications for the World Trade Center,'' Robert Shaler, director of forensic biology at the medical examiner's office, told the New York Daily News in a story published Wednesday.

The forensic effort failed to identify any remains of more than 1,100 victims, or almost half of the 2,749 who died there.

Since the attacks 3 1/2 years ago, the medical examiner's office identified nearly 1,600 victims, although progress had slowed considerably in recent months. Since September, only eight victims have been identified. A few inconclusive tests are still pending that could yield a couple of more identifications, Shaler told the newspaper.


The city has about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead. The medical examiner's office will contact all victims' families who asked to be notified when the forensic effort ended.


Shaler has said that the DNA effort could be reopened if new scientific processes were developed. ``If three years from now somebody comes up with something ... that really looks like it's going to work, then we're going to be poised to go after it,'' he told The Associated Press in 2003.


Some identifications were made quickly in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. To identify smaller remains, the medical examiner had to rely on DNA matching, drawing results from shreds of bone and tissue. But tests were often not possible because the DNA was too damaged by heat, humidity, and the passage of time. ``I'm still driven by the families,'' Shaler said in 2003. ``When I see these people, they look at me with eyes that say, 'Did you find her yet?' But when you're only turning out a couple a week or four, five a month, it's hard.''


In most cases, victims whose remains were not identified have been legally declared dead by the court anyway, based on documentation that they were at the trade center or on the hijacked airplanes.



02/23/05 09:11

[Jolie Rouge]

Form letters tell 9/11 families of 911 calls
Victims' group representative calls letters 'totally crass'
Sunday, March 26, 2006

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The mayor's office is sending form letters this weekend to the families of 24 victims of the 9/11 attacks, informing them of unreleased recordings of 911 calls made by their loved ones.

At least one recipient called the letters "totally crass."

"I had one family member call me today, she was hysterical. She actually fainted," said Bill Doyle, whose son died after two planes crashed into the WTC towers. "She opened it up in an elevator and she couldn't believe it, because she never heard from her husband that morning, but apparently he called 911."

Doyle called the letters notifying families this week "totally crass" and shocking to families. (Watch how a lawsuit led to release of tapes -- 2:24)

He sent an e-mail to victims' families Saturday.

"We are sending this e-mail to you because we do not want you to be blindsided by the information, and we want you to be able to choose where and when you read the information and with whom," Doyle's e-mail to families said.

Jonathan Greenspun, commissioner of the Mayor's Community Assistance Unit, in a written statement responding to Doyle's complaint, said his office had intended to send an e-mail to WTC support groups Friday to give them advance notice but a "miscommunication" delayed the warning until Saturday.

Families of those heard on the 911 calls can request a CD with the unedited recording, Greenspun said.

As part of a court decision last year, it will be left to those next of kin to decide whether the New York Fire Department recordings will be made public.

Letters began arriving by special delivery Friday, sent by New York officials to the families offering them copies of the calls and informing them of their right to keep them private or make them public.

Edited versions of the calls, including only the voices of the 911 operators and dispatchers, will be released to the news media this week by the New York Fire Department, Greenspun said.

The New York Court of Appeals last year ruled that the final words of a private citizen calling 911 were protected by privacy rights that could only be waived by next of kin.

The court's decision in a suit filed by the New York Times and the families of nine firefighters who died also resulted in last summer's release of emergency radio recordings and 12,000 pages of oral histories taken in the weeks after the attacks.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/26/WTC.911.calls/index.html

[Jolie Rouge]

More Human Remains Found Near WTC Site
By AMY WESTFELDT, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Construction workers cleaning toxic waste from a vacant skyscraper near the World Trade Center site have found more bone fragments and human remains, officials said Tuesday.

The city medical examiner's office plans to extract DNA from the latest remains to be recovered from the former Deutsche Bank building and try to match it against a database of the 2,749 people killed at the trade center on Sept. 11, 2001, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the city medical examiner's office.

Fire Department crews previously searched the building, and 10 bone fragments were found on the roof last fall.

The new remains were found in recent weeks by crews doing a more thorough cleaning before construction workers begin dismantling the building in May, said John Gallagher, spokesman for the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

Some victims' family members said forensic experts should search the 41-story building again.

"I'm not trying to malign the construction workers, but this is not what they're trained to do," said Diane Horning, whose son was killed at the trade center and has filed suit to remove trade center debris from a landfill where victims' remains were found.

More than 40 percent of the victims at the trade center have not been identified. The medical examiner's office is storing more than 9,000 unidentified remains and hope that more sophisticated DNA technology can allow for identifications in the future.

Borakove said that two human remains were found Jan. 27 on the 38th floor of the building. She could not say what the remains were or how big they were. Last Friday, workers found two bone fragments on the roof, she said.

"They are definitely human," Borakove said.

The Deutsche Bank building has been vacant since the terrorist attacks, when part of the south tower tore a gash in the building. Deconstruction of the building, which is contaminated with asbestos, lead and trade center dust, began in September.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060328/ap_on_re_us/attacks_remains;_ylt=AhQlg_bEF8rpQ_QG9WoL.GFH2ocA; _ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-

[Jolie Rouge]

More Human Remains Found Near Trade Center

NEW YORK - Construction workers near the World Trade Center discovered 74 more bone fragments on a damaged skyscraper being prepared for demolition, officials said.

Investigators reviewing emergency calls from the morning of the terrorist attacks also identified eight more recordings of emergency dispatches and 911 calls from the towers that had previously been overlooked.

Most of the bone fragments discovered over the weekend were found mixed with gravel that had been raked to the sides of the roof of the Deutsche Bank building, which suffered extensive damage when the twin towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001.

"This is the largest find from the Deutsche Bank, and I would not be surprised if additional quantities of remains are found there," Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner's office, told The New York Times in Thursday's editions. "They are still doing the cleanup."

The building is contaminated with asbestos, lead and trade center dust and being cleaned before workers begin deconstructing it floor by floor in June.

Earlier this year, workers in the building found four additional human body parts, and they found 10 additional bone fragments on the roof last fall. In the most recent discovery, workers retrieved 82 samples, 74 of which proved to be human remains that will undergo DNA testing, Borakove said.

The medical examiner's office has more than 9,000 unidentified remains from the 2,749 victims of the trade center attack. The remains are being are being stored in the hope that more sophisticated DNA technology will allow for identifications in the future.

The newly discovered 911 recordings were identified on two previously overlooked tapes as investigators searched for the voice of a fire department official who died in the trade center.

The fire department said the recordings would be released after they are processed by the city law department. Roughly 130 calls were released Friday after the voices of the callers had been edited out. The voices of the fire and police operators who heard the calls for help were released after the Times and victims' relatives sued.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060406/ap_on_re_us/attacks_remains_1