Art News

10 years, 21,000 bone fragments, no 9/11 closure

NEW YORK (AP).- 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