07-08-2025
Remains of 3 Victims of 9/11 Are Identified From Minuscule Evidence
After Barbara Keating was killed aboard a jet that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, her family had little hope of identifying her remains, beyond a piece of an A.T.M. card retrieved from the rubble.
'We had forensic experts telling us two decades ago, 'Really, you should not expect any DNA,'' her son, Paul Keating, said, 'because of the physical act of the explosion itself, because of the heat.'
But around three years ago, the New York City medical examiner's office contacted the family: Its forensic scientists had identified what seemed to be a hairbrush that had belonged to Ms. Keating. Mr. Keating's brother and sister provided DNA samples, hoping that they would prove a match.
On Thursday, they got a positive confirmation. Ms. Keating was one of three victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center whose remains had been identified, the medical examiner's office announced, as it continues a painstaking mission of identifying the remains of every victim of the attacks, decades later.
The remains of Ryan Fitzgerald, who had worked as a foreign currency trader at Fiduciary Trust Company International, were also identified, along with a woman who was not named at the request of her family, the office said.
The identifications bring the total number of remains matched to victims to 1,653 of the 2,753 killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, according to the office. More than 90 percent of those identifications have come through DNA testing, according to the office's statistics.
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