Scientists still identifying 9/11 victims' remains | 60 Minutes Archives
In a Nutshell
New York’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner continues to identify 9/11 victims 22-plus years later using ever-improving DNA technology, having so far identified 60 % of the 2,753 victims while 1,101 remain unknown. Recent successes—such as the 2023 match for insurance executive John Nan—rely on cryogenic grinding, chemical amplification, and exhaustive re-testing of tiny bone fragments against family reference samples collected in 2001. Families receive in-person notifications and decide whether to accept remains, leave them in the medical examiner’s repository, or decline further updates, reflecting the ongoing promise that every fragment will be pursued until no family is left waiting.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
It seems hard to remember when America was united. But recently, we were reminded of such a time, the morning of September 11th, 2001, when all Americans pledged to persevere together. Nearly a quarter century ago, the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner made a promise to identify the remains of the lost souls of 9/11. Not many are aware, but that work has never stopped. Today, more than 1,000 families still wait for word, and you're about to meet two for whom the promise was kept.
The most recent identification came this past December when Ellen Nan was decorating her Christmas tree. Two police officers came to her door with news of her husband, John, who had been missing 22 years. John was her husband. She met him when she was 24 years old and had moved to New York. He was an incredible person described by people who knew him as a real gentleman, very old school, old soul, wonderful father. He was very happy when they had their young son and spent a lot of time with him. He was a great friend to a lot of people.
John Nan was a 44-year-old insurance executive bound for his office on the 105th floor of the South Tower as the terrorist attack began. The first building was hit. John was in the second building, the South Tower. He had an opportunity to call her. He said, "Hi, honey. It's me. Uh, if you hear anything on the news, don't worry. I'm okay." It was the other building.
In a different family tragedy, 25-year-old Andrea Hobberman had just received a visitor pass on her first trip to her company's headquarters on the 92nd floor. Back home in Chicago, Andy, as her family called her, had just been fitted for her wedding dress in Wisconsin. Her mother Kathy was watching the news. She was shocked and ran upstairs to wake up Gordy to tell him. She came back downstairs just in time to see the second plane hit. That was United Flight 175. As Gordon Hobberman joined his wife, he threw a cup against the wall. The thing is they didn't know what tower she was in. They didn't know where she lived.
The search for Andrea Hobberman, John Nan, and nearly 3,000 others would become the passion of Dr. Charles Hirsch, the city's chief medical examiner. He raced to the base of the burning towers with a team that included a young scientist named Mark Desire. Both towers were standing. They were on fire. They parked their truck. They were to set up a temporary morgue and begin to preserve the evidence. Mark wasn't down there very long. He had just received his orders from Dr. Hirsch. He picked up their gearbox and the south tower cracked. It was right over that plume. They could see the steel and the fire coming down and he thought, "This is it. This is how I die."
The South Tower with John Nan inside foundered after 56 minutes. As Mark was running away from the collapsing south tower, he was heading for a door in an adjacent building and then he got blasted off his feet. Just knocked him right out of his shoes. Never made it to the door, but it was enough to get him through the partially through the window, which really would save his life. If he was on the outside, everything that came down across his legs would have just taken him out.
The medical examiner's team survived. That's Mark Desire in the middle in the green shirt. The North Tower in the distance is minutes from collapse. Andrea Hobberman is inside. Her parents, her sister Julie, and fiance Al drove 16 hours to Manhattan where they picked up a list of hospitals. With those lists of medical centers, Kathy and Gordon split up and Julie and Al took the west side of Broadway and they took the east side. They visited 32 different medical centers working their way down towards the tip of Manhattan and ground zero. Of course, the answers were no for Andrea Hobberman and thousands of others.
Manhattan was papered in pleas for the missing and longing remained after hope had washed away. Everybody has a flyer. Everybody is looking for their people. Families lined up at a National Guard armory and waited hours to give DNA samples to the medical examiner. There were 17,000 reference samples, toothbrushes, razors, hairbrushes, anything that the person touched when they were alive. If they couldn't get one of those samples, what living relatives do they have? Moms and dads, kids. There was a DNA swab done of Ellen's young son Jack's cheek. They filled out descriptions. They gave photographs. They filled out many, many forms. Jack was 18 months old when his father was among those embedded in a mountain of misery.
Nearly 2 million tons of debris were searched by hand for human remains. After a year, they thought they had found everything. But then in 2006, there was a shocking revelation. Bone fragments on the roof of a building across the street from ground zero. The medical examiner sent anthropologist Bradley Adams. They ended up going through the whole rooftop and they found over 700 small bone fragments on that rooftop and then they ended up, obviously if there's remains there, they need to search other areas. So, they went through every floor of that building, even to the point of having vacuum cleaners and vacuuming up dust and debris.
The remains on the Deutsche Bank building were from American Airlines Flight 11. The discovery prompted a new search for clues at ground zero. Computer floppy discs or golf balls or parts of office furniture that would be buried there. And if you're seeing that, then you know there's the potential there could be human remains mixed in with this World Trade Center debris. Five years after the attack, Brad Adams began collecting 18,000 tons of excavation material over the course of a year. 75 anthropologists washed it through screens. There was the 700 on Deutsche Bank and then over a thousand more were found during the sifting operations. All together the total World Trade Center remains came to 21,951.
The recovery efforts have been monumental and this was an unprecedented event. As you know, this is the greatest mass murder in the history of the United States. Today, Dr. Jason Graham is New York City's chief medical examiner. He inherited this promise made by his late predecessor, Charles Hirsch. As long as there are families who are continuing to seek answers, this work will continue. There were 2,753 victims, homicide victims. 60% of those individuals have been identified. 40% are left to be identified. 40% comes to 1,101 victims with no identified remains.
Putting a name to those remains is the job of the last original member of the medical examiner's 9/11 team. Mark Desire, now assistant director of forensic biology. These remains went through every possible thing that could destroy DNA 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. Everything was present at ground zero, making this not only the largest forensic investigation in the history of the United States, but the most difficult. Some of these World Trade Center remains have been tested 10, 15 times. Without a result, but if there's DNA, they're going to find it. They're going to find it. They're going to generate a profile. It may take them a while.
All remains today are bone. In a demonstration with animal bone, Desire showed new technologies that make breakthroughs possible. They include this cryogenic grinder filled with liquid nitrogen at 320° below zero. The early days of 9/11 2001, they were doing this all by hands with a mortar and pestle. With high-speed vibration, individual cells in the deeply frozen bone shatter. A chemical process releases their DNA. Equipment like this has taken that to the next level, given them so much more access to cells. They need as much DNA as possible because these samples have hardly any. Other innovations chemically amplify DNA, revealing more information from the smallest fragment. Some as small as the size of a tic tac. They've been able to get DNA from those and generate a DNA profile.
Samples are tested every week with advanced technology. John Nan's bone fragments, 15 in all, had been tested for years. Then last year, the lab made a perfect match to the swab of the cheek of his infant son taken 22 years before. First notifications are made in person. And the police came to the door and her first reaction was she said, "Is it my son?" And they said, "No." Everything's okay. And these two wonderful, really kind policemen said, "We're here to deliver you the news." And they had a letter that your husband's DNA has been discovered. When the police officer said, "We found your husband's DNA." It was a shock that they had been looking all these 22 years. She thought that that door had long been closed.
About half of 9/11 families have told the medical examiner that if their loved one is identified today, they don't want to know. Time has lightened their burden of grief. But the other half still hope for word. Few understand this mix of emotions like Dr. Jennifer Odon. She's the medical examiner's World Trade Center anthropologist, a scientist, and something of a counselor to those still hoping for the promise. Shock, she would say, is the first response. Typically just because of how many years have gone by, they weren't necessarily expecting to get that new identification, any identification for some families, they weren't expecting it. And then after that it tends to be emotional, some grief because all now all the memories, everything is coming up about that.
She is in touch with hundreds of families. Some of the memories families have shared with her are that last phone call that they received or the last birthday they had or, a vacation, but a lot of it has to do with that last contact, whether it was in the morning before they went off to work or if they had called while they were in the towers. A vital part of her job is to listen. And she will listen as long as they would like her to. They have phone calls sometimes and it'll last an hour and she will stay on and listen and talk to them. When they have questions, she'll answer it, but a lot of times they just want to speak to someone. Ellen Nan spoke to Jennifer Odon this past December when the remains of her husband John were identified for the first time. So, she heard nothing about John's remains for 22 years. So, they just assumed that there was nothing. They buried a box of mementos, photographs, and a letter that she wrote and a drawing her son had done and then nothing.
Ellen remarried and had two more boys. Her son Jack was 18 months old when his father died, now age 24. Jack let his mother tell the story of how his father's identification struck them differently. For her, it was very sad. For him, it was uplifting in a way to realize that people had been working all that time to find any piece of his dad and that of all the people that were blessed by this breakthrough that it was his dad, and that meant so much to him. So, it was really moving to see how moved he was. So many people who had met John or had even not met John reached out to them, emails, letters, phone calls to her and to Jack. And she thinks that for Jack, it really brought to life so many descriptions of his father that as a young man, he could now really appreciate. So it was a great remembrance, John being able to be back in a lot of people's minds.
As remains are identified, the folders get bigger and bigger because they keep adding all the information for those remains. Jennifer Odon adds new identifications to the DM files. No one knew what to call 9/11 the day it happened. So, the ME settled on disaster Manhattan. There's one folder for each murder victim. 2,753. This is an inventory of all of the remains found for this one person. Such things here as rib, vertebrae, sternum found over months and years. This indicates that about 50% of this body was recovered. It's a very rough estimate. They're trying to understand how many of the remains have been identified. How much of that individual is there? What are the chances that more remains will be identified? Because those are questions that families will ask.
Families have a choice. They can ask a funeral home to pick up a remain vacuum packed like this labeled with an American flag or they can leave the remain in the custody of the medical examiner. She tells them that they don't have to make that decision right now. They can call back in a month, a year, two years, 10 years, and they could then have those remains transferred over to the funeral home that they choose. They are keeping track of the remains that precisely. They know where every single remain is. They have numbers associated with all remains. So, every remain that was recovered has a specific unique number associated with it. Number 18,756 is the most recent remain of Andrea Hobberman.
The Hobbermans have asked to be told of all new identifications. For them, each reminder of their daughter is a stepping stone through a void. Gordon Hobberman calls missing hard to describe to other people, but it's deep inside you. There isn't a day that he or they don't think of her. When asked what it means to have had Andrea's remains identified, he said, "If Andrea could face what she had to face, how could I not want to know what happened to her?" Today he's 73. His relationship with the medical examiner has spanned 11 notifications, plus the amazing discovery of the relics of Andrea.
They met Gordon Hobberman at the National September 11th Memorial Museum at ground zero. With the help of the museum staff, they saw artifacts from Andrea's purse which are archived, cataloged, and handled like antiquities. He received them in 2004 from the NYPD in a meeting with officers and a priest. They wanted to know if he needed any help processing that and he was actually more concerned at that time how he was going to keep these from his wife. He feared his wife's pain. So he locked the bag in a desk drawer which he did not open for 7 years. In 2011 they donated to the museum. This is the phone that they kept calling. Her flip phone. It didn't work. A pager, driver's license, and the last photo of her life. The visitor ID that captured Andrea's spirit minutes before she was gone. And that was their Andrea. And she was going to go on to do great things and she wanted grandchildren. Her house was such a pride. She loved her owl so much. You can see it in her smile. You can see it in her face. He brought Andrea's identified remains home to Wisconsin. But he believes her other remains, still unidentified, are in the museum behind this wall and a verse by the poet Virgil. No day shall erase you from the memory of time.
Many museum visitors don't realize, but this is the outer wall of the medical examiner's repository for 9/11 remains. They're in what was the basement of the North Tower. And this is completely out of the path of the museum. It's hidden around the corner. Next to the repository, this is the entrance to the office of the chief medical examiner family reflection room. The room and repository have never been seen by the public. Families only can call a number on the door which summons an escort, often Dr. Jennifer Odon. The visits are different every time. Some families are very emotional and she'll sit in with them for an hour and just hear stories and she'll walk around with them until she knows that they're okay and then she leaves the room completely so they have the space to themselves.
This must be a burden to her. She doesn't consider it a burden. It's tough. She definitely has moments of, feeling very emotional and needing to step back. But when she talks to a family and they say thank you how grateful they are that with their continued work that a question she's answered helped them in some way. It makes it all worth it. Gordon Hobberman invited them inside as his guest. No camera, but they were allowed to record the audio. They found a small sitting room and a window into the repository for human remains. The window they're looking through looks like it's about 5 feet wide and three feet or so tall. Just a single window and a single wooden bench in front of the window. With permission, they gave their notes to an artist who sketched the view through the window that joins the family room to the repository. A loved one sitting on the bench sees a deep austere white room with rows of dark wooden cabinets 8 ft tall. They hold about 10,000 remains both known and unknown. It is in a sense a private national shrine.
Why do you come here after all these years? Gordon feels close to his daughter. She wasn't meant to be here, but she's here. The repository in the museum, which stands between the reflecting pools, seems like the right place, Ellen Nan told them for her husband, John. She has been here often. She has visited the pools over the decades to run her fingertips over her lost husband's tribute. And yet she is surprised how the endless effort to actually find him allowed her to feel once again the embrace of a nation's devotion. Her first reaction was to tell people, did you know that all this time they have been sifting through these remains and researching and researching for over 20 years? What an incredible thing. John had another moment in all of their lives. So, that was something she's incredibly grateful for.
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