9/11 memorial in Lansing brings Tom Barrett, Will Lawrence and Abdul El-Sayed to Lansing
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 was marked in Lansing with the sharp blast of a rifle volley and spoken words about keeping the memories alive.
Mourners have long used Wentworth Park in downtown Lansing as the city’s 9/11 memorial grounds, and it is where Michigan’s piece of Twin Towers steel resides. The site was an obvious choice, since it is where firefighter deaths have been mourned since the 1934 Kerns Hotel fire, which killed 34 people and was one of the nation’s deadliest fires.
The memorial included comments from Lansing Police Chief Robert Backus, Fire Chief Carrie Edwards-Clemons, City Council Vice President Trini Pehlivanoglu, along with U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett, a U.S. Army veteran.
Barrett said he was in South Korea, amid a training exercise, when early news of the attacks began to spread among the troops.
Andrea Doherty spoke with Barrett after the ceremony and shared that she attends every year to honor her friend, who died in the attacks. Doherty and her husband lived in New York at the time and moved to Lansing about five years after 9/11, and they have attended nearly all of the Lansing memorials ever since.
Doherty said she looked today and found the name of her friend on a large poster with thousands of names of those who died.
Barrett’s challenger, William Lawrence, and U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed attended the ceremony.
El-Sayed told City Pulse: “Today we come together in memoriam of the 3,000 people we lost, in memoriam of the first responders and the heroism they showed, in memoriam of the attempt of people to attack the idea of our country and we come together because we want to build the kind of America we knew we could be. We build an America that is better as a collective than the sum of its parts. So we mourn the people we lost and in their memory we insist upon and double down upon the kind of America that really can bring people together beyond our differences and build something that is greater.”
