Earlier this month, the New York City medical examiner’s office positively identified the remains of a man killed in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center—the first positive identification in over two years. Below, Jay Aronson, author of Who Owns the Dead? The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero, considers some of the questions raised by the open-ended effort to identify the dead.
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The recent identification of the 1641st victim of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks highlights both the continuing development of DNA profiling technology and the ongoing commitment of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) to endeavor to identify the remains of 9/11 victims. Before this, the most recent identification occurred in March 2015 when 26-year-old Fiduciary Trust employee Matthew David Yarnell was identified using newly available testing methods.
In Who Owns the Dead? I chronicle the efforts of scientists, construction workers, politicians, and uniformed service personnel to recover and identify the remains of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks. The identification of Yarnell and the most recent victim are the fruits of a promise made by Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch that his office would never end its efforts to identify the missing.
Despite these recent successes, Who Owns the Dead? suggests that the promise was problematic at a variety of levels, not least of which that it means that the events of 9/11 can never be fully put to rest and that unidentified remains of victims will be in a permanent state of limbo—neither buried in marked individual graves nor interred in a collective mass grave. Instead, they are housed in the Medical Examiner’s repository seven stories below ground behind a wall of the National 9/11 Museum.
Other than an unknown number of undocumented immigrants who were never officially reported missing, it is highly unlikely that any victims of the attacks suffered an anonymous death. In an interview with CNN, Matthew Yarnell’s mother Michelle Yarnell said that she never doubted that her son had died in the attacks. She said that receiving the call from the OCME about Matthew “opened up all of the old wounds and old pains,” but enabled her family to “finally put everything to rest.” She also noted that she was grateful that the ME’s office was not going to give up in their quest to identify as many remains as possible. “I hope for everyone that lost a loved one there, that they’ll have closure someday, and, hopefully, sooner rather than later.”
Identifications like Yarnell’s and the one that just occurred will likely continue sporadically over the next few decades as DNA extraction technology continues to improve and profiling techniques become ever more sensitive. This will also likely become the norm for future mass disasters in which identification programs are declared open-ended.
One question that needs to be answered, then, is what impact these long-delayed identifications have on families and communities. Do they bring solace and relief after so many years? Are outcomes for families that receive remains years or decades after death different in any way from those of families that receive them early on, or not all? Is the lingering hope that an identification may occur in the future healthy or unhealthy for families that do not receive remains? In cases where families receive partial remains, what are the effects of being informed of the identification of additional remains years later? And, more controversially, whatever the answer to these questions, might the resources expended on extended identification projects be used more helpfully in other ways?
These are questions that must be analyzed empirically by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, ethicists, historians, and forensic scientists. We must not assume that we already know the answers.
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Aronson recently spoke with the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center’s Being Human podcast about his work; you can listen to that conversation via the player below.
