Family of 9/11 victim Barbara Keating to hold burial 25 years after attacks

As communities across the U.S. commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11 on Friday, the family of Barbara Keating will gather privately in Framingham, Mass., to finally lay her to rest.

Keating was flying home to California after visiting her family when terrorists linked to al-Qaida crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. A team of forensic researchers identified Keating's remains last year.

Her son, Paul Keating, told NPR that the family is gathering to celebrate her life. "We carved the headstone 25 years ago, but she wasn't there, and now she will be," he says. "This feels like, at least to some degree, some closure."

According to Keating, on the day of the attack in 2001, he was traveling in New Jersey on business and saw the twin towers burn and fall.

"Basically everyone stopped what they were doing, we were like across the water from it, watching it," he recalls. "At some point, I got a call and found out that that was my mother's plane."

Barbara Keating was 72 years old, with five children and 12 grandchildren, and had retired from a career leading a chapter of the children's advocacy group Big Brothers Big Sisters near Boston. She'll be laid to rest next to her husband. "She was tough, funny, very smart, she was fabulous," Keating says.

New York officials say 40% of the 2,753 people who died on 9/11 in New York City still have not been recovered or positively identified. But teams continue to search through rubble and debris collected from the World Trade Center site.

Keating praised the ongoing effort to reconnect grieving families with the remains of their loved ones: "It just means a lot to comb over miles and miles of city blocks of debris for every day, 60 hours a week for 24 years."

Efforts continue to find roughly 1,100 victims of 9/11 still unaccounted for in New York City. In a statement, the city's chief medical examiner, Dr. Jason Graham, described the effort as a "sacred commitment."

"A quarter century after the day that forever changed our world, we are keeping the promise to identify those who died at the World Trade Center in 2001 and return them to their loved ones," Graham said.

Using increasingly sophisticated forensic DNA techniques, researchers identified one more previously unknown woman last month. Her name is being withheld at the request of her family.