Inside the groundbreaking science used to identify 9/11 remains

Inside the groundbreaking science used to identify 9/11 remains

The north tower was already billowing smoke when Mark Desire, then a 33-year-old criminalist with the city Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, made it to Ground Zero to assess the dead.

Instead, he nearly joined them.

Desire had just received marching orders from the chief medical examiner when Flight 175 smashed into the south tower overhead, showering him with deadly debris.

“This is how I’m gonna die,” he remembers thinking at the time. “The debris landed on me, shattered my left leg, knocked me out of my shoes. The next day, I was back — on crutches.”

His task was a grim one: collect, catalog and match the 22,000 pieces of human remains to 2,753 victims lost in the rubble.

Seventeen years later, what started out as an ad hoc team of four scientists dodging falling debris has become “the largest forensic investigation in the history of the United States” — involving a dedicated team of 10 people working tirelessly to identify victims’ remains using DNA, according to Desire, now the assistant director for forensic biology at OCME.

Since 9/11, the OCME’s team has brought bittersweet closure to the families of 1,639 victims and pioneered new, internationally recognized techniques for putting names to remains.

But with 7,418 remnants left — and 1,111 victims to match them to — their Sisyphean project is far from over.

The team’s efforts yielded quick results in the early going: Less than a year after 9/11, some 1,200 victims’ remains had been identified.

But things slowed down once the easiest-to-identify remnants were catalogued.

In the intervening years, just 400 more victims’ remains were given names — largely thanks to new techniques pioneered by the ME’s office.

Blazing jet fuel that covered multiple floors like napalm ratcheted temperatures inside the World Trade Center to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit — as hot as a cremation chamber — according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The remains that weren’t totally incinerated were further damaged in Ground Zero’s million-ton pressure cooker of rubble, which smoldered and flared for 100 days before it was finally quenched.

“Fire, water, sunlight and mold and bacteria and jet fuel — all of these things destroy DNA, and I just mentioned everything that was present at Ground Zero, so this was extremely challenging,” Desire said.

Even just picking out what was human was a Herculean effort.

“If we didn’t have an anthropology team, there would be 10,000 more [nonhuman] samples that we would not need,” Desire said.

Officials have determined that the final body count from 9/11 was 2,753, and there are no missing or unaccounted-for persons. OCME’s task is matching the names of the dead to the remains pulled from the wreckage.

In many cases, researchers were left with only bone fragments, which are notoriously hard to work with because they lack much DNA.

But the researchers found a way to draw blood from bone.

A firefighter stands among the debrisGetty Images

First the fragments have to be meticulously ground up — the finer the better. Scientists had to crush bones to dust by hand with a mortar and pestle until they came up with a better system to pulverize the remains using metal ball bearings and ultrasonic vibrations.

Then, an enzyme that triggers DNA replication is added to the mix to improve the yield on what little genetic material they can extract from the bones.

“We’ve been able to develop our own procedure here in New York City,” Desire said. “So these techniques have allowed us access to more cells and the more chances we have at getting usable DNA.

“We’re further in the future because of the World Trade Center — forensic science is — than we would have been without.”

The “WTC protocol,” as it is called, is so effective that it has been used by the Quebec government to identify the scores of victims of the fiery 2013 train wreck in Lac-Mégantic, as well as by the Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense to identify people who went missing in Argentina during a 1970s junta and immigrants who disappear on a migrant corridor from Central America to the United States.

“The NYC OCME has played an enormous role in the application of DNA analysis in our work and projects, the Argentinian group’s co-founder Mercedes Doretti told The Post.

“First, because the improvements they made for coordinating with other DNA laboratories regarding procedures and software in trying to identify the World Trade Center 9/11 attack victims was a contribution to the entire forensic community, and we also benefited from that contribution.

“Second, because of their staff’s generosity and openness to help advise EAAF, specifically regarding several of our forensic projects dealing with the application of DNA in complex situations identifying victims of human- rights violations in different parts of the world.”

The city identified more than 100 previously unknown remains this year thanks to the system. Nearly all belonged to previously identified 9/11 victims, but some were new.

The breakthrough came in July, when investigators retested bone fragments they’d tried six times and finally determined they belonged to 26-year-old financial worker Scott Michael Johnson.

“We can keep going back to those [bones] 17 years later. And we go back to them now. That’s going back to the same remains that we’ve tried five, 10, 15 times. Using new procedures. Trying different methods on them. We’ve been successful all these years later,” Desire said.

“And as the technology improves . . . we know that we’re going to be able to continue to make identifications. We just have to keep pushing that science to the level that we can use it here.”

johnOCME Assistant Director Mark Desire addresses the media about the recent identification of Scott Michael Johnson, who died in the World Trade Center attacksJohnson’s dad, Thomas Johnson, 77, told The Post it was painful to revisit his son’s death when he got the call — but his family chose to let OCME release Scott’s name to inspire hope and as a nod to those who finally identified his son.

“We felt that the story using his name would be more meaningful to people than it was just an anonymous name. We felt it was a gift to them, and to the Medical Examiner’s Office, because we admire them,” he said by phone from Florida.

The family of a new ID made in 2017 asked that their relative’s name not be publicly released. Matthew Yarnell’s identification in 2015 is the third-most recent.

In some cases, families ask to be notified every time a new piece is verified — but others choose to avoid reopening the wound, according to Jennifer Odien, an anthropologist with the OCME team.

“Some families will be very emotional when we call, other families are more matter of fact. But for the most part, whether they’re emotional or not, they’re grateful to get that phone call, even if it does bring up the pain of having to deal with it again,” she said.

The families can choose to pick up the newly identified remains. If relatives wish not to receive updates, the remnants are kept in a repository, according to Odien.

Better technology and more refined techniques are just part of the equation — researchers rely on family members to provide DNA samples so they can match profiles of 9/11 remains to the database of known victims.

But it’s not always easy to ask families to revisit the trauma of 9/11.

“We train our scientists when they meet with families — however that family reacts, that’s the right way to react. It’s the worst day of their life. Any way that we can help, and get them some answers,” Desire said.

Toothbrushes are a common source of genetic information, but OCME has gleaned DNA profiles from some unusual sources.

One victim was identified by a prayer card he kept as a memento from his mother’s funeral.

“His wife had said every night before he went to bed, he would pull it from the little pouch and put it against his forehead and say a little prayer for his mom,” Desire said. “And he did that for years. His wife had known that his DNA would be on that, and I knew that his DNA would be on that as well, so we were able to swab that card. It was a match to remains from the WTC — that’s how we identified him.”

Then there was the Staten Island man who was identified because he had been tangling with an aquarium-installation project the day before the tragedy.

“He dropped it and cut his hand on the glass and his blood was left on there,” Desire said. “It still sat there for him to clean up the next day, but he died on 9/11.”

OCME sent a team out days later, and the mess of broken glass was still on the floor — “and we identified him,” Desire said. “That was absolutely unconventional.”

Some remains, however, will never be identified — either because the DNA has degraded too much or because about 100 families have declined to provide DNA samples.

“It’s really difficult for a lot of families to process this. They might choose that they don’t want to provide their DNA. That’s their choice,” said OCME anthropologist Angela Soler.

“Unfortunately, if we don’t have their DNA on file from family, we won’t ever be able to identify them. It also makes it a little bit harder to identify everybody else because when you’re narrowing down the number of victims who have been identified, every exclusion helps.”

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