Barbara Keating died in the 9/11 attack. She's finally being laid to rest

0:00Tomorrow, communities across the U.S. will commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9-11. One family in Massachusetts will gather to finally bury a loved one. Barbara Keating died when one of the hijack jetliners struck the World Trade Center. Her remains were identified last year, and Pierre's Brian Mann reports. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Paul Keating was in New Jersey on business. When word began to spread that a plane had struck one of the twin towers in lower Manhattan. Basically, everyone stopped to what they were doing. We were like across the water from it and we're was watching it. He remembers the clear blue sky that day, the confusion, and then his phone rang. At some point, I got a call and found out that that was my mother's plane. Barbara Keating was flying home to California after visiting her family when terrorists crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the North Tower. She was 72 years old with five children and 12 grandchildren retired from a career leading a chapter of Big Brothers, Big Sisters near Boston.

1:00She was tough, funny, very smart, but she was fabulous. What made the loss harder was the fact that his mother's remains were lost in the rubble at ground zero. But teams of forensic researchers working for New York City are still searching through debris collected from the World Trade Center site, and last year they found Barbara. That just means a lot to come over miles and miles of city blocks of debris for every day, 60 hours a week for 24 years. New York officials say 40 percent of the 2,753 people who died on 9-11 in New York City still haven't been recovered or positively identified. But on this 25th anniversary Keating and his family will gather privately on Friday for a service to celebrate her life in framing of Massachusetts. You have to come in from all over Canada, California. But I mean so much time has passed that you know the grandkids are grown and needless to say a lot of people

2:03have passed that that would have been invited. Barbara Keating will be laid to rest next to her husband William. Paul Keating told NPR this moment even after so long will help his family heal. I mean we carved the headstone 25 years ago, but you know she wasn't there. And now she will be. This feels like at least to some degree some closure. Efforts continue to find roughly 1100 victims of 9-11 still unaccounted for in New York City. In a statement the city's chief medical examiner Dr. Jason Graham described that effort as a sacred commitment using increasingly sophisticated forensic DNA techniques researchers identified one more previously unknown woman last month. Brian Mann and PR News, New York.