On September 11, 2001, TikToker Kelly (@kellyover60) was on her way to work when the planes fell from the sky. She worked about a seven-minute walk away from the Twin Towers, just slightly north of Canal Street.
That day, she saw terrible things, like six inches of ash on top of police cars. At the time, she didn’t really process that much of the ashes were the remains of human bodies.
Shortly after the catastrophe, people put up photos and posters of their missing loved ones. The posters featured despairing messages and detailed descriptions of what their loved ones looked like.
“They would talk about their tats; they would talk about the way they wore their hair, if they had unusual jewelry, scars, every kind of scar you can imagine. And these posters were everywhere with these handwritten desperate pleas and phone numbers and email addresses,” Kelly recalled.
Of course, back in the early 2000s, technology was nothing like the way it is now, so communication was very different, and news didn’t spread as quickly.
Over the following weeks and months, the posters started to come down as people realized their loved ones wouldn’t be returning home.
After about two weeks, Kelly and other people who worked in Manhattan were finally allowed to go back to work. There was one missing persons poster that stayed up for the longest time in the train station.
There was a small black and white headshot of an Asian man on the poster, who looked to be in his late forties to early fifties. The image was accompanied by a short, vague description about how kind the man was.
It was the only thing that the poster mentioned about him. Clearly, his kindness was his most defining characteristic. That was the last poster to be taken down in the train station.
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“I think of that man every year, and I wish his family well, and I hope they have healed from the heartbreak because honestly, I don’t know if I have,” concluded Kelly.
Many TikTok users took to the comments section to share other untold perspectives related to those who were lost on 9/11. Although it has been 24 years since the attacks, the memories still hit hard.
“Fifteen years ago, I was walking down the street and something caught my eye in a pile of garbage on the street. It was the funeral remembrance card of Firefighter Brian Cannizzaro, LDR 101. I knew it had to be a mistake, throwing it away, so I picked it up and still have it to this day. I’ve since been to the memorial and found his name and leave a flower for him every anniversary. RIP Brian,” commented one user.
“My best friend’s husband was killed in the towers. They never found any of his body, but his wallet was found intact,” shared another.
“My social studies TA in middle school only had his father identified with physical bones 10 years later. They were notified again three years later and asked to be taken off of notification because of the pain of finding him fragment by fragment,” added a third.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
