They identified Ernest James’ remains just two weeks shy of the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
A decade after the 40-year-old IT expert at Marsh & McLennan died in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s north tower, the city Medical Examiner’s Office announced it had made a DNA match.
James’ fiancée, Monique Keyes, was stunned but told reporters, “It will allow me to say goodbye, finally, truly and completely.” She has met someone else and is getting married in December.
James brings the total number of 9/11 victims identified to 1,632. The Medical Examiner’s Office has pledged to continue to try to identify people “as long as there is technology available.”
COMPLETE 9/11 ANNIVERSARY COVERAGE
Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch, now 74, has said the enormous, heart-rending task is “important to people.”
Nelly Braginsky finally held a funeral for her son, Alexander, this June after recovering just one tiny bone fragment. A rabbi led a ceremony attended by family and friends of Alex, 38, a married manager of the foreign currency market for Reuters. On 9/11, he had breakfast at Windows on the World.
Shrouded in white, the fragment was laid to rest in a small box in a Jewish cemetery in Queens.
“I have only a piece of bone, but I buried him by tradition,’’ Braginsky said.
First responders mobilized quickly on the morning of 9/11. But for the rest of the day and long afterward, they found only the dead. Cadavers sometimes, but more often mere scraps of humanity. Those who found them saw things they will never forget:
“People had I-beams through them, and things like that.”
“The body of a young woman … her child underneath … an arm they found, a woman’s, and when they pried open her fingers they found inside the fist of a baby.”
Ground Zero would over time yield 21,817 separate human remains. Dr. Hirsch, whose task it would be to collect and identify them, was based on First Avenue, only two miles from the WTC.
He and aides rushed to a nearby site early on 9/11 to prepare a temporary morgue, and several of them were injured by flying debris. Those still able to work started the macabre process that saw its latest success with James.
Remains were brought to Hirsch’s headquarters as they were found. They were analyzed, borne to a tent nearby, and there — however small they might be — a prayer was spoken over them. They were then stored in refrigerated trailers pending identification. That operation would eventually require no less than 16 trailers.
Many more remains would be found as the years passed — atop the damaged Deutsche Bank building, in manholes, under a service road that had been paved in haste at Ground Zero.
An assortment of remains, from a complete cadaver dressed in a suit to tiny bone fragments, were found at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where a half-million tons of debris were dumped.
Within 10 months of 9/11, science and detective work would identify 1,229 of those killed. In the years since, 403 more have been identified. It has been an unparalleled forensic achievement.
Even so, 1,121 men and women — 41 percent of the total who died — remain unidentified.
Today, victims’ families will gather around the reflecting pools of the new 9/11 memorial.
For many, the roll of the dead etched on the monument may be as close as they ever get to a final resting place.
Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan are the authors of “The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden,” out now from Ballantine.