Numbers tell the story in the decade of search and recovery of the remains of Sept. 11 victims – a massive forensic investigation marked by a Supreme Court appeal of families who wanted a more thorough search, and discoveries years after the attacks of even more remains in manholes and on rooftops around ground zero. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
Funk Flex
Find Flex On Google+

His family has his spare firefighter uniform, but not the one he wore on 9/11 - or any other trace of him.
Killed at the World Trade Center, 32-year-old Scott Kopytko's remains were never recovered - a painful legacy of grief for families looking for answers, closure or final confirmation that their loved one was actually a 9/11 victim.
"Very painful and very hurt" is how Russell Mercer, Kopytko's stepfather, describes it. "And mistrusting of everybody."
Numbers tell the story in the decade of search and recovery of the remains of Sept. 11 victims - a massive forensic investigation marked by a Supreme Court appeal of families who wanted a more thorough search, and discoveries years after the attacks of even more remains in manholes and on rooftops around ground zero.
- Tens of millions have been spent, including on the painstaking extraction of DNA from tiny bone fragments, using technology refined from a decade ago.
- Of 21,000 remains that have been recovered, nearly 9,000 are unidentified, because of the degraded condition they were found in. More than 1,100 victims have no identifiable remains.
- And the pace of the process is telling - in five years, only 26 new identifications. Ernest James, a 40-year-old man who worked in the trade center's north tower, was the last identification, in late August.
"I can't give a time frame of when an identification is going to be made, if at all," said Mark Desire, who heads the World Trade Center identification unit for the city medical examiner's office. "But we are working nonstop."
Five scientists work seven days a week trying to make new identifications at a lab in an ultra-modern building on the east side of Manhattan. The unidentified remains are stored in climate-controlled conditions under a white tent blocks from the medical examiner's office. About 400 bone fragments are looked at and analyzed every month.
DNA analysis is done by comparing the remains' genetic profile to DNA found from victims' possessions, like toothbrushes; from relatives; or from previously identified remains.
The fragments are examined, cleaned, and pulverized into powder to extract tell-tale genetic traces - a process that can take up to a week before an identification is made. Most of the DNA profiles generated belong to previously identified victims.
When an identification is made, the remains are returned to the family. Sometimes, nothing survives the DNA testing. Relatives might only receive the packaging where the remains had been stored.
Desire, assistant director of forensic biology for the medical examiner's office, says the office won't give up.

TNT