Community members gather for the Veterans Memorial & Support Foundation Remembering 9/11 event on Sunday, Sept. But after raising young adults, I now think particularly about the values that led Mark Bingham, age 31, and Todd Beamer, age 32, to take decisive action on that day. “I still morn for those lives lost in the towers and the Pentagon and on the airplanes. “An entire generation has come into the world after that fateful day and my focus has shifted,” she said. More than two decades later, Los Gatos Mayor Maria Ristow thinks about her former one-year-old who is now 23. Though thousands of miles from Ground Zero, the tragedy has always felt close for the town of Los Gatos - even 22 years later - since Los Gatos High School alumni Mark Bingham and Todd Beamer were two of the nearly 3,000 people killed on Sept. The Flame of Liberty Memorial, situated among the redwoods next to the Los Gatos Civic Center, served as a backdrop for Sunday’s Remembering 9/11 ceremony, where a crowd of veterans and local residents paid their respects as a 21 gun salute rang out. 11, 2001, when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, were read out on the eve of the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attack - making special mention of two local men who for years have been hailed as hometown heroes for their actions on that day. It is a call to action: to do the right thing at the right time.LOS GATOS - The names of the 40 passengers and crew members killed on Sept. Todd’s “Let’s roll” became the motto of our country’s counterattack.īut David Beamer stresses that “Let’s roll” is more than simply a motto. Todd’s dad David sees the Lord’s hand in the delay of Flight 93, which allowed the passengers to know the full extent of the danger they were in and to take action based on this knowledge. They understood their plane was probably going to be used, like the other three, to carry out another attack, and they wanted to prevent that. Jefferson overheard Todd and fellow passengers planning to confront the hijackers. “He was calm through the entire conversation,” said Jefferson, “and I tried to stay just as calm with him.” Todd told Jefferson about the hijacking he asked her to tell his wife he loved her and their family they prayed the Lord’s Prayer together.įor thirteen minutes, the line stayed open. Passengers and flight attendants huddling in the rear of the plane used in-flight phones to contact their loved ones and officials on the ground.Todd, trying to call his wife Lisa on one of the plane’s phones, was routed to customer service, and he spoke with GTE supervisor Lisa Jefferson. The pilots of Flight 93 were informed of the crash and the two that followed only moments before four hijackers on their flight took over the cockpit and cabin. He would take the early flight from Newark to San Francisco, attend his meeting, and fly back that night.īut Todd Beamer ’87 never made it back to his wife, Lisa, their two young sons, David and Drew, and their unborn child.ĭelayed more than 40 minutes on the runway, Flight 93 took off only four minutes before an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC).
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