9/11 Victim Remains Identified Years Later Using Advanced DNA Method

The remains of a financial worker who died 17 years ago at the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attack was identified through a new testing method that can recover DNA from degraded samples by New York City’s Medical Examiner.

The remains belonged to Scott Michael Johnson who worked as a securities analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, located on the 89th floor of the south tower.

“This identification is the result of the tireless dedication of our staff to this ongoing mission,” Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said, adding they achieved it by linking a bone fragment recovered at Ground Zero to the remains.

“In 2001, we made a commitment to the families of victims that we would do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to identify their loved ones,” Sampson said.

Johnson is the 1,642nd person to be identified, and the medical examiner's office is trying match up another 1,100 victims with their remains.

“You get pulled right back into it and it also means there’s a finality. Somehow I always thought he would just walk up and say, ‘Here I am. I had amnesia,’” his mother Ann Johnson told the New York Times.

“His friends reported at his memorial service on the incredible love and support that he gave to them that in a sense went even beyond our understanding of him,” his father Tom Johnson said, adding, “He was one of the kindest people that anyone around him had ever known. The pain of losing someone like that was tremendous.”

Mark Desire, the assistant director of the city medical examiner's Department of Forensic Biology said, “We have to break these bone samples down to small pieces to get access to the cells. ... Through the years, that process has gotten better and better. We are also using new digestion chemicals to remove the DNA from the fragment.”

“We realize that this is an investigation we are never going to be able to completely close. But we will continue to try to ID the remains we had no hopes of identifying in the past,” Desire said, the New York Daily News reported. “But with the World Trade Center investigation, it’s a different kind of case and when you meet with the families and the hugs and the thank yous, it gets emotional with them and it really helps with that drive to keep improving that process.”

He said the yet to be identified remains are more challenging as most of them are bones, from which it is difficult to generate DNA.

In the first step of DNA identification, the bone must be pulverized. A new technique called ultrasonic ball bearings has been applied to the process, which makes it finer powder.

DNA is extracted and once its profile is generated, it is compared to the DNA samples available.

Johnson’s sample was compared to that from his toothbrush and then confirmed with samples from his parents.