9/11 victim identification comes to end

NEW YORK -- The medical examiner's office has largely ended its effort to identify the remains of those killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, leaving more than a thousand victims unidentified.\n"They told us they've exhausted all current technologies for identifications," Diane Horning, who lost her 26-year-old son, Matthew, said Wednesday.\nHorning said the medical examiner's office called her Tuesday morning.\nThe forensic effort failed to identify any remains of more than 1,100 victims, or almost half of the 2,749 who died there.\nSince the attacks 3 1/2 years ago, the medical examiner's office identified nearly 1,600 victims, although progress had slowed considerably in recent months. Since September, only eight victims have been identified. A few inconclusive tests are still pending that could yield a couple of more identifications, they told families.\nThe city has about 10,000 unidentified bone and tissue fragments that cannot be matched to the list of the dead.\nThe medical examiner's office will contact all victims' families who had asked to be notified when the forensic effort ended.\nRobert Shaler, director of forensic biology for the medical examiner, has said that the DNA effort could be reopened if new scientific processes were developed.\n"If three years from now somebody comes up with something ... that really looks like it's going to work, then we're going to be poised to go after it," he told The Associated Press in 2003.\nSome identifications were made quickly in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. To identify smaller remains, the medical examiner had to rely on DNA matching, drawing results from shreds of bone and tissue. Tests were often not possible because the DNA was too damaged by heat, humidity and the passage of time.\n"I'm still driven by the families," Shaler said in 2003. "When I see these people, they look at me with eyes that say, 'Did you find her yet?' But when you're only turning out a couple a week or four, five a month, it's hard."\nIn most cases, victims whose remains were not identified have been legally declared dead by the court anyway, based on documentation that they were at the trade center or on the hijacked airplanes.