On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, a new forensic technology is slowly bringing long-awaited answers to hundreds of families who have spent decades waiting for confirmation of their loved ones’ fates.
For Juliette Scauso, that wait has carried on since she was 4 years old, the youngest of four children growing up on Long Island without her father, Dennis Scauso, a 12-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department’s hazmat unit. Dennis was not scheduled to work on September 11, 2001, but he swapped shifts to pick up extra overtime pay. When the South Tower collapsed, he was inside, and only his dented, damaged firefighter helmet, emblazoned with his badge number, was recovered months after the attack.
A quarter of a century later, Dennis Scauso remains one of more than 1,000 unidentified 9/11 victims from New York, according to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). For decades, identifying fragmented remains recovered from Ground Zero has stood as one of the most complex forensic challenges in modern history. The jet-fueled fires that burned at the World Trade Center site destroyed most genetic material, leaving only small, fragmented portions of remains for testing. Complications were amplified by shift changes that left many first responders wearing borrowed gear marked with other firefighters’ names, and the sheer scale of the tragedy, which dwarfed the other 9/11 attack sites. While all 40 victims on United Airlines Flight 93 were identified, and only five remains from the Pentagon attack remain unaccounted for, more than a third of the 2,753 World Trade Center victims are still without formal identification.
But last month, OCME announced a breakthrough: using Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy (FIGG), investigators have identified a previously unknown victim, marking the 1,654th confirmed identification from the attacks. This new technology, which leverages whole genome sequencing to map a victim’s full genetic code, allows investigators to match partial DNA profiles to more distant relatives of victims than older DNA testing methods permitted. Once a distant match is found in genetic genealogy databases, the New York Police Department works to track down closer family members to confirm the match.
OCME has preserved all unidentified remains in sealed, temperature-controlled packaging for decades, allowing teams to retest samples as new technology emerges. Early identifications relied on fingerprints and dental records, before DNA testing became the standard, and successive generations of DNA technology have allowed teams to extract usable genetic material from samples that were untestable years earlier. This continuous re-evaluation is why new identifications are still being made 25 years after the attacks. Last year alone, three more victims were identified through advanced DNA testing: 26-year-old currency trader Ryan Fitzgerald, 72-year-old Barbara Keating who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, and a third victim whose family chose to keep their identity private.
Angela Soler, director of forensic anthropology at OCME, says FIGG opens a new frontier of hope for families still waiting for answers. “There is real promise in using this approach,” she said. “There’s hope for more families to receive answers, and hopefully we’ll be able to test more remains in the future using this technology as well.” The work is deeply personal for Soler and many of her colleagues, who responded to Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. While they acknowledge it is unlikely every victim will ever be identified — in some cases, no recoverable remains exist at all — they have no plans to end their efforts. “As long as there’s families looking for answers, we’ll continue searching for them,” Soler said.
For families, the news of an identification brings a complex mix of emotions. For many, formal identification closes a lingering, unspoken question that has lingered for decades, bringing a sense of closure that allows them to lay their loved one to rest, either in a private burial or in the repository built into the bedrock of the World Trade Center memorial, where many families choose to leave remains close to where their loved ones died. But for others, the news reopens wounds that have taken decades to heal.
Juliette Scauso says she has made peace with never having her father’s remains, and has built her life around his memory — remembering him as a handyman with a love of jazz who left only his helmet behind. “I’ve spent essentially my entire life knowing my father died, and learning to live with the fact that we never recovered him,” she said. For her, an identification decades later would not bring her father back, but only reopen a grief she has learned to carry. “At this point, an identification wouldn’t change the reality of his death. It wouldn’t give me back my father, and I don’t necessarily want to reopen something that has become part of the way I’ve learned to live and grieve. Especially 25 years later, it’s going to open up the wounds again.” Even so, she acknowledges the profound importance of the new technology for other families still waiting.
Soler echoes that complexity, noting that for every family that longs for answers, some choose to opt out of notification, finding the confirmation of their loved one’s death too painful to revisit 25 years on. Still, she says, the work continues: every week, OCME receives calls from family members asking for updates, and investigators will keep testing, matching, and searching, as long as there are questions left to answer.