A quarter century after terror reshaped the country, members of Bucks County’s 9/11 families gathered at the Garden of Reflection in Lower Makefield on Friday to honor the memories of loved ones who perished in the 2001 attacks and vowed not to forget them.
“Usually, I try not to speak anything personal, but I have to confess that this is 25 years, and my son Joshua only lived for 23 (years),” said Judi Reiss, of Lower Makefield, who lost her son in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Reiss, who emceed the somber remembrance ceremony, recalled how he loved to look out from his office at Cantor Fitzgerald and see the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
“And he used to come home, or he’d call me and say, ‘Mom, I’m looking at my lady.’”
The
morning was filled with remembrances like that for the 18 Bucks Countians who were killed that day when Islamic terrorists slammed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and into a field in Shanksville in Somerset County.
“Grief is the universal language that bonds all of us together across the world,” said Bucks County Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick, of Middletown, quoting St. Francis.
He said it is a fact of American history that the first battle in the Global War on Terror began over the skies of western Pennsylvania with two Bucks County residents — United Airlines flight attendant Lorraine Bay, and Newtown businessman Lou Nacke — on board. The crew and passengers of Flight 93 are credited with thwarting the terrorist plans to slam the aircraft into a target in Washington, D.C. that day, saving countless lives on the ground.
Bay, a Neshaminy High School graduate, had poured boiling water on one of the terrorists. A cockpit microphone captured Nacke’s voice as he and others battled the hijackers after the 40 passengers aboard Flight 93 voted to take back the plane by storming the cockpit.
The attacks, which unfolded in less than two hours and were carried live on television, stunned the country. Nearly 3,000 were killed and others died in the years that followed from attack-related injuries and illness from working on the recovery at Ground Zero and elsewhere.
Friday’s ceremony began starkly when Larry Newman, president of the Yardley-Makefield Fire. Co., rang a large sliver fire truck bell 18 times for the Bucks County victims, who either lived here at the time or their deaths or had close ties to the county.
The service followed the timeline of the morning of 9/11, as Newman, wearing white gloves, rang the bell seven more times to coincide with the escalating events of that day, from 8:46 a.m. when the first airliner struck the North Tower, to 10:28 a.m. when it collapsed.
“People who had gone to work that morning did not come home. Families were waiting for phone calls that would never come,” Rabbi Anna Boswell-Levy said. “The course of our lives has forever been changed, shaped by grief and memory and, as a nation, we will never be the same.”
Nine of the county’s 18 victims were from Lower Makefield. Tara Bane’s husband, Michael, was among them.
“I’m still having a difficult time wrapping my head around the fact that it’s been 25 years since I last saw his smiling face, since I last heard his endearing chuckle. He has remained forever young, just 33 years old,” she said.
Even all these years later, how should we honor those lost on 9/11, asked Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie.
“We need to do that by living lives that is worthy of their loss, and that includes treating each other in ways that we believe honors their memory, building a country and a society that cares, that heals, that has a higher purpose,” said Harvie, of Falls, a former high school history teacher.
Joseph Kelly, Lower Makefield’s police chief since 2025, described how he was a New Jersey Transit police officer and was a first responder to the terror attack on the Twin Towers in February 1993, and again on 9/11, when he assisted in the massive evacuation of Manhattan as the towers collapsed and burned. He recalled seeing police and firefighters head to Lower Manhattan.
“As thousands of people were desperately trying to escape danger, the first responders ran towards it,” he said.
The Port Authority Police lost 23 officers, among them one of his friends, Officer John Scala.
About one in four Americans were born after 9/11 and have no living memory of the event, or the trauma it caused the country.
“That places a tremendous responsibility on those who do remember. We must share our experiences. We must teach them the lessons, and we must never allow the passage of time to diminish our law enforcement vigilance," Kelly said.
“On behalf of every man and woman who wears the Lower Makefield Township uniform, I make this promise: We will never forget. We will remember and honor the 18 from Bucks County. We will remember Officer John Scala and every first responder who ran towards danger. We will remember the families who have carried these losses for 25 years.
“But remembrance is not enough,” he said. “Twenty-five years later, never forget is more than a promise to remember the past. It is now a responsibility to remember our future.”
JD Mullane can be reached at jmullane@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Bucks County remembers 18 residents lost on 9/11 at 25th anniversary
