Music Ministry performing during the service.
JAYDEN GONZALEZ / THE QUADRANGLE
Maddie Rosado, Managing / News Editor
Manhattan University (MU) commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks this past Friday with a prayer service outside the Chapel of De La Salle and His Brothers, followed by a conversation and reflection panel in Smith Auditorium.
Panelist and alumna Susan Fiorentino ’12 spearheaded the event, working with Alumni Relations to bring the event to campus. For Molly Brett, director of Alumni Relations, the panel was an opportunity to amplify voices and bring forward stories that may otherwise have remained untold.
“We thought having this event was a wonderful idea,” Brett said in a separate interview with The Quadrangle. “But the question was, how are we going to get more people involved? So from there we started reaching out to the MU community.”
It was then after that Margaret Groarke, Ph.D., professor and chair of the department of history, political and international studies, recommended Colleen Kelly, co-founder of Peaceful Tomorrows, as another voice for the panel.
A community member also suggested William Cook, director of MU’s Public Safety, while Brett reached out to Reverend Andrea Raynor of MU’s Campus Ministry & Social Action as other panelist speakers.
Grishma Shah, Ph.D., interim dean of the O’Malley School of Business, served as the panel’s moderator. In an interview with The Quadrangle, Shah explained how reflecting on her own grief from Sept. 11 prepared her to guide the panel.
“I’ve spent so much time around this process, the grief, what happened,” Shah said. “I just felt like I would know the right questions to ask.”
Throughout the event, each panelist took turns further introducing themselves and speaking in remembrance of the Sept. 11 attacks. While their experiences that day varied widely, each speaker returned to a common thread: the way tragedy pushed them toward community.
For Kelly, that community came in the aftermath of a personal loss. Her brother Bill was among nearly 3,000 people killed that day. In the years that followed, she became involved in volunteer work, which helped her build a community of her own. This eventually led her to co-found Peaceful Tomorrows.
“It was through friends of mine that I was able to meet other family members who had lost someone on Sept. 11,” Kelly said. “And then through that bond, we then went on to organize and to launch our group, Peaceful Tomorrows. Our motto is, we’re kind of the best friends that we never wanted to meet.”
Where Kelly’s connection to that day came through loss, Cook’s came through being a first responder. Cook, director of Public Safety at MU, was a New York City police detective during the Sept. 11 attacks.
When Cook was called into work, he arrived at Ground Zero after both towers had collapsed. He spent the following two months working 12-hour shifts at the site, conducting security, searching for remains and escorting people in and out of the area.
“I ended up getting to Ground Zero… I got there probably at 12:30 p.m., and both buildings were already down,” Cook said. “And what I remember most about it is the smell, the fumes, the ash. It was awful.”
For Fiorentino, Sept. 11 was not experienced at Ground Zero, but through its ripple effects on her family. She was 10 years old and living on Staten Island, home to many first responder families, when her school dismissed students early that day. Both her father and uncle were first responders working in New York City.
“As I got older, I learned about the PTSD from that day,” Fiorentino said. “I kind of blocked out a lot of what happened after, so I really don’t have memories from that time.”
Similar to Kelly, Fiorentino found her own community in the years that followed. She became involved with the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, where she helped establish a network of children of first responders and during the COVID-19 pandemic, self-published a book featuring more than 40 of their accounts.
“If this tragedy didn’t happen, I would have never met these beautiful people who are part of my life forever because we are tied together by this event,” Fiorentino said. “Sometimes I felt like they were the only people who understood me.”
Raynor’s connection to the day came through her work supporting others in crisis. She was leading a hospice team meeting when she first learned about the attacks. In the weeks that followed, she served as a chaplain at the temporary morgue at Ground Zero, where she spoke with responders during overnight hours.
“Being around reliable witnesses… I believe that it helped my healing process,” Raynor said. “I hope it helps young people who were not alive or present that day to understand more than the terrorism part of it. Hearing individual stories is what makes things real, it brings it down to a personal level. That is going to help us keep not only the memory alive, but the lessons of that day alive, so that we don’t become hardened to tragedy.”
We continue to remember and honor the members of the MU community whose lives were lost that day: Robert Baierwalter ’79, Michael Carroll ’84, Joseph Coppo ’75, Michael Duffy ’93, Kevin Frawley ’90, Richard Gabriel ’71, John Gallagher ’91, Salvatore Gitto ’78, Joseph Holland ’91, Lt. Joseph Leavey ’77, Michael J. Lyons ’93, Brian P. Magee ’73, Robert McCarthy ’90, Richard Morgan ’59, Dennis Moroney ’84, Timothy O’Sullivan ’64, James Quinn ’99, Robert Regan ’75, Antonio A. Rocha ’90, and John Tobin ’76.