The New York Budgets

Tag: World Trade Center

  • 3 September 11th attacks Victim Identified After Nearly 24 Years

    3 September 11th attacks Victim Identified After Nearly 24 Years

    Three 9/11 Victims Identified Nearly 24 Years Later. © Richard Drew/AP/TT
    Three 9/11 Victims Identified Nearly 24 Years Later. © Richard Drew/AP/TT

    NEW YORK — Nearly 24 years after the devastating September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, New York City’s medical examiner’s office has identified the remains of three more victims, offering closure to their families through advancements in DNA technology. The announcement, made on Thursday, marks another step in the ongoing effort to return the remains of those lost in the tragedy to their loved ones.

    The identified individuals are Ryan D. Fitzgerald, a 26-year-old currency trader; Barbara A. Keating, a 72-year-old retired nonprofit executive; and a third woman whose identity was withheld at her family’s request. All three were among the nearly 3,000 people killed when al-Qaida hijackers crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, the Pentagon, and a field in southwest Pennsylvania. Their names have long been etched on the National Sept. 11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan, but until now, their families had no confirmed remains to connect to their memory.

    The identifications were made possible through advanced DNA testing of minute bone fragments recovered from the World Trade Center debris over two decades ago. The city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner has been tirelessly analyzing tens of thousands of such fragments, retesting them as DNA techniques improve to overcome challenges posed by fire, sunlight, and bacterial degradation. “Each new identification testifies to the promise of science and sustained outreach to families despite the passage of time,” said Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jason Graham in a statement. “We continue this work as our way of honoring the lost.”

    Barbara Keating was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, a Boston-to-Los Angeles flight that hijackers crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The 72-year-old was returning to her home in Palm Springs, California, after spending the summer on Cape Cod. A career social worker, Keating had served as executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Middlesex near Boston and remained active in her Roman Catholic church in retirement. Her son, Paul Keating, expressed awe at the medical examiner’s dedication. “It’s just an amazing feat, gesture,” he told the New York Post. He revealed that genetic material from his mother’s hairbrush was matched to DNA samples from relatives, with a fragment of her ATM card being the only other trace of her recovered from the rubble.

    Ryan Fitzgerald, a 26-year-old Manhattan resident, was working at a financial firm in the World Trade Center while pursuing a master’s degree in business. Described in obituaries as a driven young man planning a future with his girlfriend, Fitzgerald’s remains were identified through the same meticulous process. Efforts to reach his family for comment were unsuccessful as of Friday.

    The third victim’s identity remains private, respecting her family’s wishes, but her inclusion in this announcement underscores the scale of the identification effort. Of the more than 2,700 victims who perished at the World Trade Center, approximately 40% still have no identified remains, leaving many families waiting for answers.

    The medical examiner’s office has made steady progress, with identifications added as recently as last year. The process involves not only cutting-edge science but also extraordinary commitment. “We’re talking about people putting in overtime 24 years later, for us,” Paul Keating said, highlighting the emotional weight of the work for families. New York Mayor Eric Adams praised the effort, stating, “We hope the families receiving answers from the Office of Chief Medical Examiner can take solace in the city’s tireless dedication to this mission.”

    As technology continues to evolve, the medical examiner’s office remains committed to testing and retesting fragments, ensuring that more families may one day find closure. For now, these three identifications offer a bittersweet moment of connection for those who have waited nearly a quarter-century to lay their loved ones to rest.

  • The legacy of the Twin Towers remains pervasive, even 20 years after the tragedy of 9/11

    The legacy of the Twin Towers remains pervasive, even 20 years after the tragedy of 9/11

    panoramic view of lower manhattan and hudson river new york city skyline ny with world trade towe? a=BAVAZGDX0
    (Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

    When the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached in 2009, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey assembled an Archive Committee to collect, catalog and disseminate material recovered from the World Trade Center site. The collection reflected the range of victims of the attacks: broken eyeglasses and office supplies from those who worked in the buildings, crushed fire and police vehicles from those who raced in to save them. 

    An American flag flies behind steel from the World Trade Center at Constitution Park in Fort Lee, New Jersey — one of many local memorials to the Sept. 11 attacks across the U.S. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)

    But most of the collection was metal: 7,000 tons of steel from the Twin Towers themselves, stored in a hangar at JFK airport in Queens, New York. This trove became the raw material for a campaign of memorial-making. In a program that lasted until 2016, the Port Authority solicited requests for World Trade Center artifacts from fire and police departments, libraries, small-town museums, military and veteran organizations, and local governments, along with other interested groups.

    Artifacts from the World Trade Center site are stored in Hangar 17 at John F. Kennedy Airport in Queens in 2011. (Jennifer S. Altman /The Washington Post via Getty Images)

    “The process of this steel’s salvage and distribution across the United States speaks to the persistent social and political power of relics — parts of bodies or objects imbued with auras from another realm,” write Samuel Holleran and Max Holleran in Places Journal. The Melbourne-based brothers — a visual artist and urban sociologist at the University of Melbourne, respectively — sifted through newspaper clips and official documents to track down the fate of about 1,800 steel fragments that were distributed by the Port Authority during the life of the archive program, to chronicle the World Trade Center’s second life.

    “The attack was so televisual, and the image of the towers became so painful and charged, we were curious as to how communities could honor the buildings without showing them,” Samuel Holleran told CityLab in an email.

    A World Trade Center memorial by artist Heath Satow in Rosemead, California. The sculpture contains 2,976 stainless-steel doves, representing victims of the 2001 attacks, welded together to create a pair of giant hands lifting a twisted steel beam from the towers. (Frederick J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

    Most of these chunks of I-beams and scraps of scorched steel were used to create small 9/11 memorials scattered around the country. “Only a few of the American memorials are in major cities,” they write. “Most have been erected in liminal spaces between suburban office parks and parking lots, at the centers of traffic circles, outside public buildings in small towns.”

    The geography of World Trade Center remnants, they discovered, is surprisingly broad. New York City and the immediate region received the largest share of artifacts, unsurprisingly, but fragments were distributed to all 50 states. There are also memorials built around WTC steel in Canada, Germany, Italy, England and Israel. U.S. military bases in South Korea and Afghanistan received 9/11 steel, too.

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    Most memorials, they note, pay tribute to firefighters and police departments rather than those who worked and died in the towers. The authors speculate that 9/11-relic-based monuments emerged in the wake of the attacks in part because so few human bodies, alive or dead, were pulled from the wreckage; the steel itself served as stand-ins for everything that families and loved ones could not recover: “Even in our globalized digital age, the demands of memory remain stubbornly tactile, and alternative death rites were needed.”

    A 9/11 memorial in Winslow, Arizona. (Josh Brasted/Getty Images North America)

    But the spread of WTC artifacts and their incorporation into public spaces nationwide also reflects the sheer significance and scale of the event. “For Americans who couldn’t make it to Manhattan, the dispersal of steel around the country helped to turn the loss of a distinctly New York icon into a ‘national sorrow’ akin to the assassination of a president,” the Hollerans write.

    This dispersal was far wider than the physical footprint of the memorials themselves. Only a tiny portion of the World Trade Center’s massive steel skeleton ended up in the Port Authority’s archive: More than a million tons of debris ended up in a landfill in Staten Island, and the city sold 200,000 tons of structural steel in the international scrap metal market. “By the first anniversary of the attack,” the Hollerans write, “most of the WTC’s metal frame was beginning a new life in Asia, recast as cladding, rebar, even cookware.”

    In a sense, that process of creation and change continues two decades later; in various forms, the towers endure.