9/11 victim identification

Date: Terrorist attacks occurred on September 11, 2001

The Event: Following the devastation caused by terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, experts used several forensic techniques to identify the dead.

Significance: This investigation was unique in that it involved a very high number of deaths at three very different scenes separated by great distances. The contributions of forensic science to the recovery and identification of the victims were important both because they aided in the investigation of these crimes and because they made it possible for the family members of victims to lay their loved ones’ remains to rest.

In the aftermath of the four plane crashes that took place on the morning of September 11, 2001, authorities had to create a plan quickly to manage victim identification. Because the deaths were caused by acts of terrorism, jurisdiction over the bodies went to the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner (OAFME), a division of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The OAFME, however, did not have sufficient human resources to deal with so many separate incidents of such great magnitude all at once. A decision was thus made to honor the request made by authorities in New York City and allow the New York medical examiner’s office to handle the victims who died at the World Trade Center. The OAFME would handle the remains at the Pentagon as well as those at the site of the crash in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Search and Recovery

At any death scene, no matter what the details or the scope, the most important, and therefore first, step taken by first responders is always to check for and treat survivors. Any loss of evidence that occurs because medical personnel enter a scene to treat victims is considered acceptable. Immediately after the attacks, massive searches began for any possible survivors at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center site (later referred to as Ground Zero); it was clear that United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, had no survivors.

A rescue operation is very different from a scene search, as time is of the essence. At both the Pentagon and Ground Zero, search efforts had to be stopped often because of fires in the buildings and fears of continued structural collapses. All rescue workers had to leave these scenes every time the areas were deemed too dangerous; after the risks had subsided, they resumed their previous positions. The initial searches in both areas were thus extremely slow and time-consuming.

The OAFME conducts autopsies at a mortuary located on Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, approximately one hundred miles east of the Pentagon, but the first bodies from the crash sites did not arrive at the OAFME facility until two days after the attacks, on September 13, 2001. The remains varied in condition from full-bodied corpses to fragments of muscle and bone. Some remains were burned; some were crushed. Many were commingled; that is, parts from two or more bodies were mixed together. The victim remains recovered from Ground Zero were much more fragmented than those recovered at the Pentagon, as they had been subjected to the tremendous forces of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Methods of Identification

Even when bodies in need of identification are relatively fresh and complete, visual identification is not considered accurate enough for official purposes. Following the September 11 attacks, most of the remains recovered were in pieces, and visual identification was of no use at all. The purpose of the autopsies performed on the remains was victim identification.

Three main forensic methods produce results that are accepted as positively identifying deceased persons: forensic odontology (analysis of teeth and dentistry), fingerprint analysis, and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis. Each on its own is sufficient for identification, and each involves a process of comparing elements of remains with antemortem (prior to death) documents or records of persons who could possibly be the deceased. For every piece of remains that was brought into the Dover mortuary, all three methods were conducted whenever possible.

Managing the Remains

All remains that arrived at Dover Air Force Base followed the same flow and were seen by workers at the same stations. When each body bag arrived, its paperwork was reviewed; the paperwork noted where the remains were from, how they were found, and any identifying numbers given to them. The remains were then renumbered using an OAFME system, so they could be tracked through the stations. A checklist that accompanied the remains throughout the process was annotated with the OAFME number to ensure that no station was missed and to document the reason any given station may not have been able to work on the remains (such as the fingerprint station explaining that the remains included no hands).

The first station was a security scanning machine much like the kind used at airports. The body bag was placed on the conveyor belt, and the X-ray machine allowed for an initial look inside the bag. This preliminary step allowed the workers to check for any hazards in a bag, such as sharp metal objects, before they opened it. After the remains were taken off the belt, pictures were taken of the closed bag to document how it arrived. The bag was then opened and pictures were taken of the body or parts inside.

Steps in the Identification Process

The next station was the first of the identification process, the anthropology station. Forensic anthropologists examine skeletal remains to determine the sex, age, and race of the deceased. In this particular case, the anthropology station’s function was to characterize and document the remains in each bag. If, for example, a bag was found to contain two right arms, this was noted so that the workers at the rest of the stations would know that the bag contained commingled remains. If a bag contained only a hip and upper leg bone, then it could skip the fingerprint and forensic odontology stations.

The fingerprinting station was next. Fingerprints were taken of every recoverable finger, and analysts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later compared the prints with the antemortem fingerprint records available for those on the list of possible victims. Many of those who died at the Pentagon on September 11 were in the military, and thus their fingerprints were on file and accessible. The FBI also conducted searches for fingerprint records that may have existed for all of the nonmilitary victims.

The remains next moved to the forensic odontology station. Forensic odontologists compare oral X rays and castings of the teeth of decedents with antemortem dental records. Tooth enamel is one of the hardest substances produced by the human body; it can survive when the rest of the body is crushed, decomposed, or severely burned. Elements such as the positions of teeth in the jaw, the shapes of fillings, and the lengths of the roots of teeth can all contribute to the identification process.

The next step was to X-ray the remains. Although the primary purpose of the X rays taken was to assist the pathologists with their work in performing the autopsies that followed, comparisons of X rays were also sometimes used in the identification process. For victims with X rays in their medical records, radiologists could compare antemortem and postmortem X-ray images. Unique injuries, healing mechanisms, or medical procedures revealed in X rays could help to identify individuals.

The third method of positively identifying remains, DNA analysis, was begun when the remains were brought into autopsy. Nuclear DNA is found in cells that contain nuclei, such as the cells in blood, skin, and saliva. Nuclear DNA is the most common type used for DNA testing, but it is somewhat fragile and can easily be damaged, especially by decomposition. Another type of DNA, mitochondrial DNA, can be used in a different test comparison that can also identify remains. Unlike nuclear DNA, the offspring receives mitochondrial DNA only from the mother, and since there is no mixing with the father’s mitochondrial DNA, usually little change is seen from generation to generation. Mitochondrial DNA is much sturdier than nuclear DNA and can withstand decomposition changes. It can be recovered from both bone and teeth even after hundreds of years. Because mitochondrial DNA is maternal in its delivery, mitochondrial DNA from a decedent must be compared with mitochondrial DNA from a family member on the decedent’s mother’s side to make a match.

Success Rate

Following the unprecedented national tragedy of the September 11 attacks, identifying the victims was an extremely high priority. The OAFME was able to identify positively all 184 victims from the Pentagon scene as well as each of the 40 victims from the Pennsylvania field. The New York medical examiner’s office had similar success with the remains recovered from the World Trade Center site. Forensic pathologist Judy Melinek, who was training and working in her first year at the New York medical examiner's office, published a book in 2014, titled Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, that details, among other things, her experience performing autopsies on victims of the September 11 attacks.

Though the New York medical examiner's office issued death certificates for all of the victims reported in the attack, as of 2016, approximately 40 percent of those who had gone missing at the site of the World Trade Center towers had not been identified through the forensics process. With the goal of identifying the individuals continuing, in 2015, two more victims had been positively identified through retesting of DNA samples that had been filed following the attacks, allowing family members to find closure.

The volume of the remains examined, the number of agencies involved, and the number of volunteer workers who helped with the identification process went beyond anything either of the medical examiners’ offices had ever before experienced. By using established forensic methods for positively identifying remains, they were able to give the victims’ families a sense of resolution by returning the remains of their loved ones to them for burial.

Bibliography

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