YEARS ON, We’ll
TWENTY years on, the names of all 2,983 victims were read out solemnly, one by one.
During the lengthy reading there were six brief pauses.
Four of them marked the exact moments the North and South towers of New York’s World Trade Center were hit by hijacked planes and the times they actually fell.
The other two were to remember the exact time planes hit the Pentagon and crashed in Pennsylvania.
The sky above the service at the memorial museum, where the towers once stood in downtown Manhattan, was hauntingly similar to that of September 11th, 2001. There was that distinctive late-summer blue sky and not a single cloud to be seen.
President Joe Biden, ex-presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and ex-new York mayor Michael Bloomberg were among dignitaries paying respects to those killed in the al-qaeda outrages, plus the six who died in a truck bombing at the North Tower in 1993.
Rock icon Bruce Springsteen sang I’ll See You in My Dreams for the grieving relatives and friends who had queued from before dawn on Vesey Street to get into the ceremony, which started at 8.46am local time.
Respects
Melinda Moran and Haydee Lillo enbraced beside one of the memorial’s reflecting pools inscribed with the victims’ names after finding out their lost relatives knew each other.
Many carried their loved ones’ photos and banners with their names.
Michelle Pizzo, 46, came to pay her respects to her husband Jason Defazio with his picture on her back.
The bond trader died aged 29 along wih all his colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald. The couple had been married just three months. Michelle
said: “I come every year. 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.”
Sheryl Miller carried a photo of her dad Philip, who worked for an insurance firm and died aged 53.
Across the city in the lower East village, hero fireman Mike Kehoe returned to his station for the first time since he transferred 17 years ago.
It was from there he was working on the morning of 9/11. He and his colleagues on Engine 28 company left for the World Trade Center and, incredibly, survived. Mike was pictured halfway up the tower while he was courageously trying to save lives but managed to evacuate before it collapsed.
His fellow firefighters from Ladder 11 – from the same station – all died.
Some 343 firefighters lost their lives that terrible day. In total, 441 first responders died, the largest loss of emergency personnel in US history. Irish priest Mychal Judge was officially named as the first victim. His close friend Brendan Fay, 63, a documentary maker from Athy, Co Kildare, lay a white rose on his name at the memorial. Judge, the chaplain of the New York Fire Department, was pictured being carried from the rubble.
Brendan said: “He was a great man Everyone loved him in New York.”
Mike Low, whose daughter was a flight attendant on the airliner that struck the North Tower, was also at Ground Zero. He described the sorrow and disbelief experienced by his family for the past 20 years.
He said: “It felt like an evil spectre had descended on our world but it was also a time when people acted above and beyond the ordinary.”
There were memorial services across the city and the nation.
Former President Donald Trump visited the 17th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.
And in Pennsylvania, George W Bush, president at the time of the attack, spoke at a memorial ceremony.
People visited the Wall of Names which remembers the passengers of Flight 93, who went down fighting while successfully preventing their hijacked aircraft from hitting the US Capitol building in Washington.
That day it felt like an evil spectre descended
on our world