In New York City, there has been a quarter-century-long effort to reclaim the dead.

On September 11th, 2001, the bodies of nearly 2,800 people were buried at ground zero, reduced to anonymous fragments in a grave made of concrete and steel. Most people know of the visible bravery in lower Manhattan that day, the nobility of the firefighters and first responders running up the stairs while everyone was coming down. Less well known was another group of first responders, whose tireless effort to identify the victims has been quietly ongoing since.

Today, new technology is helping the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner keep a promise to do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to put names to the remains.

Finding the fragments

To begin to identify the victims after 9/11, they first had to be found.

In the weeks and months that followed the attack, teams of government workers labored with tortured devotion to comb through the wreckage. And when two gargantuan skyscrapers falter and crumble beneath their own weight, it leaves a lot of wreckage: nearly 2 million tons in all. This mountain of debris where the World Trade Center towers once stood became known as “the pile.” Each worker in the pile became a kind of archeologist, digging into a certain prehistory of America — a time before the so-called war on terror — all laboring, in essence, to raise the dead.

“When we do have a recovery [of human remains], I don’t think of it as a bad thing. I think of it as the beginning of closure for families that have been through just pure hell,” Port Authority Police Department officer Dan Henry told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley in 2002. 

Henry knew of such emotional perdition himself. He was there, in part, in pursuit of the remains of his brother, fireman Joseph Henry. 

In his quest for closure, Dan Henry joined some 800 people who searched the wreckage every day. Their work persisted without pause for months, through weekends, weather, and holidays, not stopping for even one hour. They dug until they reached the bedrock of Manhattan.

With each bucket of debris in the pile, workers searched by hand, looking for human remains. Then, after everything had been examined, the rubble was piled on barges and sent across New York Harbor to Staten Island. There, workers sorted the wreckage and spread it over conveyor belts, where they again sifted it manually. They searched for anything that might identify a life: a wallet, a bone fragment, a wedding ring.

“I never give up hope that I’ll get his wedding band back that I want so desperately, or that I’ll get another phone call about some other remains,” Nicole Petrocelli LaMorte told Pelley in spring of 2002. 

Petrocelli LaMorte’s late husband, Mark Petrocelli, was one of the victims whose remains were recovered and identified early on.

At the time she spoke with Pelley, Petrocelli LaMorte had been told about four separate recoveries of her husband, a commodities broker for Carr Futures. Petrocelli, who usually worked at the World Financial Center nearby, had left home early that morning to attend his first brokers’ meeting, held in the World Trade Center’s North Tower on the 92nd floor. Shortly after he arrived that morning, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into floors 93 to 99. No one survived above the 91st floor.

While some family members of victims opted not to be informed when their loved one’s remains were identified, Petrocelli LaMorte told Pelley she chose to know every time. If he were sick and dying, she would have taken care of him, she said in 2002. So when any part of him was identified — as his heart was, for example, found alone outside his torso — she wanted to know and to bring the remains home.

At the time of that interview in 2002, the majority of families were still waiting for the first notification that their loved one had been identified. And in those months immediately after the attack, it looked likely that it would remain that way.

“But it’s important for the families to remember that the recovery, the identification process will continue at the medical examiner’s office for quite some time, probably almost a year,” Petrocelli LaMorte told Pelley at the time. “So there is hope.”

Identifying the victims

Both the work and the hope have endured longer than imagined.

One morning in December 2023, police officers knocked on Ellen Niven’s door. Niven was putting up her Christmas tree, and when she saw the officers, she first feared something had happened to her son. Instead, they were there to present a letter she thought might never come: a notice informing her that her late husband’s DNA had been identified for the first time.

Whether or not the news arrived as something of an early holiday gift, it was belated in other ways. On 9/11, Ellen’s husband, John Niven, was a 44-year-old insurance executive at Aon who worked on the 105th floor of the South Tower. After United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, another Aon employee, Kevin Cosgrove, also huddled on the 105th floor. Cosgrove’s wife was informed that her husband’s remains were found and identified a week after the attack in 2001.

But for two decades, Ellen Niven had not heard a thing.

“I was really blown away because I had no idea that for 22 years, anyone had still been looking, or sifting, or trying to find anything,” Niven said recently. “I just assumed that had all ended shortly after 9/11, when everything was cleared away.”

After the disaster, workers unearthed 15 of Niven’s bone fragments, and for years, scientists had tested and retested them. But they always came up short on extracting enough DNA for a match. According to Mark Desire, the assistant director of forensic biology at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, this has been a common issue with the human remains found within the wreckage.

“These remains went through every possible thing that could destroy DNA,” Desire told 60 Minutes, “from jet fuel to diesel fuel, mold, bacteria, sunlight, all kinds of chemicals that were in the building, insects, heat, fire. All these things destroy DNA.”

If any genetic data survived, today’s new technology will search for it. To extract DNA from bone, scientists first need to pulverize the bone into a fine powder. According to Desire, this process was done by hand with a mortar and pestle in the early days after 9/11. Today, the method involves a cryogenic grinder filled with liquid nitrogen at 320 degrees below zero. With high-speed vibration, individual cells in the deeply frozen bone shatter, and a chemical process releases their DNA.

New methods, including a combination of Y chromosomal technology and nuclear technology, made a breakthrough with Niven’s remains. Finally, more than two decades after his coworker was identified, scientists were able to link DNA in a bone fragment to a cheek swab taken from Niven’s son, Jack, in the days after the attack. At the time, Jack was just 18 months old.

The news of the match has brought memories of Niven back to friends and family.

“He was a very calm person, witty, very dry, great sense of humor. Sort of a benevolent chuckle,” Ellen Niven remembers. “He really was very open-minded. The older I’ve gotten, and the more time has passed, the more you appreciate qualities that he had that were really special.”

One special memory Niven holds of her late husband was the last time she saw him. It was the morning of September 11, 2001, and John had fed their young son cherry yogurt for breakfast before grabbing his briefcase and getting ready to leave. He was scheduled to fly to Denver that afternoon, and as he walked out the door, he told her, “Alright, I’ll call you later.”

For Kathy Haberman, the finite nature of memories like these is still hard to accept.

“I can’t look at pictures of Andrea now, because there’s never going to be another picture,” Haberman told 60 Minutes. “There’s never going to be another memory.”

Haberman’s daughter, 25-year-old Andrea Haberman, was on her very first business trip. Like Mark Petrocelli, she worked for Carr Futures, but as an administrative assistant to the company’s president, she was based in Chicago. She had never been to New York City before — indeed, had never even visited the East Coast — and was scheduled to fly out on Monday, September 10th.

Her flight from Chicago’s O’Hare airport was canceled twice, and after the second postponement, she called her parents to tell them that, if it were canceled a third time, she would postpone her flight until morning.

According to Haberman’s parents, she had already been nervous about the trip. She was acutely aware of the legacy of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a subject she wrote about for an English assignment in high school. Elizabeth Rydzik Biskobing, the English teacher who had assigned students to write an essay about an event in the news, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Haberman was the only student who chose to write about the bombing. Going beyond the assignment, Haberman even included her own disbelief at the terrorists’ brutality.

“She really threw me for a loop because she was so baffled by what happened,” Biskobing told the paper.

After finally landing in New York City late Monday night, Haberman reported for work around 8 a.m. the next morning — visiting the 92nd floor of the North Tower. Her boss, who had flown in that morning, was navigating traffic into Manhattan when the disaster happened.

“Thing is, she knew nobody there,” Haberman’s father, Gordon, told 60 Minutes. “That has always bothered me. She was alone and had this happen.”

Over the years, the Haberman family has been reminded of Andrea with every call from NYPD detectives. There have been 11 notifications so far to inform them that her remains have been identified, and each time, the family can feel that they are present for their daughter in death.

“She was beautiful both inside and out, intelligent, very smart,” Gordon Haberman said. “And she was very much looking forward to the future, all of us.”

One future event Andrea had been eager for was her wedding to her fiancé, Al Kolodzik. The two had just purchased a home together, and over Labor Day weekend, they had finalized details of their wedding, which was to take place the following year. The day after Andrea died, her parents say the postman delivered a thick manilla envelope containing the contract for the reception venue. 

“To this day, I cannot look at her wedding dress,” Kathy Haberman said. “I never want to see it again.”

Haberman’s sister, Julie Osmus, remembers Andrea as outgoing in a quiet way. “She was just very precise on, you know, when she would talk and what she would say.”

“When she loved you, you knew it,” Osmus said.  

Today, about 40% of 9/11 victims have yet to be identified. That means the families of 1,103 people at ground zero have never received that call of closure. But the work is ongoing; forensic biologist Mark Desire said samples are still being tested every week. 

For those whom the medical examiner has contacted, the endless search to identify their loved ones’ remains has made it feel as though the nation has made good on its long-ago promise to “never forget.”

“I’m incredibly grateful, incredibly moved,” Ellen Niven said, whose late husband, John, was the 1,650th victim identified. “I had no idea that this was happening.”

Now remarried with two additional children, Niven said the experience of learning about her first husband’s identified remains has allowed her to reflect on how far she and their son, Jack, have come since that day. She said she does not think of it as closure, but something else.

“You do a lot of almost philosophical kind of soul searching, how important it is in human nature to either find a body, or find answers,” she said. “And even if this remain is infinitesimally small, there’s huge symbolism in that.”

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.