BC Joins Fellow Americans, Honoring the Fallen of September 11

Like Americans across the country, members of the Brooklyn College community took time out on a cold, rainy and blustery Friday, Sept. 11, 2009, to recall the 2,752 people who were killed just a few miles away on a beautiful sunny morning eight years before.

On Sept. 11, 2001, two commercial airliners that were hijacked shortly after taking off from Boston crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. A third airplane crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth fell to the ground in a field in rural Pennsylvania as the forewarned passengers battled the hijackers for control of the craft.

"I was in chemistry class when we got word that there had been a plane crash," recalled David Wells, who spent the morning handing out yellow ribbons to students and others who stopped by the information table inside the main entrance to Boylan Hall. "It wasn’t until after we got out of class that we found out the details of what happened."

Wells said that he had spent many worry-filled hours on that day trying to locate an aunt who worked on the 40th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers. "She managed to get out," he said softly.

"My grandmother, who lives in Alabama, called me to tell me there’d been a big crash," said Pamela Holmes, of the Student Affairs Office, as she sat on the sixth floor of the Student Center, watching the TV coverage of survivors of those who were lost on 9/11 as they read out the names of the dead. "Doing something like this is important," she said. "It reminds us and gives us hope."

"There are people here who stood on the roof deck above us and watched the twin towers come down," said Ryan Buck, director of the Student Center. "People come here by ones and twos. Mourning is an isolating thing. That’s why I’m glad that President Obama declared this a National Day of Service and Remembrance. You can’t serve in isolation."

Cem Bodur, an economics student from Turkey, said that as a child he had watched the actual attacks on television. "It didn’t seem real then," he said. "Now I am here in New York. I am a New Yorker and I feel empathy now."