Ana Cisneros was just 16 years old a quarter century ago when she and her parents watched helplessly from their home in Escondido as the Twin Towers in New York burned and then crumbled, ending the life of Ana’s older brother.
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Juan Pablo Cisneros, 24, had charted an unlikely course to a job on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Born in Guatemala, he came to the U.S. with his family at a young age, graduated from Orange Glen High School and then went on to Dartmouth College. His financial trading job at Cantor Fitzgerald was supposed to be a stepping stone, a way for him to pay off his school loans and help his little sister pay for her own education.
“My brother was the pillar in our family, and was a tremendous source of love and strength for all of us,” Ana Cisneros remembered during an emotional phone call this week. “His loss still very much impacts us to this day.”
For the local families who lost loved ones in the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and for the San Diegans involved in rescue and cleanup efforts, the passage of time has helped dull the pain, but not the memories. Twenty-five years later, those families continue to observe yearly traditions to mark the fateful date.
Government agencies and organizations across the county also held ceremonies Friday to mark the quarter-century that has passed. Customs officials at the U.S.-Mexico border briefly halted traffic at 5:46 a.m., commemorating the time the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Sheriff Kelly Martinez and more than a dozen other law enforcement officials gathered Friday morning to discuss the dramatic ways the attacks changed law enforcement in the county. And firefighters from San Diego and New York met for a yearly ceremony aboard the USS Midway Museum to honor the hundreds of first responders who died that day.
For the families who suffered personal tragedies, each Sept. 11 that passes is about ensuring the memory of their loved ones lives on, including among younger generations of family members.
That’s the case for La Jolla resident Mary Beth Adderley, whose 22-year-old son, Terence “Ted” Adderley Jr., was working 11 floors below Cisneros that day, almost exactly where American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the tower. Most years, Adderley gets together with friends and family, including her grandchildren, to watch a broadcast of the memorial ceremony from Ground Zero, where the names of all 2,977 victims are read aloud.
Adderley said her family also shares stories each year about Ted, who had graduated from Vanderbilt University earlier that year and had just recently started as a research associate at Fred Alger Management. She makes sure to talk to her younger grandchildren about the son she lost and the history of the attack that took his life.
“We want to make him a real person to my grandchildren,” Adderley said this week. “They need to hear that their Uncle Ted was really a person.”
Adderley, who has supported and worked with a number of 9/11 victim organizations and family groups over the years, also takes time to remember her son each time she travels to New York to visit friends. Her first stop is always the monument at Ground Zero.
“I stop over and say hello to my son, put a flower on his name,” Adderley said. “There’s always a lot of people there. Even in the cold.”
Ana Cisneros said her family attends Mass together each year on Sept. 11, then visits her brother’s grave.
In the days after the attack, her mother, Lidia Alvarez, flew to New York to search for her son and provide her DNA to aid in identification efforts. Cisneros said one enduring memory from the weeks after the tragedy is the sense of community and unity her family felt from the New Yorkers who helped them.
“I think certainly we’re seeing a contrast now, 25 years later, of people taking the 25th anniversary as this opportunity to spew racist and anti-Muslim hate,” Cisneros said. “I think that’s the complete antithesis of where we should be.”
In addition to the thousands of World Trade Center workers who died that day, more than 340 firefighters were killed when the towers collapsed, and hundreds more have died over the years from illnesses related to the toxic debris at Ground Zero.
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During Friday’s ceremony on the deck of the USS Midway Museum, the FDNY Retirees of San Diego read the names of firefighters and other first responders who died on 9/11. Many members of the local retiree group were part of the initial response, as well as the search-and-rescue efforts in the weeks that followed.
“Never forget. We have to keep doing it,” said Robert Allen, past president of FDNY Retirees of San Diego. “I knew too many guys who died, and I don’t want to forget them.”
More than 500 people attended Friday’s ceremony aboard the Midway, where San Diego Fire-Rescue Department Chief Robert Logan also spoke about the importance of honoring those who gave their lives. And he stressed the importance of educating future generations about the events and heroic actions of that day.
“The responsibility falls on us to continue telling the story, teaching the lessons and making sure ‘never forget’ is not just a phrase, but a promise,” Logan said.
Attending the yearly Midway ceremony has become a tradition for Brian Kidwell, a retired San Diego firefighter-paramedic. In 2001, Kidwell was a member of California Task Force 8, a local search-and-rescue unit of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Six days after the attack, Kidwell and the rest of the task force arrived at Ground Zero and saw “the Pile” for the first time.
“Nothing could have prepared you for the devastation we saw when we got there,” the Lakeside resident said. “We were prepared as we could be, as far as training went, but to actually see it was beyond anything we ever imagined.”
For the next 13 days, Kidwell and his team worked their way through the rubble in an attempt to find survivors, but the destruction was too severe. Despite their best efforts, they found no living victims. They did, however, help recover bodies.
Kidwell recalled that while removing one of the bodies from the rubble, he openly cried in front of the other members of the team. Then he turned to his friend and mentor, Capt. Ron Edrozo, who was helping him carry the body in a rescue basket.
“I’ve never seen Ron shed a tear,” Kidwell said. “But we’re walking down, we’ve got the basket, and he looked at me and goes, ‘Don’t you look at me, you son of a bitch.’ Because he was crying.”
One of the first places Kidwell searched at Ground Zero was an area near where a donut shop had once stood, providing early morning eats for those who worked in the World Trade Center. The shop, and everyone inside it, had been destroyed.
The first Sunday morning after Kidwell returned home, he stopped by a donut shop on his way to church.
“I turned around and came out of the store immediately…,” he said. “I was right back there.”
Kidwell said the experience had a profound impact on California Task Force 8.
“Obviously this changed all of us,” he said this week. “There are some people that came back from the experience who left (urban search and rescue) and never came back.”
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