Three 9/11 victims’ remains have newly been identified, officials said this week, as evolving DNA technology keeps making gradual gains in the nearly quarter-century-long effort to return the remains of the dead to their loved ones.
New York City officials announced Thursday they had identified remains of Ryan D. Fitzgerald, a 26-year-old currency trader; Barbara A. Keating, a 72-year-old retired nonprofit executive; and another woman whose name authorities kept private at her family’s request.
They were identified through now-improved DNA testing of minute remains found more than 20 years ago amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center after the al-Qaida hijacked-plane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the city medical examiner’s office said.
“Each new identification testifies to the promise of science and sustained outreach to families despite the passage of time,” chief medical examiner Dr. Jason Graham said in a statement. “We continue this work as our way of honoring the lost.”
Keating’s son, Paul Keating, told media outlets he was amazed and impressed by the enduring endeavor.
“It’s just an amazing feat, gesture,” he told the New York Post. He said genetic material from part of his mother’s hairbrush was matched to DNA samples from relatives. A bit of his mother’s ATM card was the only other trace of her ever recovered from the debris, he said.
Barbara Keating was a passenger on Boston-to-Los Angeles-bound American Airlines Flight 11 when hijackers slammed it into the World Trade Center. She was headed home to Palm Springs, California, after spending the summer on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod.
Keating had spent her career in social services, including a time as executive director of the Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Middlesex, near Boston. In retirement, she was involved in her Roman Catholic church in Palm Springs.
The Associated Press sent messages Friday to her family and left messages at possible numbers for Fitzgerald’s relatives.
Fitzgerald, who lived in Manhattan, was working at a financial firm at the trade center, studying for a master’s degree in business and talking about a long-term future with his girlfriend, according to obituaries published at the time.
In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed when the hijackers crashed jetliners into the trade center’s twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in southwest Pennsylvania on 9/11. The vast majority of the victims, more than 2,700, perished at the trade center.
The New York medical examiner’s office has steadily added to the roster of those with identified remains, most recently last year. The agency has tested and retested fragments as techniques advanced over the years and created new prospects for reading genetic code diminished by fire, sunlight, bacteria and more.
“We hope the families receiving answers from the Office of Chief Medical Examiner can take solace in the city’s tireless dedication to this mission,” New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said in a statement Thursday.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
