In honor of the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, Haddonfield held a memorial ceremony outside of Haddon Fire Company One.
All three of the borough commissioners and various faith leaders joined first responders to commemorate the 24th anniversary and the lives lost and affected by the attacks.
The first speaker was fire department chief Patrick Gorman, who shared a realization.
“We were talking about 9/11, where we were when the actual event happened,” he relayed, “only to realize probably half of our members here weren’t even born when Sept. 11 occurred.
“This is why it’s important to do ceremonies like this to keep the tradition going.”
Chaplain for the Haddon Fire Company Reverend Chris Heckert, who organized the event, was the next to speak, asking for the community to come together in the wake of the tragedy.
“Our focus today is a shift from collective grief to communal hope in the face of a lot of division and noise and darkness and violence,” he reflected. “Today, we are reclaiming communal hope that we got a glimpse of 24 years ago in the face of the unthinkable.”
The ceremony began at 8:30 a.m., with sirens scheduled to go off at each of the times one of the four planes crashed, with the first set to go off at 8:46 a.m. when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
When the first siren blared, the ceremony paused and everyone held a moment of silence for the lives lost in the tower and on the plane.
Each of the commissioners took the time to make statements about the anniversary, beginning with Mayor Dave Siedell.
“To the families whose lives were changed forever by coming together in this place and at our memorial, we not only honor their memory, but also the gratitude for the strength and sacrifice that continue to inspire us,” he said.
Frank Troy shared that he was active duty military at the time of the attacks, and emphasized that the day should be used for optimism and to treat everyone with dignity and respect.
Itir Cole shared that she was a high school sophomore in Fort Lee at the time of the attacks, across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
“There probably wasn’t a single classroom in high school that didn’t have a child of somebody who was in that building that day,” Cole said, recalling how school was canceled and the gym of her school became a staging ground for first responders.
Following the remarks by the commissioners, the events of Sept. 11 were recounted, with mentions of the specific flights that were hijacked, the times they each crashed and the number of people killed in total.
Hopeful statistics were also shared, like the 36,000 units of blood that were donated to help injured survivors in the aftermath.
Community members, first responders and the commissioners all participated in a reflection sharing their stories and what they remember of the attacks, before Heckert shared his own about being a seminary student at Drew University.
“I ran to my seminary, and nobody in the seminary Hall yet knew what happened, and so I ran floor to floor and told everyone, and they turned on the radio, and our lives changed, and the world changed,” he recalled.
The crowd then recited the Litany of Hope prayer before Reverend Cricket Denton of the United Methodist Church sang “Amazing Grace.”
Those in attendance also shared when they got a vision of hope in the days and months following the attacks.
As the ceremony ended shortly after 9 a.m., the second siren of the day went off to mark 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower, with everyone pausing to pay respect to the lives lost, before saying their goodbyes to each other.
The other two sirens went off at 9:37 a.m. for when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon and 10:03 a.m. for when United Flight 93 crashed into an empty field in Shanksville, PA after passengers and crew attempted to retake the plane from the hijackers.
