9/11 woman's remains become 1,633rd identification: Karol Ann Keasler lived in Brooklyn Heights but traveled the world
9/11 woman's remains become 1,633rd identification
Karol Ann Keasler lived in Brooklyn Heights but traveled the world
BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Friday, February 10, 2012, 10:35 PM
THE REMAINS of a globe-trotting Brooklyn Heights woman whose journeys took her to Tuscany, Asia and Africa have finally been identified.
Karol Ann Keasler, 42, a bride-to-be who volunteered in a soup kitchen and read novels to the elderly, was finally identified by the city’s chief medical examiner on Friday.
“It’s been almost 11 years,” her younger sister Susan told the Daily News from her home near Las Vegas. “And after all this time, I had come to believe that things like this only happen on ‘CSI.’ ”
Keasler worked as an event planner for investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods on the 89th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center. She was identified in part through a breakthrough technology, developed years after 9/11, that can extract a full DNA profile from a small bone fragment.
“I didn’t even realize they were still trying to identify her until the Nevada police came to my mother’s door and told us what they had found in New York,” her sister said.
All they had in the big white ME’s tent off FDR Drive was a bone in Karol Keasler’s foot that had been discovered in the months after 9/11. That turned out to be enough to make a positive ID.
“I feel a little bit restful, a little big relieved, a little bit thankful,” she said.
The fragment will be returned to Nevada and her mother, Denise Keasler, plans on having it cremated with her own remains upon her death, the family says.
Susan Keasler says she prefers to think of her sister as the whirlwind adventurer jetting off to live with a boyfriend, a former New York Times correspondent, in the Ivory Coast of Africa. She also traveled to places like Bosnia, Sweden and Cambodia.
“She wasn’t even supposed to be in New York that day,” she said. “She was in Italy planning her wedding, and she came back a week earlier to plan an event for her company.”
The identification of Keasler brings to 1,633 the number of victims whose bodies or body parts have been recovered and positively identified.
Another 1,120 people were either not recovered or have not yet been identified — out of the 2,753 innocents massacred at Ground Zero.
The last time a 9/11 murder victim was identified was a 32-year-old white man whose family requested that his name not be released.
“Karol was always in our thoughts and wishes and prayers,” her sister said.
And there were always reminders: In 2005, Karol’s business cards, an emery board and a nail clipper were found at the site in a little makeup case she always carried.
“I have kept it ever since,” Susan said.
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