The remains of three more World Trade Center victims have been identified nearly 24 years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack, including a man from Long Island, city officials said Thursday.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York City chief medical examiner Jason Graham said continuing advanced DNA testing identified the remains of Ryan Fitzgerald, of Floral Park, and Barbara Keating, of Palm Springs, California, as well as those of a woman whose family asked for confidentiality.
The identifications are the 1,651st, 1,652nd and 1,653rd made of victims of the attack on the Twin Towers which took 2,753 lives.
“The pain of losing a loved one in the September 11th terror attacks echoes across the decades but with these three new identifications, we take a step forward in comforting the family members still aching from that day,” Adams said in a statement.
WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND
- The remains of three more World Trade Center victims have been identified nearly 25 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attack, including a man from Long Island.
- Advanced DNA testing identified the remains of Ryan Fitzgerald, of Floral Park, and Barbara Keating, of California, as well as those of a woman whose family asked for confidentiality.
- Fitzgerald was one of nearly 500 Long Islanders who died at Ground Zero.
Fitzgerald was one of nearly 500 Long Islanders who died at Ground Zero — a figure that represents nearly one fifth of the total victims.
The coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States included crashing two hijacked airliners into the Twin Towers, a third into the Pentagon and a fourth that crashed in a rural Pennsylvania field during a passenger revolt. In response, the United States launched a global war on terror over multiple decades to eliminate hostile groups deemed terrorist organizations and governments that supported them.
Family outreach
According to officials, the identifications were made as a result of family outreach which provided crucial DNA reference samples to compare with full genetic profiles of the previously unidentified remains. The identification of Fitzgerald was done from remains recovered in 2002, while that of Keating and the woman whose identity is being kept confidential was made from remains recovered in 2001, officials said.
According to a profile published in Newsday in 2011, Fitzgerald, 26, had been working as a foreign currency trader at Fiduciary Trust in the south tower. He had called his family after the first plane hit the north tower to say he was OK and leaving his office on the 94th floor, a location that was above the impact zone of the second plane. But Fitzgerald never got out of the building and perished in the tower’s collapse.
Advanced DNA testing identified the remains of 9/11 victim Ryan Fitzgerald, of Floral Park, along with two other individuals. Credit: Family Photo
Fitzgerald grew up in Richmond Hill, Queens and moved to Floral Park with his family as a high school freshman, according to the profile, which noted he played basketball at Holy Cross High School in Queens. According to his biography, Fitzgerald played basketball in college and was studying at Dowling College for a master’s degree while working at Fiduciary Trust. Fitzgerald was living in Manhattan at the time of his death.
Fitzgerald’s family members didn’t return a number of telephone messages seeking comment Thursday.
Keating was 72 years old when she died as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the north tower. Keating, a widow, had lived in Massachusetts for many years before moving to California. A convert to Catholicism, Keating was active at St. Theresa Catholic Church in Palm Springs where she assisted the parish deacon, church secretary Mary Arthen said Thursday.
“She liked driving around in a red convertible with the top down and liked a good martini,” Arthen said, who added she was gratified to hear Keating’s remains had been identified.
Keating had been vacationing in Massachusetts when she had to return to California earlier than expected to help a daughter who had been in a car accident, Arthen recalled.
The church deacon was supposed to pick up Keating at the airport and couldn’t understand why she had not called to say she had arrived, Arthen said. Later that day, parishioners found out Keating’s flight had crashed into the north tower.
Pushing the boundaries
In a phone interview with Newsday, Graham said the latest identifications were part of a decadeslong effort by his office, which has pushed the boundaries of forensic science and DNA identification.
“It’s very challenging,” Graham said of the work. “It is the largest identification effort in history stemming from a mass murder.”
The victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers were subjected to extreme kinetic forces, burning fuel, contamination and years of degradation which compromised the DNA, Graham said.
Over the years, the fragments of remains, some as small as a fingernail, have been screened and rescreened with improved forensic techniques. Officials on Grahams’s staff have developed new techniques to get DNA from bone fragments and have been using advanced techniques such as next generation sequencing to develop genetic profiles which had previously been out of reach.
The latest three identifications were made after family members provided additional reference samples to compare with the unknown DNA material, Graham said.
‘For the families’
The outreach effort to families will continue, Graham said, since they may hold the key to more identifications.
In the decades after the disaster, the commitment to identify the missing and notify their families stands as strong as ever, Graham said.
Much work remains to be done. Some 1,100 victims of the World Trade Center attack have yet to identified.
“Everything we do is really done for the families,” Graham said
Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.
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