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9/11 remains

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The unidentified remains of 9/11 victims returned to the World Trade Center site in a solemn procession on Saturday morning.

The remains left the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner on Manhattan’s East Side shortly before 7 a.m. in three city vehicles. They were accompanied by police and fire department vehicles with lights flashing but no sirens.

Construction workers paused as the motorcade passed, and about 10 firefighters stood in the cool breeze saluting the vehicles as they arrived. The remains will be transferred to a repository 70 feet underground in the same building as the National September 11 Memorial Museum.

The unidentified remains of 9/11 victims returned to the World Trade Center site in a solemn procession

The unidentified remains of 9/11 victims returned to the World Trade Center site in a solemn procession

Like many decisions involving the site of the nation’s worst terrorist attack, the disposition of the unidentified remains has been contentious.

A group of victims’ family members who say the remains should be stored in an above-ground monument separate from the museum protested the procession. About a dozen wore black bands over their mouths at the site Saturday.

Other family members support the plans, which have been in the works for years.

Uniformed officers from the New York Police Department and Fire Department of New York and the Port Authority police carried the three caskets into the repository.

The facility will be available for family visits but will be overseen by the medical examiner. Officials hope that improvements in technology will eventually lead to the identification of the 7,930 fragmentary remains.

The death toll stemming from the attacks at the World Trade Center stands at 2,753. Of those, 1,115 (41%) have not been identified.

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After the 2001 attacks on New York City, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had to contend with thousands of bodies, many completely shattered and unrecognizable, buried among the wreckage of the crumbled buildings.

A huge 1.8 million tons was eventually moved to a landfill for workers to start sifting through, in the hopes of making positive IDs on the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks.

Nearly 11 years on, a small group of scientists are still desperately working to give grieving families the justice they crave.

More than 9,000 pieces of bone, some the size of just a Tic Tac, are kept at Memorial Park, a building on 30th Street in Manhattan, New York Magazine reported last year.

Nearly 11 years on, a small group of scientists are still desperately working to give grieving families the justice they crave

Nearly 11 years on, a small group of scientists are still desperately working to give grieving families the justice they crave

Five dedicated staff inexhaustibly sift through crushed remains of bone taken from the scene day after day, cross-referencing any clues they get with DNA samples from the victims’ families.

Last year, just two IDs were made, leaving 1,121 victims still unidentified. So far, the office has identified less than 60% of the 2,753 people who died on 9/11.

Just 17 of the remains were identified by sight alone, 305 were determined by fingerprints, 25 by photographs, 78 by personal effects, 534 by dental or body X-rays and six by tattoos.

The work also involves profiling the DNA of the victims to match against the bones. Samples were collected by taking DNA from toothbrushes or by swabbing living relatives.

Even though it is painstaking, families have praised the work as vital.

Jim Riches, a former deputy chief of the FDNY who lost his son on 9/11, told the magazine: “We recovered my son March 25, 2002 but it wasn’t all of him. I would want to bring all his parts back to Queens and put them all in one place.”

 

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