NYC Medical Examiner Identifies 1,654th 9/11 Victim Using DNA Genealogy Technique for the First Time

Twenty-five years after hijacked planes brought down the Twin Towers, killing 2,753 people in New York City, the city's Office of Chief Medical Examiner is still working through unidentified remains. On August 24, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the OCME announced they had identified the 1,654th victim, an adult woman whose name is being withheld at her family's request, using a technique never before applied to a 9/11 case.

The method is called forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG. It pairs specialized DNA analysis with genealogy research to build family trees from genetic material, generating leads that investigators then confirm through standard forensic testing. The identification came out of a collaboration between OCME and the NYPD's Investigative Genetic Genealogy Squad, according to the mayor's office.

"As we approach the 25th anniversary of the horrific September 11 attacks, we honor the nearly 3,000 people whose lives were stolen that day," Mamdani said in the city's announcement. "We remain committed to the families who have spent 25 years waiting for answers."

Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jason Graham called FIGG "a promising new addition to our toolkit" and said the effort to identify Ground Zero victims remains "a sacred commitment." His office has been running DNA comparisons against WTC remains continuously since 2001, re-testing samples as forensic technology has improved over the decades.

With 1,654 victims identified, roughly 1,099 of the 2,753 killed in New York City on September 11, 2001, still have no confirmed identity. FIGG has already proven itself in cold cases far removed from 9/11. Fox News noted the same technique recently helped identify a woman found in a Utah desert 28 years ago and separately cracked a 44-year-old case involving a body in a shallow grave tied to an estate murder plot. Those cases show the method's track record outside the WTC context, though OCME's announcement makes clear this is its first confirmed use on a 9/11 victim specifically.

The human cost of that identification work has its own history, largely invisible to the public. John Williams, a forensic anthropologist now 73 years old, spent two weeks in New York in the days after the attacks helping process remains as part of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a Department of Health and Human Services program built to respond when casualties overwhelm local medical examiners, according to The Assembly NC. Williams later founded a body farm at Western Carolina University to study human decomposition and co-edited a 2022 book on disaster victim identification for professionals and policymakers. He told the outlet the two weeks he spent in New York remain the most difficult and important of his four-decade career, and that he has talked about it less over the years even as the memories never faded.

A CBS News 60 Minutes archive segment, reposted by Forever Delmarva on September 10, 2026, underscored that OCME's identification effort was never meant to have an end date. The office has described its pledge as open-ended: it will keep testing remains as long as families are still looking for answers, no matter how many years pass.

That raises an obvious question critics of large forensic bureaucracies sometimes ask about any long-running government effort: is a quarter-century identification program still delivering results, or mostly running on institutional inertia? The answer, on the numbers alone, is that it is still working. A new case cracked in 2026, using a technique that did not exist in usable form for 9/11 victims until now, is a concrete result, not a symbolic gesture. Whether FIGG can meaningfully speed up identification of the roughly 1,099 remaining victims, many of whose remains are so fragmented that DNA yield is minimal, is not yet established by anything in OCME's announcement.

The office has not said how many additional cases it expects FIGG to resolve, or over what timeframe. It also has not disclosed the cost of standing up the NYPD-OCME genealogy squad or how it is funded going forward. Those are the concrete unanswered questions as the city marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks: how many more families still waiting for a name will get one, and how long the city is prepared to keep paying to find out.