I Identified 9/11 Victims From Bone Fragments. Decades Later, Families Still Wait

For much of her working life, Barbara Butcher confronted death at close range.

Across 23 years with New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner, she helped investigate more than 5,500 deaths, among them nearly 700 homicides, and stepped inside some of the most disturbing crime scenes the city had ever produced.

Yet nothing in her long career as a death investigator could have prepared her for the overwhelming scale of destruction at Ground Zero.

More than two decades after the September 11, 2001 attacks — the deadliest terrorist assault in United States history — the scenes she witnessed in lower Manhattan remain impossible for her to forget.

In the days after the Twin Towers collapsed, Butcher was assigned the grim task of recovering tiny fragments of bone from rooftops surrounding the vast field of wreckage.

Those fragments were subjected to repeated DNA testing as Butcher helped oversee the painstaking effort to identify victims.  

Despite the process that is almost impossible to comprehend, the heartbreaking reality is that some of the families who lost a loved one still have nothing to bury.

More than 1,000 of the nearly 3,000 victims have not been identified among the remains, and may never be.

‘So many of the things I saw haunted me,’ Butcher told the Daily Mail.

‘I had never seen that much room, that much destruction, and I had never thought that there would be thousands of people trapped beneath, obliterated, killed. It was inconceivable to me.’

The Twin Towers were struck by two airliners on September 11, 2001, and subsequently collapsed during the deadliest terrorist attack in US history.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed when Islamic terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the Twin Towers and one into the Pentagon. 

Passengers and crew aboard the fourth, Flight 93, fought back against the hijackers before the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

Butcher was in New Jersey when the attacks occurred, and she fought to get into the city and help her colleagues during the grueling recovery process.

‘That was enormously difficult, and what my colleagues did- clambering across that pile to find remains- was life-altering for them psychologically, and of course, there are the health issues,’ she said.

Butcher explained that during that time she was promoted to Deputy Director of the medical examiner’s office and was in charge of the identification process.

‘For every single remains we brought back, they had to be tagged, examined by medical examiners and forensic anthropologists, and each remains was given a unique code,’ she said.

‘That identification process was overwhelming, and it was miraculous.’

She said that investigators sent families questionnaires with strange questions such as how long a loved one’s toe was.

‘Anything that we could get that might possibly identify a person,’ Butcher added.

Of the 2,753 people who were killed in the Twin Towers, Butcher said that only 60 percent have had their remains identified.

‘When I say remains, I’m not talking about whole bodies or anything that size; I’m talking about the fact that we are taking the tiniest bone fragments found on top of the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and doing DNA testing over and over,’ she said.

‘Each time DNA becomes more sophisticated and better able to extract a profile, they retest the remains. 

‘However, that leaves approximately 1,100 people unidentified. 40 percent of those who died there were never identified. 

‘Their families have nothing to bury, and that, to me, is absolutely heartbreaking.’

Butcher noted that all of the deaths from the attacks are homicides, including those captured in horrific images ‘jumping’ out of the burning building.

‘The terrorists murdered them,’ she said.