Twenty-three years ago, several members of the Newton community were lost after terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and carried out terror attacks that altered the landscape of the world.
On Wednesday, city officials and family members of the victims gathered at the Newton 9/11 Memorial, next to the Fire Department Headquarters on Centre Street, to show that Newton still remembers that day.
“I’m of an age where maybe it was decades ago but it feels like yesterday to me,” Mayor Ruthanne Fuller said.
Newton lost eight of its natives in the attacks:
- Mark Bavis
- Paige Farley-Hackel
- Nicholas Humber
- Aaron Jacobs
- Stuart Meltzer
- Richard Ross
- Rahma Salie
- Amy Toyen
And Boston College graduate Welles Remy Crowther, who worked in the World Trade Center South Tower, helped many people to safety before losing his own life when that tower collapsed. He’s remembered as the “man in the red bandana.”
Families of those lost were in attendance Wednesday and took turns reading the text of the city’s 9/11 Memorial.
“Tonight, we hold close the families who forever bear the scars of that day, and this includes too many neighbors here in Newton who lost loved ones,” Fuller said.
Superintendent Anna Nolin recalled that day, when she was a seventh grade English teacher in Framingham. Her husband at the time worked with Stuart Todd Meltzer, a Newton native, in New York who was killed in the attacks.
“And I say to his family, he is not forgotten,” Nolin said. “We talked about him last night—a man close to his brothers, a lover of the Red Sox, a Boston guy despite moving to New York City—and Stuart was a loyal friend and a sharp funny man, and to lose him at 32 with two young boys broke all of our hearts.”
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks killed 2,977 people: 2,753 in New York, 184 in Washington, D.C., and 40 on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.
You can watch Newton’s Sept. 11 ceremony in its entirety on NewTV’s YouTube channel.
