Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
20 YEARS OF TEARS
Presidents, rock stars and bereaved families gather
THE names of 2,983 victims were solemnly read out one by one in a lengthy tribute.
There were six brief pauses – four marking the exact moments the North and South Towers were hit by the hijacked planes and the times they actually fell.
The other two breaks were to remember the exact times the planes hit the Pentagon and crashed in Pennsylvania.
The sky above the memorial service in downtown Manhattan was hauntingly similar to that of September 11, 2001. There was a distinctive late-summer blue sky and not a single cloud to be seen.
President Joe Biden and ex-Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were among the dozens of dignitaries paying their respects to those who were killed 20 years ago.
Bruce Springsteen sang I’ll See You in Your Dreams in front of grieving relatives and friends who had queued from before dawn on Vesey Street to be allowed into the ceremony, which started at 8.46am local time.
As the service started, many held up personal pictures and banners to honour the memory of their loved ones.
Michelle Pizzo, 46, was there for her late husband Jason DeFazio – his picture on her back.
Jason died aged 29. They had been married for just three months.
Michelle said: “I’ve been every year since the tragedy. I want to pay respects, and honour my husband. They never found his body. Nothing was found.”
Jason, from Staten Island, worked as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald.
Also working for the brokerage firm on the 101st floor of the North Tower was Michael Massaroli, who was killed too.
His wife Diane attended the ceremony, carrying a photo of her husband. Not a single person working for Cantor Fitzgerald that day survived the attack.
Across the city in the lower East village, hero fireman Mike Kehoe returned to his fire station for the very first time since he transferred 17 years ago. His wife EJ was with him.
It was here he was working on the morning of 9/11.
He and his colleagues on Engine 28 company were sent to the World Trade Center.
Mike was pictured on front pages halfway up the tower, courageously trying to save lives.
He managed to evacuate before it collapsed. All five of his colleagues on Engine 28 – Roy Chelsen, Brian Becker, Frank Compagna, Bob Salvador and Jim Ippollito – managed to escape with their lives.
Their fellow firefighters on Ladder 11, from the same station – Mike Quilty, Matt Rogan, Rich
Kelly, Edward Day, John Heffernan and Mike Cammarata – all died.
In total, 343 firefighters lost their lives that day.
There are memorial plaques to them on the wall, each of which recall that the firefighters: “...made the supreme sacrifice while in the performance of duty operating at Manhattan Box 5-5-8087 World Trade Center September 11th 2001.”
Poignantly, there have since been two other plaques added. One is for Roy Chelsen, who died 10 years later of cancer he developed from working in the toxic dust at Ground Zero.
The other is for former colleague Christopher Zanetis, who went on to become a major in the 101st rescue squadron, and died in Al Asad in Iraq.
In total, 441 first responders died in the attacks – the largest loss of emergency personnel in American history.
Irish priest Mychal Judge was officially named as victim “number one” of the World Trade Center attacks.
His close pal Brendan Fay, 63, a documentary filmmaker, from Athy, Co Kildare, touchingly laid a white rose on his friend’s name at the memorial.
Mychal, the chaplain of the New York Fire Department, was famously pictured being carried from the rubble of the Twin Towers by emergency crews. Brendan, 63, said: “He was a great man. Everyone loved him in New York.”
Recalling the horror of 9/11, he said: “I went for a jog in a
ESCAPE park near where we live, and on the way back I stopped for a cup of coffee. And then I’m strolling back to my house and I see this crowd gathered outside an electronic store, and they were staring at the television.
“And I stood there watching with the rest of them. And of course that was the moment that our lives here in New York and the entire world were changed for ever.”
Both he and husband Tom Moulton, a doctor, were friends with Mychal. Brendan added: “It was later that day when I would actually find out and be confirmed that Mychal, our beloved friend and chaplain in the New York City Fire Department, had died.”
Mike Low, whose daughter was a flight attendant on the doomed airliner that struck the North Tower, was also at the Ground Zero site. He bravely described the “unbearable sorrow and disbelief ” that his family had experienced over the past two decades since the attacks.
He added: “As we recite the names of those we lost, my memory goes back to that terrible day when it felt like an evil spectre had descended on our world – but it was also a time when many people acted above and beyond the ordinary.”
The 2,983 victims included men, women and children killed in the attacks at the World Trade Center site, the Pentagon and on Flight 93.
They also included all those who died in the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993.
Memorial services were held across the city and the US yesterday.
In Pennsylvania, people visited the Wall of Names, which remembers the passengers of Flight 93, who successfully prevented their hijacked aircraft from being used to attack the US Capitol building in Washington.