Remains of the Day

In the grim, sleepless months of excavation after the September 11 attacks, forensic pathologists in New York City worked day and night to identify the dead. They didn't have much to go on. The collapsed World Trade Center towers had burned at temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees, incinerating those trapped inside. Many of the bodies of the passengers aboard the two airplanes that struck the buildings were consumed by burning jet fuel, leaving only traces of DNA, much of it so damaged that it was impossible to read. Few bodies were found intact. Most of the human remains culled from the vast wreckage at Ground Zero were little more than tiny fragments of charred tissue and bone. The volume was overwhelming. Robert Shaler, who headed the city's Department of Forensic Biology and was a leader of the identification effort, worried his lab would be paralyzed if it tried to identify every piece. At first, they decided they would only attempt to test samples that were "the size of a thumb or larger," he says. But when they saw how small many of the fragments were, they changed their minds. "If we were really going to make an honest effort," Shaler says, "we had to do everything that came along."

Shaler and his colleagues at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner gave weekly updates to family members of the victims, reporting how many of the dead had been identified and reassuring them that the city was doing everything to identify their loved ones. But the families weren't only concerned with their own dead. In meeting after meeting, Shaler says, relatives would ask about the hijackers. Had the scientists identified any of their remains?

"They did not want the terrorists mixed in with their loved ones," says Shaler. The families said, "These people were criminals and did not deserve to be with them." The families asked for the remains of the hijackers to be separated out and kept someplace else. Shaler shared their frustration. Now 66, his hair and beard a grandfatherly white, Shaler says he could not always separate his duties a scientist from his own emotions: a little more than a year into the investigation, he suffered a heart attack. At the early meetings, he told the families he didn't think it would be possible to sort out the remains; by the spring of 2002, Shaler and his staff of 105 scientists had yet to identify any of the New York hijackers. "I thought we'd never find remains from anyone on the planes," he says. But he promised to try.

The blunt reality is that no matter how fastidious their efforts, the scientists will never fully sort the victims from the hijackers. The fragments are too small, too ruined and too scattered for bodies to be restored in their entirety. Some were lost to fire or during the excavation of the wreckage. Today, 1,126 of the 2,751 victims from the World Trade Center and five individuals from the Pentagon have yet to be identified at all—none of their remains and no traces of their DNA have been found.

Scientists are still trying. More than seven years later, the effort continues to identify the missing victims—and hijackers. Shaler and his successors have fulfilled at least part of their promise to the families. Through a combination of innovative DNA-mapping techniques, help from the FBI's crime lab and dumb luck, the scientists have now ID'd four of the 10 New York hijackers. The remains of the nine hijackers from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania crash sites have also been confirmed; six other hijackers have yet to be identified.

What's left of the terrorists—which, all told, likely amounts to less than 24 pounds of flesh and bone fragments—are sequestered at undisclosed locations in New York and Virginia. They are "stored as evidence in a refrigerated locker in sealed containers and test tubes," says Richard Kolko, a spokesman for the FBI.