ANN ARBOR, MI (WXYZ) - A call to service. That's how an Ann Arbor man describes the years he spent helping to identify the victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York.

In the months and years following the terrorist attacks, a small staff of software programmers and computer scientists in Ann Arbor worked around the clock to try to bring some answers to thousands of grieving families.

Watch 7 Action News reporter Heather Catallo's story in the video below:

From code to closure: the Ann Arbor company that helped identify 9/11 victims

After the World Trade Center towers fell, the race to find and recover the nearly 2,800 New York 9/11 victims began.

Police and fire crews sifted through 17,000 tons of debris taken from Ground Zero and recovered nearly 20,000 fragments of human remains. Those remains then needed to be identified, leaving the New York medical examiner's office with a horrific problem: How to do that?

 It's as close as I will ever come in my professional life to a call to service, a call to national service, certainly,  Howard Cash told 7's Heather Catallo back in 2002.

Cash is the President and CEO of Gene Codes Corporation and Gene Codes Forensics in Ann Arbor.

A few weeks after the attacks, Cash got that call to service and dedicated the next three-and-a-half years of his life to helping identify the 2,753 people who were killed in New York City.

Gene Codes Corporation made DNA identification software and was about to change the course of the 9/11 victim identification process.

 I got a call from a deputy director at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, OCMA,  said Cash.  And he said they really needed some help, could we be out there the next day? 

When Cash arrived in New York, he thought he'd be donating software. Instead, he found overwhelmed medical examiners struggling to match thousands of human remains with the flood of DNA samples provided by family members. They also had to cross reference thousands of missing person's police reports, with the massive amounts of genetic material in order to identify victims. It was a monumental task.

 He said

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