08/17/2025: The Promise and The Land of Declining Sons

0:07When the police officer said, we found your husband's DNA, I mean, that must have hit you as quite a shock. It was a shock that they'd been looking all these, all these 22 years. Not many are aware, but more than a thousand families still wait for word of a missing loved one from 9-11. and the work to identify their remains has never stopped. These remains went through every possible thing that could destroy DNA at Crown's ear, making this not only the largest forensic investigation in the history of the United States, but the most difficult. Some of these World Trade Center remains have been tested how many times?

0:4710, 15 times, yeah. Without a result? Without a result. But if there's DNA, we're going to find it. We're going to find it. We're going to generate a profile. It may take us a while.

1:00Ichinono Japan sits regally wedged between mountains an hour and a half west of Kyoto. Its listed population just shy of 50. But if it seems like more, it's for good reason. The village comes embroidered with 40 lifelike puppets. In the middle of town, on a playground, pedaling off toward the woods. It's lonely here. Back in my day, the village was full of kids. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:49This month, against all odds and expectations, the remains of three victims of the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center were identified for the first time. After nearly a quarter century, the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner announced that it had put names to fragmentary remains using the latest advances in DNA technology. As we first reported last year, not many are aware, but the medical examiner made a promise to identify the lost souls of 9-11. And that work has never stopped, because more than 1 ,000 families still wait for word. You're about to meet two for whom the promise was kept.

2:38For Ellen Niven, the moment came in December 2023. She was decorating her Christmas tree when two police officers came to her door with news of her husband John, who had been missing 22 years. John was my husband. I met him when I was 24 years old and had moved to New York. Incredible person, described by people who knew him as a real gentleman, very old school, old soul, wonderful father. Very happy when we had our young son and spent a lot of time with him. Great friend to a lot of people. John Niven was a 44-year-old insurance executive bound for his office on the 105th floor of the South Tower as the terrorist attack began.

3:36Holy f***!

3:43The first building was hit. John was in the second building. The South Tower, yes. And he had an opportunity to call you. Yes, he said, Hi, honey, it's me. If you hear anything on the news, don't worry, I'm okay. It was the other building. In the other building, a different family tragedy was unfolding. 25-year-old Haberman, Andrea L., had just received a visitor pass on her first trip to her company's headquarters on the 92nd floor. Back home in Chicago, Andy, as her family called her, had just been fitted for her wedding dress. In Wisconsin, her mother Kathy was watching the news. I was shocked, and I ran upstairs to wake up Gordy to tell him.

4:36And then I came back downstairs just in time to see the second plane hit. That was United Flight 175 as Gordon Haberman joined his wife. I threw a cup against the wall. I remember that. Thing is, we didn't know what tower she was in. We didn't know where she lived. The search for Andrea Haberman, John Niven, and nearly 3 ,000 others would become the passion of Dr. Charles Hirsch, the city's chief medical examiner. He raced to the base of the burning towers with a team that included a young scientist named Mark Desire. Both towers were standing, they were on fire. We parked our truck. We were to set up a temporary morgue and begin to preserve the evidence.

5:33It wasn't down there very long. I had just received my orders from Dr. Hirsch. I picked up our gearbox, and the South Tower cracked. It was right over us, that plume. They could see the steel and the fire coming down, and I thought, this is it. This is how I die. The South Tower, with John Niven inside, foundered after 56 minutes.

6:02As you're running away from the collapsing South Tower, you were heading for a door in an adjacent building, and then you got blasted off your feet? Yeah, it just knocked me right out of my shoes. Never made it to the door, but it was enough to get me through, partially through the window, which really would save my life. If I was on the outside, everything that came down across my legs would have taken me out. The medical examiner's team survived. That's marked desire in the middle, in the green shirt. The North Tower, in the distance, is minutes from collapse. Andrea Haberman is inside. Her parents, her sister Julie and fiancé Al, drove 16 hours to Manhattan, where they picked up a list of hospitals.

6:50But with those lists of medical centers, Kathy and I split up, And Julie and Al took the west side of Broadway, and we took the east side. 32 different medical centers working our way down towards tip Manhattan and Ground Zero. Of course, the answers were no. No. No for Andrea Hoverman and thousands of others. Manhattan was papered in pleas for the missing. and longing remained after hope had washed away. Everybody has a flyer. Everybody is looking for their people. Families lined up at a National Guard armory and waited hours to give DNA samples to the medical examiner. 17 ,000 reference samples, toothbrushes, razors, hairbrushes, anything that the person touched when they were alive.

7:59If we couldn't get one of those samples, what living relatives do we have? Moms and dads, kids. There was DNA swab done of my young son Jack's cheek. You filled out descriptions. You gave photographs. You filled out many, many forms. They swabbed your son's cheek for DNA? Yes. How old was he? 18 months.

8:26His father was among those entombed in a mountain of misery.

8:34Nearly two million tons of debris were searched by hand for human remains. After a year, they thought they had found everything. But then, in 2006, there was a shocking revelation. Bone fragments on the roof of a building across the street from Ground Zero. The medical examiner sent anthropologist Bradley Adams. We ended up going through the whole rooftop, and we found over 700 small bone fragments on that rooftop. And then we ended up, you know, obviously if there's remains there, we need to search other areas. So we went through every floor of that building, even to the point of having vacuum cleaners and vacuuming up dust and debris.

9:22The remains on the Deutsche Bank building were from American Airlines Flight 11. The discovery prompted a new search for clues at Ground Zero. Computer floppy disks or golf balls or parts of office furniture that would be buried there. And if you're seeing that, then you know there's the potential there could be human remains mixed in with this World Trade Center debris. Five years after the attack, Brad Adams began collecting 18 ,000 tons of excavation material. Over the course of a year, 75 anthropologists washed it through screens. How many human remains did you find in that project? There was the 700 on Deutsche Bank and then over a thousand more were found during the sifting operations.

10:16Altogether, the total World Trade Center remains came to 21 ,905. The recovery efforts have been monumental, and this was an unprecedented event. As you know, this is the greatest mass murder in the history of the United States. Today, Dr. Jason Graham is New York City's chief medical examiner. He inherited this promise made by his late predecessor, Charles Hirsch. As long as there are families who are continuing to seek answers, this work will continue. What's the scope of what's left to be done? There were 2 ,753 victims, homicide victims. Sixty percent of those individuals have been identified.

11:05Forty percent are left to be identified. Forty percent. comes to 1 ,100 victims with no identified remains. So these are the steps for once remains are received. Putting a name to those remains is the job of the last original member of the Medical Examiner's 9-11 team, Mark Desire, now Assistant Director of Forensic Biology. These remains went through every possible thing that could destroy DNA, from jet fuel to diesel fuel, mold, bacteria, sunlight, all kinds of chemicals that were in the building, insects, heat, fire, all these things destroy DNA. Everything was present at Crown's Ear, making this not only the largest forensic investigation in the history of the United States, but the most difficult.

11:56Some of these World Trade Center remains have been tested how many times? 10, 15 times, yeah. Without a result? Without a result. But if there's DNA, we're going to find it. We're going to find it, we're going to generate a profile. It may take us a while.

12:13All remains today are bone. In a demonstration with animal bone, Desire showed us new technologies that make breakthroughs possible. They include this cryogenic grinder, filled with liquid nitrogen at 320 degrees below zero. The early days of 9-11, 2001, We were doing this all by hand with a mortar and pestle. With high-speed vibration, individual cells in the deeply frozen bone shatter. A chemical process releases their DNA. Equipment like this has taken it to the next level, given us so much more access to cells. We need as much DNA as possible because these samples have hardly any. Other innovations chemically amplify DNA, revealing more information from the smallest fragment.

13:07Some as small as the size of a Tic Tac. We've been able to get DNA from those and generate a DNA profile. Samples are tested every week with advanced technology. John Niven's bone fragments, 15 in all, had been tested for years. Then, in 2023, the lab made a perfect match to the swab of the cheek of his infant son, taken 22 years before. First notifications are made in person. And the police came to the door, and my first reaction was, I said, is it my son? And they said, no, everything's okay. And these two wonderful, really kind policemen said, we're here to deliver you the news. and they had a letter that your husband's DNA has been discovered.

14:06When the police officer said, we found your husband's DNA, I mean, that must have hit you as quite a shock. It was a shock that they'd been looking all these 22 years. I thought that that door had long been closed. Why open that door at all? It turns out many families don't want to know. when we come back, why others, including Andrea Haberman's family, are eager, even now, for every revelation.

14:43About half of 9-11 families have told the medical examiner that if their loved one is identified today, they don't want to know. Time has lightened their burden of grief. But the other half still hope for word, and few understand this mix of emotions like Dr. Jennifer Odeon. She's the medical examiner's World Trade Center anthropologist, a scientist, and something of a counselor to those still hoping for the promise. Shock, I would say, is the first response, typically, just because of how many years have gone by. they weren't necessarily expecting to get that new identification and identification for some families.

15:28They weren't expecting it. And then after that, it tends to be emotional, you know, some grief because all now, all the memories, everything is coming up about that. Can you give me a sense of how many families you're in touch with? Hundreds. Hundreds. What memories have some of these families shared with you? Some of the memories are that last phone call that they received or the last birthday they had or, you know, a vacation. But a lot of it has to do with that last contact, whether it was in the morning before they went off to work or if they had called while they were in the towers. A vital part of your job is to listen.

16:12Yes. And I will listen as long as they would like me to. We have phone calls sometimes, and it'll last an hour, and I will stay on and listen and talk to them. When they have questions, I'll answer it, but a lot of times they just want to speak to someone. I talked to Dr. Odeon Jen, who was wonderful and so kind and so nice. Ellen Niven spoke to Jennifer Odeon in 2023 when the remains of her husband John were identified for the first time. So I heard nothing about John's remains for 22 years. So we just assumed that there was nothing. We buried a box of mementos, photographs, and a letter that I wrote, and a drawing my son had done, and then nothing.

17:06She remarried and had two more boys. Her son, Jack, was 18 months old when his father died. Now age 25, Jack let his mother tell the story of how his father's identification struck them differently. For me, it was very sad. For him, it was uplifting in a way to realize that people had been working all that time to find any piece of his dad. And that of all the people that were blessed by this breakthrough, that it was his dad. You know, and that meant so much to him. So it was really moving to see how moved he was. So many people who had met John or had even not met John reached out to us, emails, letters, phone calls to me and to Jack.

18:00And I think that for Jack it really brought to life so many descriptions of his father that as a young man he could now really appreciate. So it was a great remembrance, John being able to be back in a lot of people's minds. As remains are identified, the folders get bigger and bigger because we keep adding all the information for those remains. Jennifer Odian adds new identifications to the DM files. files. No one knew what to call 9-11 the day it happened, so the ME settled on Disaster Manhattan. There's one folder for each murder victim, 2 ,753. This is an inventory of all of the remains found for this one person?

18:52Correct. Such things here as rib, vertebra, sternum, found over months and years. Correct. This indicates that about 50 % of this body was recovered. Roughly, yes. And it's a very rough estimate. We're trying to understand how many of the remains have been identified, how much of that individual is there, what are the chances that more remains will be identified, because those are questions that families will ask. Families have a choice. They can ask a funeral home to pick up a remain vacuum-packed like this labeled with an American flag, or they can leave the remain in the custody of the medical examiner.

19:34I tell them that they don't have to make that decision right now. They can call back in a month, a year, two years, ten years, and we can then have those remains transferred over to the funeral home that they choose. You are keeping track of the remains that precisely? Oh, absolutely. We know where every single remain is. How do you do that? We have numbers associated with all remains. So every remain that was recovered has a specific unique number associated with it. Number 18 ,756 is the most recent remain of Andrea Haberman. The Habermans have asked to be told of all new identifications. For them, each reminder of their daughter is a stepping stone through a void that Gordon Haberman calls missing.

20:27It's hard to describe missing to other people, but it's deep inside you. There isn't a day that I or we don't think of her. Help me understand what it means to you to have had Andrea's remains identified. If Andrea could face what she had to face, how could I not want to know what happened to her? Today, he's 74. His relationship with the medical examiner has spanned 11 notifications, plus the amazing discovery of the relics of Andrea. When you went through these things for the first time, what did you see? What did you think?

21:25How terrible it must have been.

21:34We met Gordon Haberman at the National September 11th Memorial Museum at Ground Zero. With the help of the museum staff, we saw artifacts from Andrea's purse, which are archived, catalogued, and handled like antiquities. He received them in 2004 from the NYPD in a meeting with officers and a priest. They wanted to know if I needed any help processing that, and I was actually more concerned at that time how I'm going to keep these from my wife. He feared his wife's pain, so he locked the bag in a desk drawer which he did not open for seven years. In 2011, they donated to the museum the collection of a quarter century ago.

22:31This is the phone that we kept calling. Her flip phone. It didn't work. A pager, driver's license, and the last photo of her life, the visitor ID that captured Andrea's spirit minutes before she was gone. That was our Andrea. And she was going to go on to do great things, and she wanted grandchildren. Her house was such a pride. She loved her house so much. You can see it in her smile. Oh, yes. You can see it in her face. Yes. He brought Andrea's identified remains home to Wisconsin, but he believes her other remains, still unidentified, are in the museum behind this wall and a verse by the poet Virgil.

23:25No day shall erase you from the memory of time. Many museum visitors don't realize, but this is the outer wall of the medical examiner's repository for 9-11 remains. We're in what was the basement of the North Tower. Yes. And this is completely out of the path of the museum. It's hidden around the corner. Yes. Next to the repository, this is the entrance to the office of the chief medical examiner, Family Reflection Room. The room and repository have never been seen by the public. Families only can call a number on the door which summons an escort, often Dr. Jennifer Odeon. So the visits are different every time.

24:16Some families are very emotional and I'll sit in with them for an hour and just hear stories. And I'll walk around with them until I know that they're okay. And then I leave the room completely so they have the space to themselves. This must be a burden to you. I don't consider it a burden. It's tough. I definitely have moments of feeling very emotional and needing to step back. But when I talk to a family and they say thank you, how grateful they are, that with our continued work, that a question I've answered helped them in some way, it makes it all worth it. Gordon Haberman invited us inside as his guest.

24:55No camera, but we were allowed to record the audio. We found a small sitting room and a window into the repository for human remains. The window we're looking through looks like it's about five feet wide and three feet or so tall, just a single window, and a single wooden bench in front of the window. With permission, we gave our notes to an artist who sketched the view through the window that joins the family room to the repository. A loved one, sitting on the bench, sees a deep, austere, white room with rows of dark wooden cabinets eight feet tall. They hold about 10 ,000 remains, both known and unknown.

25:48It is, in a sense, a private national shrine. After you. Why do you come here after all these years? I feel close to my daughter. She wasn't meant to be here, but she's here. The repository, in the museum which stands between the reflecting pools, seems like the right place, Ellen Niven told us, for her husband, John. Have you been here often? I have been here often. She has visited the pools over the decades to run her fingertips over her lost husband's tribute. And yet, she is surprised how the endless effort to actually find him allowed her to feel once again the embrace of a nation's devotion.

26:41My first reaction was to tell people, did you know that all this time they have been sifting through these remains and researching and researching for over 20 years? What an incredible thing. You know, John had another moment in all of our lives. So that was something I'm incredibly grateful for.

27:16The world's population may have recently exceeded 8 billion, but it's a deceptive number. Not only is growth unevenly distributed, but in so many countries, population is in decline. In some cases, steep, deep decline. Maybe most graphically, and demographically, there's Japan. a country that since hitting a high of 128 million citizens in 2008 has lost population for 15 years running and is on pace to shrink by half by this century's end, despite government measures to halt the decline. This has huge impacts on the economy, the healthcare system, education, housing, national defense, immigration, the culture at large.

27:57Governments can control interest rates and inflation rates. Stimulating birth rates is far harder. We reported in April from the land of the rising sun, now also the land of declining sons and daughters. Ichinono, Japan sits regally wedged between mountains an hour and a half west of Kyoto. Its listed population just shy of 50. But if it seems like more, it's for good reason. The village comes embroidered with 40 lifelike puppets. in the middle of town, on a playground, pedaling off toward the woods. It's lonely here. Back in my day, the village was full of kids. Shinichi Moriyama is the town puppet master, overseeing the making and then scattering of dolls throughout Ichinono, populating a depopulating village.

28:53You say it's lonely here. Are the puppets a way to make things a little less lonely? Puppets are no substitute for people, of course, but making them cheers us up. This is as good a snapshot as any of Japan's demographic crisis. There are hundreds of communities here fading like Ichinono. Do you think there might come a day when the puppet population exceeds the human population? So, if things keep going the way they are right now, of course our population will decrease. Maybe it'll go down to 40 or maybe 30. But at the same time, my ability to continue making puppets is finite. So yes, I am deeply worried about the future of our village.