The announcement came out of New York’s medical examiner’s office in late August, and the strangest thing about it was what was missing. A victim of the World Trade Center attacks had been identified. She was an adult woman. Her family had been told. And her name was not in the release, because the family asked for it to be kept out, and the city did as they asked.
It was the first identification from that day ever made using a technique called forensic investigative genetic genealogy, and it happened because of a problem that had nothing to do with chemistry.
Mark Desire has been working on these identifications since the morning of the attacks themselves. He is now the director of forensic biology at the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and by his own account he is the only person left from the original team. Twenty-five years is a long time to stay on one case. It is a much longer time when the case is the largest forensic identification effort ever attempted in the United States and the work consists, in large part, of going back over the same material you have already gone back over.
To understand why this particular identification took a quarter of a century, you have to understand what the standard method needs, and what it cannot do without.
Ordinary DNA identification is a matching exercise. You take a profile from recovered remains, and you compare it against a reference sample given by a relative. A parent, a child, a sibling. If the two are related, the profiles line up in a predictable way, and you have your answer. It is reliable, it is well understood, and it has done almost all of the work in this case for twenty-five years.
It also has a hard floor. If no relative ever gave a sample, there is nothing on the other side of the comparison. And that happens more often than people assume. Some families were never contacted, or moved, or could not be traced. Some declined. Some had nobody close enough left to ask, because the victim had no surviving parents, no children and no siblings, and cousins alone are often too distant for the standard approach to resolve. In those cases the laboratory could hold a perfectly good DNA profile for years and still have no name to attach to it, not because the science failed but because there was no second half of the equation.
Forensic investigative genetic genealogy attacks the problem from the other end. Instead of asking whether a profile matches a specific relative who volunteered, it asks whether the profile shows distant relatedness to anybody in large public genealogy databases, the kind people upload their consumer ancestry results to. A distant match is not an identification. It is a starting point. From there, genealogists build family trees outward and backward, looking for a branch that leads to somebody who was in Lower Manhattan that morning and never came home. That gives investigators a lead, a name to test. The laboratory then has to confirm it with DNA or other forensic evidence before anybody is told anything.
In this case that work was done with the New York Police Department’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Squad, with the medical examiner’s office doing the confirmation. The method is not new in itself. It has been used in criminal cases for years. What was new was applying it to remains from the World Trade Center, and the city’s chief medical examiner, Dr Jason Graham, described it as a promising addition to the office’s toolkit and as a way of generating leads that otherwise might not have been possible. Mayor Zohran Mamdani framed the announcement as what happens when new technology meets a commitment the city has not put down.
Now the arithmetic, and one part of it does not add up, so it is being given here exactly as the two sources give it.
The Mayor’s Office and the medical examiner’s office, in their announcement in late August, called this woman the 1,654th victim identified since 2001. In the same release they gave the total who died at the World Trade Center in New York as 2,753, and said 1,099 victims, about 40 percent, remain unidentified. Those three numbers are internally consistent with each other.
A little over two weeks later, in a profile of Desire published by amNewYork, the figure given was 1,651 victims identified, described as about 60 percent of the 2,753. Eight days separate the two publications and the numbers move in the wrong direction. A count like this can shift for real reasons, including remains being reassigned between previously identified people, but no reconciliation has been published, so neither figure is being treated here as the settled one. The Mayor’s Office release says 1,654. amNewYork says 1,651. Both are on the record and they do not agree.
What both agree on is the shape of what is left. Roughly 22,000 individual pieces of human remains were recovered from the site. Of those, 14,968, about 68 percent, have been linked to a specific person. Around 40 percent of the people who died have never been identified at all. And before this identification, the office had not announced a new one for close to twelve months.
That last number is the one that explains why a new method mattered so much. The standard approach had not stopped working. It had simply run out of the cases it was capable of solving.
The gap between those two sets of figures is worth pausing on, because it is the whole problem in miniature. Around 22,000 pieces of remains were recovered and about 14,968 of them have a name attached. That leaves something in the order of seven thousand pieces of recovered human material that the laboratory holds and cannot place. The material is there. The identity is not. In some cases that is because no usable DNA has yet come out of the sample. In others a perfectly readable profile exists and there is simply nobody to compare it to, which is the exact hole this new method was brought in to fill.
And there is a harder truth sitting beside all of it, which is that for some of the people who died, no identifiable remains were recovered at all. That is not a failure of the laboratory. It is a fact about what happened to two buildings of that size, and it means the count will never reach 2,753 no matter how good the chemistry gets. Everyone working on this knows that, including the families, and it shapes how the office talks about what it is doing. Nobody in that building promises anyone an answer.
Desire’s laboratory has spent much of the last twenty-five years doing something that sounds repetitive and is, in fact, the entire reason the count has kept creeping upward. The same material gets tested again. And again. Every time extraction chemistry improved, every time a new method of pulling DNA out of badly degraded samples came along, the laboratory went back to samples that had already refused to yield a usable profile and tried once more with the better tool. Some pieces have been through that cycle more than ten times. A sample that gave nothing in 2003 might give a partial profile in 2013 and a full one later. Nothing is written off.
That is a specific kind of patience, and it is not the kind institutions are usually good at. Budget cycles do not reward going back over finished work. Careers are not built on retesting. Desire has been there through multiple mayors, multiple chief medical examiners, and a public attention span that surges every year in September and recedes by October.
Two of the families he has spent those years talking to have been open about where they have landed, and they have landed in opposite places, which is worth sitting with.
Charles Wolf’s wife Katherine was in the North Tower. The first plane went into her office directly, and Wolf has said he does not expect her remains will ever be identified. He has made a kind of peace with that. He is not waiting for a phone call, and he has said so publicly for years.
Monica Iken-Murphy’s husband, Michael Patrick Iken, was a bond trader in the South Tower. They were newlyweds. She has spoken about the possibility that genealogical research might one day produce an identification and has said she would welcome it, while also saying she would rather his remains stay where they are, at the memorial. She has since remarried and has two children. Both of those things are true at once, and neither cancels the other.
Put those two next to each other and you have the thing the medical examiner’s office has to hold in its hands every time it makes a call. An identification is not an unambiguous gift. For some families it is the end of a twenty-five-year wait. For others it reopens something they have spent a quarter of a century learning to carry, and the phone call is the last thing they want.
Which brings the story back to the name that was not printed.
There is a genuine ethical question inside this method, and it is not a small one. In the standard approach, a family’s participation is the thing that makes an identification possible. They chose to give a sample. They asked, in effect, to be told. Genetic genealogy inverts that. It can identify someone through the uploaded ancestry data of distant relatives who have never heard of the case, on behalf of a family that submitted nothing and made no request. The person can be found without anybody in the immediate family ever having asked to find her.
That does not make it wrong. It does make consent something the office has to think about after the fact rather than before it, and it means the family’s wishes at the moment of notification carry more weight than usual, because that notification is the first choice they have been offered.
The people on the other side of the database are worth a thought too. Somebody, somewhere, spat in a tube to find out where their great-grandparents came from, uploaded the result, and has no idea that their data has just been part of identifying a stranger who died in 2001. That is the bargain underneath every genetic genealogy case, criminal or otherwise, and it is the reason the field has spent years arguing about which databases should be open to investigators, what users are actually told when they tick a box, and whether an opt-in buried in a terms page is a real consent or a legal formality. Applying it to a mass fatality does not create that argument, but it does remove the usual justification, because here nobody is being caught. Somebody is being found.
A notification, when it comes, is not a press release either. It is a phone call, and then usually a meeting, and the office has spent twenty-five years learning how to make it. Families were asked years ago to say whether they wanted to be contacted at all for future identifications, and some said no, which the office honours. The call does not come with a story attached or a ceremony arranged. It comes with a fact and a set of choices about what happens next, including the choice this family made.
This family’s choice was privacy. They were told who she was, and they asked that she not be named publicly, and the city announced the identification without her. The release describes an adult woman and says nothing else about her. Nobody outside her family and a small number of officials knows which of the missing she is.
It is an unusual thing for a city to do, and a good one. New York has spent twenty-five years and an enormous amount of public money on the proposition that every one of these people deserves their name back. Here was the first success of a brand new method, on the eve of a major anniversary, and the obvious institutional temptation was to make it a story with a face. Instead the announcement was written around a hole where the name should be.
The count went up by one. The list of the missing got one line shorter. Somewhere there is a family that now knows something it did not know last year, and has told the rest of us, politely, that it is none of our business.
That is the ending. Not a name released, but a name recovered and then deliberately withheld. After twenty-five years of a public effort conducted largely in public, the first identification by this method is the one the public will never be told.
It is also, in a small way, a correction to how this kind of science usually gets talked about. New forensic methods almost always arrive in public attached to a name, because the cases that make headlines are criminal ones and the point of those is the identification of a person who did something. Here the method arrived attached to nobody. Its first success on this case is a blank space in a press release, and the only way anyone knows it worked at all is that a city office said so and a family, offstage, agreed to let it be said.
And Desire is still going. Roughly eleven hundred people are still unidentified, the samples are still in the building, and the method that just worked for the first time has only been pointed at a fraction of them. The next one may take another year. It may not. The only part of this anybody in that laboratory treats as settled is that they are not finished.