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WHAT HAPPENED: The September 11th Testimony Project

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Read bios of our John Jay community cast and creative team, and a note from the director, Professor Amy S. Green

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John Jay's Other 20th Anniversary Events

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John Jay's Other 20th Anniversary Events

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Prompt: How did this play impact your understanding of 9/11?

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Prompt: How did this play impact your understanding of 9/11?

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Prompt: What was familiar in the stories you heard? What was new to you?

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Prompt: What was familiar in the stories you heard? What was new to you?

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Prompt: What connections do you see to our lives or events today? 

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Prompt: What connections do you see to our lives or events today? 

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Prompt: If there were another act in the play that was written today, what would it say? What would you contribute?

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Prompt: If there were another act in the play that was written today, what would it say? What would you contribute?

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Prompt: Shout out one of our cast members! 

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Prompt: Shout out one of our cast members! 

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Inside Higher Ed: "At a College Wounded on 9/11, Memories Endure 20 Years Later"

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Inside Higher Ed: "At a College Wounded on 9/11, Memories Endure 20 Years Later"

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Borough of Manhattan Community College, another CUNY school, lost eight students and alumni plus a building in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. On the 20th anniversary, lessons reverberate amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Tony Perez has never forgotten the day the sky fell and terror came to his campus.

Perez, then the president of Borough of Manhattan Community College, was driving to work on Sept. 11, 2001, when he looked up and saw the attack on New York's World Trade Center.

"There was a ball of fire," he said, describing his first view of the 9/11 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people as hijackers crashed airliners into both of Manhattan's twin towers and the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pa., after passengers fought back against the terrorists.

BMCC, which occupies several buildings in Lower Manhattan, lost eight students and alumni in the fallen towers. The subsequent collapse of 7 World Trade Center -- only hundreds of feet from the heart of the attacks -- pummeled the college's Fiterman Hall with a mountain of debris, rendering it uninhabitable.

The building, which housed classrooms, computer labs and administrative offices, would later be torn down and rebuilt, earning BMCC the terrible distinction as the only U.S. college to lose a building to terrorism.
Then and Now: Move the slider to compare Fiterman Hall on 9/11 and this year
Even as Americans and people across the world struggle with a very different catastrophe in the COVID-19 pandemic, memorials around the nation this week will commemorate the two decades since 9/11.

BMCC's plans include a wreath-laying ceremony at the front of its main building, where a plaque commemorates the eight students and alumni killed that day. Leading up to the anniversary, students, faculty and staff have been sharing their memories of 9/11 in an online forum. The college has scheduled other events to reflect on its story of survival and recovery, which led to disaster-preparedness lessons that BMCC leaders shared with many institutions in higher education.

Lessons From Disaster

"Each disaster reminds us who we are and how we need to change to make it better for all of us," said Marva Craig, vice president for student affairs at BMCC, which is part of the City University of New York.

Preparation for emergencies is especially critical at BMCC, which sits at the southern end of Manhattan amid a concentration of tunnels, bridges, roads and the offices of federal and local law enforcement agencies. In addition to being near the World Trade Center and other potential terrorist targets, the area's low elevation near the Hudson River leaves it vulnerable to weather-related disasters.

In the last 20 years, the college has faced several major challenges, including 9/11, flooding from 2012's Superstorm Sandy and now COVID-19.

The 9/11 attacks taught BMCC hard lessons, Craig said, including the need to overhaul in-building communications and enhance counseling and mental health services. The college also learned to avoid keeping documents all in one central location, instead storing them off-site or in digital form, she said.

"We learned to pivot quickly," Craig said. "That's why we were ready for Sandy and, to a point, many steps were in place for us to take now."

Shuttering the college for weeks after 9/11 also kicked off an early focus on distance learning two decades before the pandemic made it the new normal.

Even with great planning, however, disasters can be hard to fully predict.

"They say, 'We will not come in the same shape or form. We're going to give you a surprise,'" Craig said.

Perez, who stepped down as president in 2018, added that the challenge of the pandemic is very different from 9/11.

"What's happening now with the virus is affecting every institution," he said. "There is no one solution because it changes on a daily basis."

The Long Recovery

Twenty years earlier, Craig had just made it to the college on 9/11 when a towering wall of dust and smoke from one of the collapsing twin towers enveloped the main campus, about five blocks from the World Trade Center. She ran up a twisting ramp to an entrance at 199 Chambers Street, arriving inside covered in ash.

"When I went in, they didn't recognize me," she said.

Perez credited college engineers who took it upon themselves to close air vents, keeping dust and smoke from flooding the vast main building, which is about the size of the Empire State Building lying on its side. Avoiding that additional damage made it possible for BMCC to reopen the following month.

"Leadership is everywhere in an institution. It's not just the president or the cabinet," Perez said. "Everybody has a role to play, but during a disaster, you'd be surprised at the people who come to the surface and take on additional roles."

Emergency teams and police initially used space at the college as a command center after the attacks. With supplies from the BMCC nursing department, the college transformed the gym into a medical triage space for an expected wave of injured people, but after the devastating collapse of the towers, that wave never came.

Even as that recovery effort played out, Perez sought to get students back to classes in just a few weeks. The college faced many hurdles before it could reopen.

The collapse of 7 World Trade Center against Fiterman Hall had wiped out offices, classrooms and the entire continuing education center, which at the time was run by Acte Maldonado, a former dean and now a professor at the college.

"It completely destroyed everything. We had no records, no computers, no files," she said.

Having lost a third of its instructional space, the college got creative coming up with new classrooms. BMCC carved up its lobby, cafeteria and other areas to make teaching space and set up trailers on the street outside to provide additional room.

"We all came together to produce the miracle of finishing that semester for the students," said Caroline Pari-Pfisterer, a BMCC English professor.

She emphasized that at BMCC, which then served more than 16,000 students, the disaster of 9/11 wasn't "just a one-day thing." Instead, the traumatic challenge went on for months.

Pari-Pfisterer recalled how barges hauling away debris from Ground Zero docked on the Hudson River across from the campus.

"You'd be in the classroom teaching, and you'd hear this banging and these thuds," she said. "You hoped you didn't get a classroom looking out on the river, because then you would see the wreckage."

Pari-Pfisterer said her students told her of their own traumas in the aftermath, from jumping at the sound of sirens and fear of more terrorism to Arab and Muslim students reporting verbal and physical abuse amid a surge in post-9/11 hate crimes.

Just walking to work was "an assault on the senses," she said, describing the fires that burned for months, infusing the air with an acrid, chemical smell.

For many, that air near the World Trade Center also had serious effects. Tens of thousands of people who lived or worked in the area near the attacks have reported suffering health issues related to toxic contaminants in the dust and debris, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Before Fiterman Hall could be rebuilt, the original building underwent a lengthy decontamination and demolition.

BMCC faculty and staff have been among those affected by that toxic air, said Lisa Rose, a BMCC professor of human services. She said that includes those present on 9/11 and people who worked at the college in the weeks and months that followed.

"There are some people who have passed away, sadly. Others who are continuing to have health problems, respiratory problems, cancers related to 9/11," said Rose, who served on the 9/11 health and safety committee for the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and staff at CUNY. She is also the mother of former U.S. congressman Max Rose, who worked on securing federal benefits for people harmed by the attacks.

"There is concern among those of us who were around then about what is going to happen in the future," she said of the potential health effects. "Perhaps we should not have come back as quickly as we did, although it really seemed like the right thing at the time."

Becoming History

The attacks left a lasting legacy at a college now teaching a generation then unborn who know that day only as history.

In the first few years after 9/11, Pari-Pfisterer said, the attacks were a communal experience in the classroom and a topic for personal writing assignments. Now, she said, "you can't spend much time on it."

"There's no memory of it anymore," she said of her current students. "Now, I feel like I'm referring to it the way you refer to Pearl Harbor."

However, the rebuilt Fiterman Hall that opened in 2012 remains a tangible reminder of what happened for all who teach and learn inside its classrooms.

"We have a building that was built because of 9/11," Craig said. "We do not stop the reminder to students of why we got the building and why the building is there."

Perez said the most lasting memory of BMCC and 9/11 is of the college aiding its community during the disaster, serving as a base for emergency workers and remaining committed to helping students complete their education.

"That will be always part of the history of the college," he said. "Its ability to be resilient."

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At a college wounded on 9/11, memories endure 20 years later

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Tony Perez has never forgotten the day the sky fell and terror came to his campus. Perez, then the president of Borough of Manhattan Community College, was driving to work on Sept. 11, 2001, when he looked up and saw the attack on New York's World Trade Center.

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New York Magazine: "Ramy Captured the Paradox of Being Muslim American After 9/11"

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New York Magazine: "Ramy Captured the Paradox of Being Muslim American After 9/11"

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When it premiered in 2019 on Hulu, Ramy was the first scripted series focused on Muslim American life. The show's episode “Strawberries” provides what might be the only primarily Muslim American perspective on September 11 from any TV genre.

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Ramy Captured the Paradox of Being Muslim American After 9/11

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In the days, weeks, years, and decades since September 11, 2001, the event has taken on such sanctity to a certain kind of American identity that it's become ensconced in a mythical untouchability. At a December 2001 luncheon at the National Press Club, actress Goldie Hawn said of an American flag she knit after September 11, "I was trying to knit America back together again."

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In the summer of 2001, the UN hosted an international Conference Against Racism. Days later, the 9/11 attacks overshadowed the progress made there.

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Twenty years ago, during the dog days of summer, a fledgling journalist named Shereen Marisol Meraji - maybe you've heard of her? - headed to Durban, South Africa. Her mission: to report on the meeting of thousands of organizers and ambassadors at the United Nations Conference Against Racism.

The conference, Shereen says, helped her develop a global sensibility, learn about the interconnected struggles of people of color around the world, and foster a sense of optimism about what the future held when it came to dismantling racism.

Then, days after the conference ended, that sense of optimism was abruptly wiped away.

On this special episode - the last that will be co-hosted by Shereen - we're taking a look back at that conference, the issues that racial justice advocates were fighting for, and the day the world changed.

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Twenty years ago, during the dog days of summer , a fledgling journalist named Shereen Marisol Meraji - maybe you've heard of her? - headed to Durban, South Africa. Her mission: to report on a meeting of thousands of organizers and ambassadors gathered at a global conference on racism.

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New York Magazine: "The Patriot Act and Me"

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New York Magazine: "The Patriot Act and Me"

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"As a kid, I tried out photography. Then the FBI searched my home."

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The day I was born, my parents were robbed. It was a warm January morning in 1988 when my father went out to the car and found the window smashed, their cassette player, their Fleetwood Mac and Eagles tapes, gone. They told me later that they didn't care; their first child had been born. Other than that, my childhood growing up in Hyde Park, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Chicago, was uneventful. In the summers, I played soccer in the midwestern heat, then cooled off with strawberry ice cream my grandfather bought from the corner store when he visited from India. On the Fourth of July, the smoky smells of barbecue filled the air while I joined the neighborhood parade, American flags fluttering from my bike handles. I watched with wonder as the night sky popped with fireworks reflected on Lake Michigan. I remember the cicadas singing on hot nights and how the cool lake breeze made the little hairs on my brown arms wave.

Sports were my obsession, so I was ecstatic when my dad took me to the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney. I rooted for the U.S. to win gold in every event. My face painted in red, white, and blue, I held my hand to my heart when the national anthem played. After soccer player Mia Hamm high-fived me, I didn't want to wash my hands for days. When Team USA won the most medals, my 12-year-old body swelled with pride. We were the country to beat.

Then 9/11 happened. I was in band class assembling my oboe when our teacher came in late. He said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. The principal wheeled a TV set with bunny ears into the cafeteria. We watched a plane fly through one tower, then a second plane fly through the other. When the first plane hit, we thought it was an accident. When the second plane hit, we knew it was not. We watched this on repeat all morning.

As the U.S. went to war on terrorism, I went to high school and found a new passion in photography class. From behind the lens, the world was mine to explore. I found I could express myself in ways that I couldn't with words. I took my camera with me everywhere. One Sunday, on the way to a soccer game, I spotted inspiration for my "abstract objects" assignment and asked my dad to pull over. I got out of the car with my camera and focused the lens on a giant metal tower that seemed out of place in the burnt-yellow fields. It looked like an alien. I took a photograph.

Later that night, the phone rang. When my mother picked up, the caller identified himself as a detective from the DuPage County sheriff's office. He said they had received a call from a ConEdison employee who saw a girl of Middle Eastern descent taking photos in front of a foreign car. The license plate was registered to our phone number.

"We're from India," my mom replied. I heard her explain my class assignment. "Did she break any laws?" she asked.

The detective told her he was just following protocol. Then he wished her a good evening and hung up. It was a troubling call, but we moved on. I developed the photograph in the school darkroom. It wasn't a masterpiece, but I always felt a rush when chemical magic revealed the images from my teenage life. The darkroom felt safe, like home.

A week after the detective's call, our monthly housekeeper heard forceful knocks on my family's apartment door. When she answered, an FBI agent flashed his badge.

"Do only four people live here?" the FBI agent asked.

"Yes, a family," she said.

Unsatisfied, he searched the apartment. He checked each room and closet and left his business card from the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. He didn't show a warrant or have my parents' permission to enter and search our home. He had something far more powerful: the USA Patriot Act.

Immediately after 9/11, Congress enacted the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" law. The Patriot Act sought to uncover terrorists that might be in America, ones that were "homegrown." I remember reading about this law in class but never expected it would impact my life.

The FBI launched an investigation. My parents were asked detailed questions about their visa status and to provide proof of my school enrollment. They contacted my photography teacher and principal to verify us and our intentions in America. As a teenager, I never spoke directly to the FBI agent, but if I had, I would have told him I was afraid of terrorism too.

Whenever I was asked what I was doing with my camera or where I was from, my stomach churned and my mouth went dry.

When word got out about the investigation, my high-school newspaper reported on it. The student journalists reached out to the DuPage County detective for comment about whether this was a case of racial profiling. The detective claimed that police security measures are blind to both age and race. "All complaints about suspicious activity are investigated like crimes," he said. "To take this particular crime at face value is ludicrous," he added. "There are teenage and child suicide bombers in the Middle East. Though it seems less likely to happen in America, there is still a good chance that suicide bombings or terrorist action could happen anywhere else." My classmates, soccer teammates, and teachers were enraged. They rallied behind me, offering to defend me to law enforcement. While I appreciated their support, I felt embarrassed that I had caused the investigation. I wanted the whole thing to go away.

After that, my fear took on new dimensions. I was not only afraid of terrorism but also afraid to be seen as a terrorist. I was afraid of not belonging or not seeming American enough despite being born in the United States. Perceptions of people who looked like me had changed. My mother's sweet, lyrical voice, which filled our home with joy, became more somber. She worried about future misunderstandings regarding our name and ethnicity. My parents applied for U.S. citizenship so they would never be questioned about their status again. Proving our Americanness became a necessity to ensure our safety and security.

I wanted to return to my old life, especially the darkroom, but it didn't feel like home anymore. I worried about taking photos outside of my neighborhood. Whenever I was asked what I was doing with my camera or where I was from, my stomach churned and my mouth went dry. Photography stopped being my passion for a long time. I tried new hobbies and a different career path but never felt the same rush. It took over a decade for me to return to it and pursue a career as a filmmaker. Eventually, I learned that being unafraid to make art is a way to fight the forces of alienation that make people like me feel as if they don't belong.

The FBI investigation didn't ruin my life. But it had an effect on me and still does to this day. It was my coming of age, my self-discovery about the challenges of being a person of color in America. Before the investigation, I believed that the country's values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applied equally to everyone. I didn't know my skin color could be perceived as dangerous. The Patriot Act enabled a new version of fearmongering, making many Americans feel unwelcome at home. This culture of fear and divisiveness has only increased in recent years. Almost two decades later, I still feel uncomfortable in places where there aren't many people who look like me, where we're viewed as "other" by our fellow citizens. Many Americans face similar challenges every day with far worse consequences. While I have been fortunate in many ways, I never forget that to walk through America without fear is a privilege that is not our birthright as people of color.

It has taken time for me to confront my naïve perceptions and untangle my definition of home from a country or national flag. I still don't have a good answer for what home means to me. For now, it may only be a feeling. Fleeting memories that bring warmth and peace, like the sweetness of strawberry ice cream, cicada songs on hot summer nights, and cool lake breezes that made the hairs on my brown arms wave. Or maybe, home simply lies within the edges of my favorite photographs, the preserved moments I choose to carry forward.

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The day I was born, my parents were robbed. It was a warm January morning in 1988 when my father went out to the car and found the window smashed, their cassette player, their Fleetwood Mac and Eagles tapes, gone. They told me later that they didn't care; their first child had been born.

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New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims 

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New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims 

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Read this new collection of works by North American Muslim writers.

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New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims a book by Kazim Ali

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From the Introduction: "The goal with this anthology is to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres--poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of texts which mix and match and blur all of these modes .

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New York Times: "How the NYPD is Using Post-9/11 Tools on Everyday New Yorkers"

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New York Times: "How the NYPD is Using Post-9/11 Tools on Everyday New Yorkers"

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Two decades after the attack on New York City, the Police Department is using counterterrorism tools and tactics to combat routine street crime.

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Police officials say they are obligated to use every tool at their disposal to fight crime. But critics say the expansive surveillance dragnet is ensnaring everyday New Yorkers. Credit... Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Two decades after the attack on New York City, the Police Department is using counterterrorism tools and tactics to combat routine street crime.

Police officials say they are obligated to use every tool at their disposal to fight crime. But critics say the expansive surveillance dragnet is ensnaring everyday New Yorkers. Credit... Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

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It was an unusual forearm tattoo that the police said led them to Luis Reyes, a 35-year-old man who was accused of stealing packages from a Manhattan building's mailroom in 2019.

But the truth was more complicated: Mr. Reyes had first been identified by the New York Police Department's powerful facial recognition software as it analyzed surveillance video of the crime.

His guilty plea this year was not solely the result of keen-eyed detectives practicing old school police work. Instead, it was part of the sprawling legacy of one of the city's darkest days.

Since the fall of the World Trade Center, the security apparatus born from the Sept. 11 attack on the city has fundamentally changed the way the country's largest police department operates, altering its approach to finding and foiling terrorist threats, but also to cracking minor cases like Mr. Reyes's.

New Yorkers simply going about their daily lives routinely encounter post-9/11 digital surveillance tools like facial recognition software, license plate readers or mobile X-ray vans that can see through car doors. Surveillance drones hover above mass demonstrations and protesters say they have been questioned by antiterrorism officers after marches. The department's Intelligence Division, redesigned in 2002 to confront Al Qaeda operatives, now uses antiterror tactics to fight gang violence and street crime.

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The department's Technical Assistance Response Unit operates a drone fleet that was announced in 2018. Credit... Uli Seit for The New York Times

Policing technology has always advanced along with the world at large. And the police have long used surveillance cameras to find suspects caught on video, publicizing images of people and asking the public for help identifying them. But both supporters and critics of the shift say it is almost impossible to overstate how profoundly the attacks changed American policing - perhaps most acutely in New York, which lost 23 of its own officers that day, and hundreds more from 9/11-related illnesses in the years since.

The Police Department has poured resources into expanding its surveillance capabilities. The department's budget for intelligence and counterterrorism has more than quadrupled, spending more than $3 billion since 2006, and more through funding streams that are difficult to quantify, including federal grants and the secretive Police Foundation, a nonprofit that funnels money and equipment to the department from benefactors and donors.

Current and former police officials say the tools have been effective in thwarting dozens of would-be attacks. And the department has an obligation, they say, to repurpose its counterterrorism tools for everyday crime fighting.

"It's what everybody would want us to be doing," said John Miller, the deputy commissioner for the Police Department's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureaus, "instead of just saying, 'Well, these were just for counterterrorism. So if it's not a bombing we're not going to use them. I'm sorry you got mugged.'"

But others say the prevalence of the department's technological arsenal subjects ordinary New Yorkers to near-constant surveillance - a burden that falls more heavily on people of color. According to one estimate from a recent analysis by Amnesty International that was shared with The New York Times, a person attending a protest between Washington Square Park and Sixth Avenue - a common route through the park and into the city for protests after the death of George Floyd last summer - would be captured on the Police Department's array of Argus video cameras for about 80 percent of that march.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and the heavy favorite to become the city's next mayor, said in an interview that he intends to audit and re-evaluate how counterterrorism and surveillance resources are deployed and used in the city.

"I'm a believer in using technology to keep us safe," said Mr. Adams, a former New York City police captain. "I don't believe in using technology to dismantle our rights that exist in our country."

Derrick Ingram was accused of speaking into a bullhorn near an officer at a protest. The police descended on his home with a response he said would have been appropriate for a terror attack. Credit... Laila Stevens for The New York Times

Derrick Ingram remembers the laser - that red dot, hovering in his bedroom, trained there by an armed police officer posted across the courtyard from his apartment last summer.

"It was one of the most intense experiences," he said.

The police had identified Mr. Ingram using facial recognition tools they applied to his Instagram profile, intercepted his phone calls and used drones to peer inside his apartment. Dozens of officers descended. The response seemed suited to a terrorist threat, Mr. Ingram said.

But Mr. Ingram, an organizer and activist, was not a terrorism suspect. Officers were seeking him in connection with his participation in a protest, where they said he spoke through a bullhorn near the ear of a patrolwoman, causing her temporary hearing loss. He would later be charged with assault of a police officer - a case that was subsequently dropped.

The intensity of the police operation was shocking, Mr. Ingram said.

"It kind of felt stupid. I felt like it was a waste of taxpayer money and funds," Mr. Ingram said. "We've created a monster that's kind of always existed within America, but we've given that monster - because of 9/11, because of other terrorist attacks and things that have happened - unquestionable, unchecked power."

Safeguards meant to limit the police's ability to monitor political activity were suspended. Thousands of additional cameras and license plate readers were installed around Manhattan, part of the Lower and Midtown Manhattan Security Initiatives.

Only recently - because of a law passed by the City Council last summer, to police officials' dismay - did the breadth of the Police Department's surveillance dragnet begin to become clear. The law, known as the POST Act, requires the department to provide a public accounting of its post-9/11 technological arsenal.

Police officials have proved reluctant to fully comply with the transparency requirements, and have historically kept such expenditures secret even from the city's own comptroller. But according to figures maintained by the city's Independent Budget Office, the Police Department's spending on intelligence and counterterrorism nearly quadrupled between 2006 and 2021, up to $349 million from $83 million in 2006, the earliest year for which the office keeps data.

For a department that was running entire precinct houses on single computers at the time of the attacks, the expansion has been stunning, said Raymond W. Kelly, whose second stint as New York Police Department commissioner began just months after the attacks. Mr. Kelly led a frantic, rapid effort to bring the department up to speed.

"We brought in thousands of computers and lots of other technology to try to get the department into the 21st century," Mr. Kelly said in an interview.

Raymond W. Kelly took over as police commissioner not long after Sept. 11 and oversaw the transformation of the department. Credit... Katie Orlinsky for the New York Times

He challenged the notion that the surveillance apparatus in New York troubled many residents; most Americans are used to having their pictures taken even while shopping in a department store, he said.

"Your picture was probably taken 30 times while you were in that store," said Mr. Kelly. "I don't think the average person has the concern about privacy that many of these activist groups have."

In documents released this year, the police acknowledged their use of a vast network of license plate readers, thousands of surveillance cameras, mobile X-ray vans and digital tools that are used to scrub social media profiles and retain deleted information. Much of the resulting data can be collected and stored without a warrant.

The tactics have become ubiquitous in criminal cases, including investigations of low-level crime. Asked to identify recent cases in which the police used such surveillance measures, public defenders from across the city said it was difficult to think of one that had not.

"My office defends tens of thousands of cases each year, and I would be shocked if we have a single case of any level of severity that did not include some form of surveillance technology," said Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, the director of the science and surveillance project at Brooklyn Defender Services.

Most often used, lawyers say, is the Police Department's Domain Awareness System, which fuses data from several different surveillance tools - license plate readers, closed-circuit television streams, images that can be analyzed with facial recognition software, or phone call histories - and associates the data with a person or address.

The department has acknowledged that the platform was not developed as a crime-fighting tool, but rather, has been repurposed into one: "Originally designed as a counterterrorism platform, D.A.S. is now a program that aggregates a substantial quantity of the information N.Y.P.D. personnel use to make strategic and tactical decisions," read a draft policy paper posted on the department's website.

The police say safeguards exist around the information that the department collects - warrants, for example, are sometimes required to query stored data, and facial recognition software cannot be the sole reason for an arrest. But civil liberties advocates say the kaleidoscopic data network collected by the police has effectively turned the city into a surveillance state, even for law-abiding New Yorkers.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said her organization was already concerned with creeping police surveillance in the 1990s; not long before the attacks, the group had mapped out every camera it could find in the city. In hindsight, she said, the exercise would prove naïve.

"We made a map, and we had dots - we had pins at that time - where there were cameras. And when we did that, there were a couple of thousand," Ms. Lieberman said. "We repeated the survey at some point after 9/11, and there were too many cameras to count."

Inside the Real Time Crime Center at One Police Plaza, analysts search databases for information. Credit... Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

In the months and years after Sept. 11, the Police Department under Mr. Kelly set about building a system that would protect the city from another attack.

The department established a counterterrorism bureau and remade its intelligence division, including the so-called Demographics Unit - a secretive police unit that kept tabs on Muslim New Yorkers, even without evidence of a crime.

"The theory was, in the course of regular policing, police officers around the country would run across little bits of information that, when added to other kinds of information, would potentially reveal terrorist plots in the making," said Faiza Patel, the director for the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, which researches the intersection of civil liberties and surveillance. "In order to do that, they really lowered the threshold for information collection."

The department still defends its practices, but later settled a lawsuit alleging it had illegally spied on Muslim New Yorkers, and officials say it no longer employs the kinds of demographic surveillance it used following the Sept. 11 attacks. Today, many of the division's resources have returned to tracking gang conflicts and gun crime (it also maintains a division to track extremist groups).

Still, the scars from the surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers remain, and the policing methods behind it - data collection and intelligence-gathering - have stuck.

Mr. Ingram, the activist who was arrested after a Black Lives Matter protest against racism in policing, was one of several people involved in last summer's demonstrations who said they were eventually interviewed by city and federal counterterrorism officers.

"When the definition of 'terrorism' becomes anyone you don't agree with, that's utterly terrifying," said Hannah Shaw, who was arrested during a protest last summer and turned over to federal antiterrorism agents for questioning.

Police departments were already beginning to develop surveillance technology before the Sept. 11 attacks, said Fritz Umbach, a history professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

"There's certainly more police presence," Mr. Umbach said. "That is an ongoing trend that predates 9/11. It continues for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism."

What has changed, he said, is the tools that police have at their disposal.

"Government funding developed these tools for war and then they get repurposed for policing," he said. "And that's a real issue."

For those in law enforcement who lived through the pressure of a post-9/11 world in New York, the nexus between counterterror work and policing street crime seemed a natural progression.

"It's hard to explain sometimes how difficult the work was early on, with all the threats that we were facing, and the expectation that we were going to stop every single thing," said Carlos Fernandez, a former F.B.I. agent in charge of counterterrorism in New York City who worked closely with the Police Department after Sept. 11. "That was a very challenging environment to work in."

The tools developed in the aftermath of the attacks proved to be useful in fighting street crime too, Mr. Fernandez said.

"I think to a large degree it's been very beneficial," Mr. Fernandez said. "But without the proper checks and balances, anything that's good can also be used for bad reasons."

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How the N.Y.P.D. Is Using Post-9/11 Tools on Everyday New Yorkers

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Two decades after the attack on New York City, the Police Department is using counterterrorism tools and tactics to combat routine street crime. Police officials say they are obligated to use every tool at their disposal to fight crime. But critics say the expansive surveillance dragnet is ensnaring everyday New Yorkers.

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The Atlantic: "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind" 

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The Atlantic: "What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind" 

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Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

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Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family's search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

"It felt like she was saying my grief was less important than hers," Jen said. "I remember thinking, This article was published online on August 9, 2021. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
When Bobby McIlvaine died on September 11, 2001, his desk at home was a study in plate tectonics, coated in shifting piles of leather-bound diaries and yellow legal pads. He'd kept the diaries since he was a teenager, and they were filled with the usual diary things-longings, observations, frustrations-while the legal pads were marbled with more variety: aphoristic musings, quotes that spoke to him, stabs at fiction.

The yellow pads appeared to have the earnest beginnings of two different novels. But the diaries told a different kind of story. To the outside world, Bobby, 26, was a charmer, a striver, a furnace of ambition. But inside, the guy was a sage and a sap-philosophical about disappointments, melancholy when the weather changed, moony over girlfriends.

Less than a week after his death, Bobby's father had to contend with that pitiless still life of a desk. And so he began distributing the yellow legal pads, the perfect-bound diaries: to Bobby's friends; to Bobby's girlfriend, Jen, to whom he was about to propose. Maybe, he told them, there was material in there that they could use in their eulogies.

One object in that pile glowed with more meaning than all the others: Bobby's very last diary. Jen took one look and quickly realized that her name was all over it. Could she keep it?

Bobby's father didn't think. He simply said yes. It was a reflex that he almost instantly came to regret. "This was a decision we were supposed to make together," his wife, Helen, told him. Here was an opportunity to savor Bobby's company one last time, to hear his voice, likely saying something new. In that sense, the diary wasn't like a recovered photograph. It raised the prospect, however brief, of literary resurrection. How, Helen fumed, could her husband not want to know Bobby's final thoughts-ones he may have scribbled as recently as the evening of September 10? And how could he not share her impulse to take every last molecule of what was Bobby's and reconstruct him?

"One missing piece," she told me recently, "was like not having an arm."

Over and over, she asked Jen to see that final diary. Helen had plenty of chances to bring it up, because Jen lived with the McIlvaines for a time after September 11, unable to tolerate the emptiness of her own apartment. Helen was careful to explain that she didn't need the object itself. All she asked was that Jen selectively photocopy it.

Jen would say she'd consider it. Then nothing would happen. Helen began to plead. I just want the words, she'd say. If Bobby's describing a tree, just give me the description of the tree. Jen demurred.

The requests escalated, as did the rebuffs. They were having an argument now. Helen, Jen pointed out, already had Bobby's other belongings, other diaries, the legal pads.

When she finally left the McIlvaines' house for good, Jen slammed the door behind her, got into her car, and burst into tears. Shortly after, she wrote Helen a letter with her final answer: No, just no. If Helen wanted to discuss this matter any further, she'd have to do so in the presence of Jen's therapist.

Helen and her husband never saw Jen again. "She became a nonperson to me," Helen told me. Today, she can't so much as recall Jen's last name.

But for years, Helen thought about that diary. Her mind snagged on it like a nail; she needled her husband for giving it away; it became the subject of endless discussion in her "limping group," as she calls it, a circle of six mothers in suburban Philadelphia who'd also lost children, though not on September 11. They became indignant on her behalf. A number proposed, only half jokingly, that they break into Jen's apartment and liberate the diary. "You don't get any more memories," one of the women told me. "So anything written, any video, any card-you cling to that. That's all you're going to get for life."

The McIlvaines would have to make do with what they already had. Eventually, they did. Three words of Bobby's became the family motto: Life loves on. No one could quite figure out which diary or legal pad it came from, but no matter. Helen wears a silver bracelet engraved with this phrase, and her husband got it tattooed in curlicue script on his upper arm.

Here I should note that I know and love the McIlvaine family. On my brother's first day of college, he was assigned to a seven-person suite, and because he arrived last, Bobby became his roommate. My brother often thinks about what a small miracle that was: If he'd arrived just 30 minutes earlier, the suite would have been an isomer of itself, with the kids all shuffled in an entirely different configuration. But thanks to a happy accident of timing, my brother got to spend his nights chattering away with this singular kid, an old soul with a snappity-popping mind.

Eight years later, almost to the day, a different accident of timing would take Bobby's life. He and my brother were still roommates, but this time in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, trying to navigate young adulthood.

Back when Bobby was still alive, I would occasionally see the McIlvaines. They struck me as maybe the nicest people on the planet. Helen taught reading to kids who needed extra help with it, mainly in a trailer in the parking lot of a Catholic high school. Bob Sr. was a teacher who specialized in working with troubled adolescents; for a decade, he'd also owned a bar. Jeff, Bobby's younger brother, was just a kid in those days, but he was always unreasonably good-natured when he turned up.

And Bobby: My God. The boy was incandescent. When he smiled it looked for all the world like he'd swallowed the moon.

Then, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Bobby headed off to a conference at Windows on the World, a restaurant in a building to which he seldom had reason to go, for a media-relations job at Merrill Lynch he'd had only since July. My brother waited and waited. Bobby never came home. From that point forward, I watched as everyone in the blast radius of this horrible event tried to make sense of it, tried to cope.

Early on, the McIlvaines spoke to a therapist who warned them that each member of their family would grieve differently. Imagine that you're all at the top of a mountain, she told them, but you all have broken bones, so you can't help each other. You each have to find your own way down.

It was a helpful metaphor, one that may have saved the McIlvaines' marriage. But when I mentioned it to Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at UC Irvine who's spent a lifetime studying the effects of sudden, traumatic loss, she immediately spotted a problem with it: "That suggests everyone will make it down," she told me. "Some people never get down the mountain at all."

This is one of the many things you learn about mourning when examining it at close range: It's idiosyncratic, anarchic, polychrome. A lot of the theories you read about grief are great, beautiful even, but they have a way of erasing individual experiences. Every mourner has a very different story to tell.

That therapist was certainly right, however, in the most crucial sense: After September 11, those who had been close to Bobby all spun off in very different directions. Helen stifled her grief, avoiding the same supermarket she'd shopped in for years so that no one would ask how she was. Jeff, Bobby's lone sibling, had to force his way through the perdition of survivor's guilt. Bob Sr. treated his son's death as if it were an unsolved murder, a cover-up to be exposed. Something was fishy about 9/11.

And then there was Jen. She's married now, has two terrific kids, but she wonders sometimes, when she's quarreling with her husband or feeling exasperated with her life, what it would have been like if she'd been with Bobby all this time. I tracked her down in April, and of course she's nothing like the heartless villainess I had come to imagine her to be. That was just the story I'd told myself, the one I'd used to make sense of the senseless, to give shape to my own rage. Like I said: We all need our stories.

One thing I knew when I finally visited her, though: I wanted to see that diary. And I wanted the McIlvaines to see it too. "I'm not a saver," she said when we first met up for cocktails. My heart froze.

But she still had it, just so you know.

Listen to Jen Senior discuss this story on The Experiment podcast, a show about people navigating our country's contradictions. Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts

T ell me about your son.

Helen welcomed this invitation the first time she heard it, because it focused her thinking, gave her an outlet for her grief. But soon it filled her with dread, and she felt herself straining under the weight of it. How can you possibly convey who your firstborn was or what he meant to you?

Helen usually starts by telling people that Bobby went to Princeton, but that's hardly because she's status-fixated. It's because she and Bob Sr. did not expect to have a child who went to an Ivy League school. They both went to state schools in Pennsylvania, not even particularly well-known ones. Both of their kids were sporty. But when Bobby was 8, his third-grade teacher said to them-and they both remember her exact words-"Start saving your pennies." This one's education might cost you.

"The amount of things that had to go right for my brother to go to Princeton were, like, astronomical," says Jeff, a high-school biology teacher and track coach in Somerdale, New Jersey. "To us, it was like someone from our family becoming the president."

This is how everyone in the family remembers Bobby: as a sui generis creature, exceptional and otherworldly, descended from the heavens through a basketball hoop.

He was an intense student. He was an even more intense athlete, competitive to the point of insolence. Writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer last year, Mike Sielski, an old high-school classmate of Bobby's, described him as "all bones and acute angles and stiletto elbows" on the basketball court. It was a goose-pimpling story, one he had occasion to write because another classmate of theirs had unearthed 36 seconds of video from 1992, in which a teenage Bobby McIlvaine throws an immaculate pass that sets up an immaculate shot that flies right over the teenage head of ...

Kobe Bryant.

Bobby scored 16 points off Kobe and his team that day, in addition to setting up that floater.

When he arrived at college, Bobby retained a bit of that alpha-dog streak. He was still competitive, even while playing mindless, made-up dorm games. He wasn't bashful about ribbing friends. He was tall and handsome and had a high level of confidence in his sense of style, which may or may not have been justified. "There were times you wanted him to step back and not be so serious and intense," says Andre Parris, a former suitemate and one of Bobby's closest friends. "But it was part of who and what he was, and what he thought he had to do to get ahead."

What "getting ahead" meant to Bobby was complicated. Financial worries are all over his journals from those years ( I don't feel like a real person sitting here with no money, reads one typical entry). Yet he was conflicted about what it might take to make money, flummoxed by all the kids who were beating a dutiful path to business school. ( Is youth really just a hobby? he asked about them, with evident pique.) He wanted to be a writer. Which paid nothing, obviously.

This conflict continued into his brief adulthood. He spent two years in book publishing before realizing that it was no way to make a living, and switched instead to corporate PR. He could still write his novels on the side.

But for all Bobby's hunger and swagger, what he mainly exuded, even during his college years, was warmth, decency, a corkscrew quirkiness. He doted on girlfriends. He gave careful advice. His senior year, he took a modern-dance class because, well, why not? It would be fun. And different. His final project involved physically spelling out his girlfriend's name.

That was just a lark, though. Bobby's real intellectual passion was African American culture and history. After Bobby died, the McIlvaines got not one but two condolence notes from Toni Morrison, with whom he'd taken a class. The second came with the term paper he'd written for her. "It is certainly one of the more accomplished and insightful," she wrote, "as was he." His senior thesis received an honorable mention for the main prize in the department of African American studies.

At his funeral, Bobby's oldest friends spoke of what a role model he was to them. I was five years older than Bobby, which meant I mainly saw him as charming and adorable, intelligent and unstoppable.

But strangely, I wanted to impress him too. When I started my job at New York magazine, writing short features in the theater section each week, Bobby gave me grief about ending each one of them with a quote. At first I was annoyed, defensive- the little shit -but in hindsight, it's amazing that I cared so much about this 22-year-old's opinion, and even more amazing that he'd read me attentively enough to discover an incipient tic. To this day, I credit Bobby with teaching me a valuable lesson: If you're going to cede the power of the last word to someone else, you'd better be damn sure that person deserves it.

Bob McIlvaine Sr. cries easily and regularly when you speak to him. Everyone in the family knows this and has grown accustomed to it-his grief lives close to the surface, heaving up occasionally for air. He cried at our first lunch after the McIlvaines picked me up at the train station a few months ago; he cried again just minutes into our first chat when the two of us were alone; he cried in a recent interview with Spike Lee for a documentary series about 9/11 on HBO.

In talking with Bob Sr., something heartbreaking and rudely basic dawned on me: September 11 may be one of the most-documented calamities in history, but for all the spools of disaster footage we've watched, we still know practically nothing about the last moments of the individual dead. It's strange, when you think about it, that an event so public could still be such a punishing mystery. Yet it is, and it is awful-the living are left to perseverate, to let their imaginations run amok in their midnight corrals.

For Bob Sr., what that meant was wondering where Bobby was and what he was doing when the chaos began. For years, that was all he could think about. The idea of Bobby suffering tortured him. Was he incinerated? Was he asphyxiated? Or even worse? "I think Bobby jumped," he shouted up the stairs one day to his wife. The thought nearly drove Helen mad.

Over time, it became clear that Bobby didn't jump. Bobby's was one of fewer than 100 civilian corpses recovered from the wreckage. But it haunted Bob Sr. that he never saw the body. At the morgue on September 13, the pathologist strongly advised him against viewing it. Only years later-four? five? he can no longer remember-did he finally screw up the courage to go to the medical examiner's office in New York City and get the official report.
From the July/August, September, and October 2002 issues: Excerpts from William Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
That's when everything changed. "My whole thesis-everything I jump into now-is based upon his injuries," he tells me. "Looking at the body, I came to the conclusion that he was walking in and bombs went off."

A controlled demolition, he means. That is how he thinks Bobby died that day, and how the towers eventually fell: from a controlled demolition. It was an inside job, planned by the U.S. government, not to justify the war in Iraq-that was a bonus-but really, ultimately, to destroy the 23rd floor, because that's where the FBI was investigating the use of gold that the United States had unlawfully requisitioned from the Japanese during World War II, which it then leveraged to bankrupt the Soviet Union. The planes were merely for show.

Does a man wake up on September 12, 2001, and believe such a thing? No. This belief takes shape over the span of years, many years.

That first year, Bob Sr. was numb. His sole objective was to get through each day. But he eventually got involved in a group called 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "It opened up my life," he tells me. "I became very active. That's how I grieved. It was perfect."

Before Bobby went to Princeton, Bob Sr. had been indifferent to politics, voting sometimes for Democrats and sometimes for Republicans-including, he thinks, Ronald Reagan. "I was not a well-read person," he says. "I owned a bar in the city. If I even mentioned the word progressive, my customers probably would have shot me."

But then Bobby started taking classes with Princeton's glamorous tenured radicals. He started writing for the school's Progressive Review. His father devoured everything he wrote. Soon, he had Bob Sr. reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Z Magazine, the radical monthly. Bob Sr. has been interested in politics ever since. "That's all because of Bobby."

So this anti-war activity? It was perfect-a natural outlet for him.

But as time wore on, Bob Sr. got impatient. In 2004, he went down to Washington to hear Condoleezza Rice speak to the 9/11 Commission, and her testimony -or lack thereof, he'd say-so enraged him that he left in a huff, cursing in the halls of Congress. "I wanted answers," he explains. Yet no answers were forthcoming. That's when he realized: The government was hiding something. "I became militant," he says. "To this day, I'm very militant."

Bob Sr. is a bespectacled, soft-spoken man, slender and slightly stooped. But his affect is deceptive. We're sitting in the upstairs den of the McIlvaines' three-bedroom home in Oreland, Pennsylvania, the same house where Bobby and Jeff grew up. It's sweet, modest, cluttered with family pictures. But this room has been transformed into a 9/11 research bunker, stuffed with books and carefully organized files-by event, subject, country. The largest piece of art on the wall is a world map freckled with pins marking every country that's invited Bob Sr. to tell his story.

"I speak out so much, the word just spreads," he tells me. "I'll show you Italy." Pictures and clippings from a Rome film festival, he means, because he appeared in the documentary Zero: Inchiesta sull'11 Settembre. He got to walk the red carpet. "The Russians came over. They spent two days here, wanted to hear what I had to say." Meaning Russian state news agencies. They parked themselves on the McIlvaines' back deck. "France came here, stayed a few days to talk." Same deal, though he doesn't remember which media outfit. ("My dad is practically a celebrity in that community," Jeff told me.)

Crucial to Bob Sr.'s understanding of September 11-that it was the cynical skulduggery of the U.S. government, not a grisly act of terrorism by jihadists using commercial planes filled with helpless civilians-is the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which popularized the idea that jet fuel couldn't burn at a high enough temperature to melt beams into molten steel. This is, it should go without saying, contrary to all observable fact.

But this theory is what Bob Sr. is eager to illustrate for me. He has visuals prepared, lots of building diagrams. I tell him we'll get there; I just want to ask a few more questions about those early days-

He's disappointed. "Everything I've done in my life is based upon those seconds." This is something he very much wants to discuss.

And so we discuss it. Only a preplanned detonation, he argues, could bring down those towers, and only a lobby embroidered with explosives could explain the injuries to Bobby's body. He has the full medical examiner's report.

It is very upsetting to read. Most of Bobby's head-that beautiful face-was missing, as was most of his right arm. The details are rendered in generic diagrams and the dispassionate language of pathology ("Absent: R upper extremity, most of head"), as well as a chilling pair of responses on a standard checklist.

Hair color: None.

Eye color: None.

But a subtle thing made Bob Sr. think something was amiss. The report describes many lacerations and fractures, but they appear almost entirely on the front of Bobby's body. The back of his corpse is basically described as pristine, besides multiple fractures to what remained of his head.

The story we've told ourselves all these years is that Bobby had already left the building when the planes hit. Bobby didn't work in the World Trade Center; from what we could piece together, he'd gone to Windows on the World simply to help a new colleague set up for a morning presentation at an all-day conference, not to attend it. So Bobby did his part, was our assumption, then said his goodbyes and was making his way back to nearby Merrill Lynch when he was suddenly killed in the street by flying debris.
Bobby's daily planner is cluttered with appointments. But the day of September 11 is blank. Whatever he was doing was not significant enough to merit its own entry.
Bob Sr. doesn't buy it. If that were true-if Bobby were moving away from the World Trade Center-wouldn't he have fallen forward? Wouldn't there be injuries on his back? "If you're running away, it'd be more of a crushing type of thing," he tells me. "Probably every bone in his body would be breaking."

I tell him I'm not a pathologist, but it seems just as plausible to me that he heard the roaring sound of a plane flying too low and too fast, or maybe the sound of a hijacked aircraft hitting the North Tower itself, and turned around to see what had happened and never knew what hit him.

He rejects this explanation. "My theory is he was walking into the building at the time, because he had the conference up there."

"I thought his conference started at 8:30?" I ask. The first plane hit at 8:46 a.m. That would have meant Bobby was arriving late.

"I thought it started at 9," Bob Sr. says.

"Isn't there a way to find out?" I ask.

"You know, to tell you the truth, I never ..."

He'd never checked.

Breakfast and registration for the conference began at 8 o'clock. Opening remarks were scheduled for 8:30. Bobby's colleague was scheduled to speak at 8:40. The full brochure is available on the 9/11 Memorial & Museum's website.

When I eventually visit Jen-she of the purloined diary, the woman to whom Bobby was about to be engaged-she shows me the daily planner that was sitting on his desk at Merrill. It's cluttered with appointments. But the day of September 11 is blank. Whatever he was doing was not significant enough to merit its own entry.
Read: Everything my husband wasn't there for
My brother also tells me that he still has the note Bob Sr. left for him on his kitchen table on Thursday, September 13. It said that an investigator with the New York City Police Department, Joe Gagliardi, had just come by to drop off the wallet they'd pulled from Bobby's pocket. One line in particular stood out. He was found on the perimeter. Not near the lobby.

"Was he really?" Bob Sr. says when I phone him and ask him about the note. He'd completely forgotten that he'd written it. "If that's true, that's great." He thinks for a moment. "Though the perimeter-he still could have been 10 feet away. He certainly wasn't 100 feet from the building."

I then tell him about the conference schedule, which actually did leave open the possibility that he was 100 feet from the building. If he'd left before his colleague started speaking-or the opening remarks-he could have been quite close to his office at Merrill Lynch, a five-minute walk away. Bob Sr. takes it all in. He repeats that he finds Bobby's injuries too extreme, too savage, to be caused by flying debris. "But you know what?" he finally says. "That's no longer relevant to me. My whole thing is who did it and why. It's been 20 years and I still can't get any answers."

It takes me some time, but eventually I summon the courage to ask Bob Sr. an obvious question: What makes his claims about the destruction of the World Trade Center more credible than the claims of, for instance, Donald Trump supporters who say the 2020 election was stolen?

"I can believe it was stolen!" he tells me. "But I'm not going to go around preaching that, because I don't know. Because I'm doing my homework." Bob Sr. is always reading. His latest is a biography of Allen Dulles. "Probably 99.9 percent of the people that you will find in those radical groups-the Oath Keepers, whatever-they really haven't done any research."

But then he adds that he sympathizes with Trump voters, as much as he despises Trump himself. "This country hasn't done anything for them in such a long time. So you can't blame them for voting for him."

Bob Sr. asks if I would like to see Bobby's wallet. I didn't realize he had it, but he does, stuffed in a biohazard bag, itself entombed in a plastic box in the room that once belonged to Bobby. He carefully opens them for me.

"Helen and Jeff have never seen this," he tells me.

They haven't?

"No."

The wallet is covered in dust, still, and faintly redolent of that World Trade Center tang, a scent once so powerful that New Yorkers could smell it in their eyes. He starts pulling out a 26-year-old's modest possessions: a Pennsylvania driver's license, a Visa card, some kind of work or building ID, a library card. The wallet still contains $13 in cash, but the money is disintegrating, almost completely rotted away.

"The only thing I do is 9/11 stuff," Bob Sr. says. "My whole basis of everything revolves around the day."

This is not, it should be said, anything like what Helen does with her days. A two-decade investigation into 9/11 was not part of her retirement plan. In one of our earliest conversations, she specifically told me that she'd walk across the United States to not discover some of the things that Bob Sr. has learned. So as he and I sit here, inspecting a wallet that she's never seen, I ask: Doesn't all this searching, this interrogating, have unhealthy consequences for his marriage?

He readily admits that it does: "We'd socialize and she'd catch me saying stuff, and she would go nuts. She'd say, 'Do not talk about 9/11.' But then someone would come up to me and say, 'Can I ask you about it?' And I'd start talking. Then she'd find out about it. She'd get so upset." They now tend to socialize separately. "I will talk 9/11 with anyone I see, if they want to talk about it," he says. "And I think that's why I don't have many friends. They're afraid I'm going to talk about it."

It may be hard to imagine why anyone would want to spend so much time immersed in the story, sensations, and forensics of his son's death. But for Bob Sr., that's precisely the point: to keep the grief close. "I don't want to get away from it," he tells me. He wants to stay at the top of the mountain. This is how he spends time in Bobby's company-by solving this crime, by exposing the truth about the abuses of American empire. "Doing what I'm doing, that's really helped me, because I think of him every day. Every time I talk, I talk about Bobby."

He's aware that there are other ways to spend time with Bobby that wouldn't be quite so excruciating. He could read his diaries, for example. To this day, he feels terrible that he handed that last one off to Jen. He felt so guilty about it for so long that he was still mentioning it in interviews in 2011. A British newspaper referred to it as "the journal episode."

"I'm just not that big on the journals," he tells me. "They don't mean that much to me."

So what means the most to you? I ask.

"That he was murdered," he says.

On the morning of September 11, Helen, the most stoic of the McIlvaines, was the only one who panicked. Jeff knew that his brother didn't work in the World Trade Center. Bob Sr., who was teaching that day in the adolescent psych unit of a local hospital, treated the macabre, smoldering towers like a news event and, along with everyone else, began watching the coverage on TV.

Helen, however, took one look at the television and needed to sit down. She knew it seemed ridiculous, superstitious, but she'd spoken with Bobby the night before and forgotten to end the conversation the way she always did: "Be careful." She'd later say those words to his casket as it was lowered into his grave.

By midday, when no one had heard from Bobby, everyone in the family felt like Helen. Yes, the cell towers were down in Lower Manhattan and the phones were working only sporadically, but surely Bobby, who could spend hours on the phone talking with his parents ( How do you guys find so much to talk about? his friends always asked), would have found a way to call, and Jen had heard nothing, which really made no sense. Bobby had just asked her father for permission to marry her two days earlier.

In the late afternoon, Andre, his close friend and old suitemate, finally reached a woman at Merrill Lynch who awkwardly told him that Bobby and a colleague had been scheduled to attend a conference at Windows on the World that morning and no one had heard from them since. Andre called the McIlvaines.

"That first night was probably worse than after we found out for sure that he'd died," Jeff says, "because we had no idea what had happened. I couldn't get that out of my head-that he was in that, you know?"

They slept in the den, the three of them. Jen stayed in her own living room that night, glued to the TV.

On Wednesday morning, Jeff and Bob Sr. were too agitated to remain in Oreland. They took a train to New York and made a fruitless tour of the city's triage centers. Nothing. My brother stood on line at a missing-persons center; Andre ran a command center out of his apartment, working the phones and every lead he had; Jeff checked every website he could find. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Jen sat and waited.

Bob Sr. spent Wednesday night in my brother and Bobby's apartment, sleeping in his son's bed.

The next day, Andre got a call from the NYPD, this time with grim news: Everyone needed to go immediately to the armory on Lexington Avenue.

Once again, Andre had to tell the McIlvaines. Helen calmly did as she was told. She treated these instructions as if she were an astronaut, doing whatever step came next if one of the modules of the International Space Station caught on fire.

The armory was a seething mass of the desperate. Hundreds of families were lined up outside, carrying posters with faces of their loved ones. A minister escorted my brother, Jen, Andre, and the McIlvaine family inside. Helen gave him Bobby's name. A police officer approached her from across the room. "Are you the mother?"

Much of what followed was a blur. They were shown to a private room where grief counselors descended on them. Then something unusual happened: Rudy Giuliani walked in.

The mayor was unaccompanied. Without aides, without cameras, nothing. He looked genuinely relieved to have a family to console at that moment, with so many bereaved New Yorkers still twisting in limbo, posting flyers with pictures of the missing on lampposts, chain-link fences, hospital walls.

Giuliani embraced everyone. Then he took a seat opposite the McIlvaines. He uttered just five words: "Tell me about your son."

If Bob Sr. chose to feed his grief, Helen chose to starve hers. She spoke about it with her limping group, because they understood. But she was determined not to be, as she puts it, "At-Least-I'm-Not-Helen." Living with the impossible was hard enough. But to be in the position of having to console others about her misfortune, or to manage their discomfort, or, worst of all, to smile politely through their pity-that was more than she could bear. Helen can still rattle off a list of all the well-meaning things people said that stung.
No parent should bury a child. You will never be the same. I was with my children last night and realized you'll never have something like that again.
Did people not realize that they were building a moat, not a bridge, when they said such things? That they were drawing attention to the pretty castles they lived in, their walls still lined with luck?

That first year was brutal. Once, while she was sitting in a diner with some friends, one of them started going on and on about the musical talents of her son. "I wanted to scream," Helen says. "I had to get out. I couldn't listen to somebody else talk about their child. For years. I couldn't."

The second year wasn't much better. She tried going to Italy on a tour with a friend. She says she came across as cold, distant, strange. She dreaded the most innocuous question: Have any kids?

Work helped. Her students needed her, and her colleagues were great. "Except I didn't want their help, because it was too soon," Helen says. "So afterwards, a few years down the road, I looked like I'd healed. And it wasn't true. I wanted to talk about it sometimes. But I had to find other means to do it, because I'd kind of shut that door."

I can't decide whether this corresponds with the Helen I've come to know. Maybe?

Helen: She wears little or no makeup. She is exceedingly good-humored. She is always brimming with questions about your life. She's the kind of person who goes along with any plan and can spend 20 minutes in a drugstore trying on funny pairs of reading glasses with you.

We actually did this together in Florida a couple of years ago. We both happened to be visiting my mom.

So the reserve she's describing is a little foreign to me. "I have a weird personality," she tells me. "I can cry over a blouse that I ruined in the laundry and then be stoic for something ..." She trails off, but I believe the word she's looking for is big.
"They deserve more than I can ever give them, and yet they will never ask for more than me," Bobby wrote in his diary, of his parents. "I love them so much."
But with Bobby ... ! Bobby brought out her more emotional self, because he was such a sensitive kid. "Once, after about half an hour of listening to his woe-is-me girlfriend stories," she tells me, "I said to him, 'You do understand I've been married to Dad for almost 30 years and I've never given him this much thought, right?' " But of course she loved every minute of it.

The last time she saw Bobby was two nights before he died. Not an hour before, he had asked Jen's father for permission to marry her; now the two families were having dinner at a restaurant in Lambertville, New Jersey, where Jen had an apartment. Helen took one look at her son and saw that his forehead was still shimmering with sweat. She reached under the table to find his hand. He locked his pinkie with hers. They stayed that way until the food came.

Around the tenth anniversary of September 11, Helen realized that she was not all right. She'd lost a child, so maybe this was what her new life was destined to be: not all right. But she wasn't convinced. Somewhere along the way, her toughness, her steadfast refusal to be a victim-it had backfired. "I found myself being petty. And bickering. I found myself being too gossipy sometimes."

I've never heard Helen say a cross word about anyone. Even when I mention that I'll soon be seeing Jen, she reacts with anxiety, not bitterness. She doesn't want to open old wounds. They were both suffering terribly back then; neither was her finest self.

Okay, but what if she lends me the diary? I ask.

"Oh my God. Would you marry me?"

But this is today's Helen. The Helen of a decade ago decided she wasn't who she wanted to be. Her therapy had stalled. She had trouble managing her anger. "My life just feels so amazingly off kilter," she wrote in a reminiscence marking the tenth anniversary.

She'd kept too much in, and she was fermenting in her own brine.

Not long after, she started seeing a different therapist. This one was spiritual. That new perspective changed everything. "She really believes that we don't see all."

Even before Bobby died, Helen was a big fan of self-help books. But after September 11, she bought them by the dozen, hoovering up everything she could about loss. She found Elisabeth Kübler-Ross indispensable-not so much for her writing about the five stages of grief, though that was fine, but for her writing about life after death.

Kübler-Ross once considered a belief in the afterlife a form of denial. But starting in the mid-1970s, she had a change of heart, compiling thousands of testimonies from those who'd had near-death experiences in order to show that our souls outlast us.

"I looked at life-after-death books, but they were too faith-based," Helen says. "I wanted to believe what I was taught in my Catholic upbringing. But what I liked about Kübler-Ross is that she had a science background."

It was precisely because she was a scientist, of course, that Kübler-Ross's fellow physicians were so dismayed by this strange turn in her interests. They thought it kooky and unrigorous, a stain on her legacy. I tell this to Helen. She laughs. "Bet they didn't sell millions of books."

Kübler-Ross used a hokey but intuitive metaphor to describe the body and soul: Our bodies are our mortal coils, our "cocoons"; when we die, we shudder them off and our souls-our "butterflies"-are released into the wilds of the universe. Helen cherished this idea. It was a notion that could redeem a violently, capriciously abbreviated life. "One day I actually thought, What if there's a hierarchy and Bobby's a part of that, and he just came down as a human for a bit?  "

She and Bob Sr. began watching Supernatural and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shows they'd never have imagined watching before.

And here in this world, Helen came to understand that there was nothing to be gained by bottling up her grief. At age 60, she took up running, not only because it felt good but because it allowed her to cry. She started expressing herself more. She noticed one day that the tempest of grievances she unloosed in her therapist's office were all so trivial, so petty, so pointless. What was she getting so worked up about?

Now she's doing the very thing the self-help books tell you to do: letting stuff go. She tells me about a friend whose towering self-involvement used to infuriate her. But recently, she chatted with her on the phone and decided just to enjoy the good bits.

Wow, I say. What makes you so forgiving?

"It wasn't serving me well."

You know what radical acceptance is? Living with a husband who has dedicated his life to spreading the word that the United States deliberately orchestrated the collapse of the World Trade Center and then conspired to cover it up. Forget all the chipper advice columns about how to get along with your Trump-loving uncle at Thanksgiving. How do you get on in your decades-long marriage after your son has died and your spouse wakes up each morning livid as an open wound and determined to expose the truth?

Helen would be lying if she said this didn't cause friction.

"There were many moments where I was like, Oh, please," she says. She was perfectly open to some of the things Bob Sr. said. "But a lot of it was emotional, and a lot of it, I couldn't trace to find out myself, and I'm not a go-on-a-website kind of person. I didn't want to burst his bubble by constantly saying, 'Well, did you check, is it a valid website?' "

Perhaps the more challenging issue, the nuts-and-bolts-of-living-in-a-marriage issue, was daily conversation. Bob Sr.'s single-minded focus meant that any conversation could segue without warning into September 11. She'd come downstairs and tell him she was thinking about buying a new sweater; he'd reply by asking if she knew that the government had lied about the actual date of Osama bin Laden's death.

"So has it gotten in the way?" she asks. "Yeah, many times. We'd be going somewhere, and I'd say to Bob, 'You cannot talk about 9/11.' And he'd say, 'Well, they ask me about it.' I fell for that for the first 99 times until my therapist said, 'That's not good enough.' When we're out at a social event, we're out. I don't want to be always victim, victim, victim."

How do you handle it now, I ask, if you feel another soliloquy coming on?

"Now I say, 'Bob, you have the I-won't-talk-about-anything-else-but-9/11 look on your face.' We've come to a point where we can actually joke about it."

Helen wants me to understand: There are some aspects of Bob Sr.'s obsessions that she doesn't merely tolerate; she actively supports them. Two years ago, she listened to a presentation by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and found it persuasive. It's the other parts of his narrative, which keep evolving, that leave her at loose ends. "If I were him, I'd just stick with the buildings," she says. I ask if she's up-to-date on his latest theory, involving Japanese gold. She shakes her head. "I don't even hear it," she says. "I'm defending the person, not the view."

Long ago, Helen realized that "9/11 truth," as Bob Sr. likes to call it, had sunk its hooks into her husband, and she's never thought it her place to pry them loose. "I'm very protective of him," she says. "If he decided to be a male stripper in an old people's home, it's okay with me. He has to be who he has to be, because damn it, this happened, you know? And if that's going to give him comfort-"

She interrupts herself, gives an embarrassed smile. "Get that visualization out of your head."

Helen would never dream of abandoning this dear man. He was Bobby's Little League coach. The one who organized races around the house when the kids were little, using a piece of tape for the finish line. Bob Sr. was her only suitor who ever suggested they play sports together-the others thought that was strictly for the fellas.

And now he's the only other person in the world who understands what it feels like to have raised Bobby McIlvaine and lost him.

She walks me over to the wall with a giant framed poster she had custom-made for her husband five years ago. It's a periodic table of Bob Sr., basically-dozens of images of him, all tidily laid out in a grid. Bob Sr. talking to Rosie O'Donnell. Bob Sr. giving an interview on French television. Bob Sr. speaking at a forum about the 9/11 Commission report, captured on C-SPAN. "I gave him that on his 70th birthday," she says. She went online, punched his name into Google, and voilà. A hero's gallery. "I love looking at it." He's become the superstar, strangely, that his son never had the chance to be.

Bob Sr.'s crusade may look to the outside world like madness. Helen sees it as an act of love. "He's almost going to war for his son," she tells me. "He's being a father in the best way he knows how. How can I not allow that?"

Most theories of grief, particularly the ones involving stages, are more literary than literal. People don't mourn sequentially, and they certainly don't mourn logically. But there's an aspect of one of those models I keep circling back to whenever I think of the McIlvaines. It's the "yearning and searching" stage of grief, first described by the British psychiatrists Colin Murray Parkes and John Bowlby in the 1960s. "When searching," Parkes writes, "the bereaved person feels and acts as if the lost person were recoverable, although he knows intellectually that this is not so."

How Bob Sr. searches is obvious. But it occurs to me, after speaking with Helen, that perhaps her years-long preoccupation with Bobby's final diary is her equivalent of Bob Sr.'s obsessions. "Yes!" she says when I tentatively raise the possibility. "Yes, yes. It's 'If I can't have this, then I'll have that.' "

Yet here's what's curious. Helen has two earlier diaries of Bobby's. She also has stacks of legal pads of his writing, many with diarylike entries in them. But she's barely dipped into them at all.

One reason is practical: They're hard to decipher. Bobby's handwriting is neat but small and slightly peculiar. Another is instinctive: For a long time, Helen feared that reading them would be a violation of a sacred boundary, "like going into his room without knocking." Yet another is how much pain it causes her. "I tried today again," she wrote in another reminiscence on the tenth anniversary of Bobby's death. "I thought, 'If I don't tackle these before I'm dead, who will?' " She lasted 10 minutes. Bob Sr. has never looked at them at all.

"But somewhere I did find the words Life loves on," Helen tells me.

I've been meaning to ask her about this, because I'm now reading Bobby's diaries and legal pads, and I can't find the phrase anywhere. Does she still not know where it came from?

She doesn't. She thought he'd written it about a close family friend who'd died, but she was wrong. I tell her I'll keep looking.

I take one of the two diaries back to my hotel that night. And I realize, as I'm reading, that there's probably another reason Helen never dug too deep into either one of them. They're from his freshman and sophomore years of college, when he was still a proto-person, still essentially a kid. He was clearly older when he scribbled in some of those legal pads, but they're chaotic and undated. Only the diaries feel manageable and chronological, and they read like the musings of a boy in his late teens-florid, soulful, a little mushy. He doesn't sound at all like the Bobby of September 11, 2001, who was almost 27 years old.

Yet I still get a kick out of them, and those chaotic legal pads, especially the parts about writing. Even at 19, Bobby was trying to find his voice, sometimes shifting from the first person to the third to see if he liked it better (and then saying so in the margins- third-person experiment!). They're filled with exhortations and reminders to himself: I need to stay true to my voice, whatever it is. I write horrible stuff in other people's voices. And my favorite: Hope is even more important than talent.

There's also tons of beautiful stuff about his family. This may be what astonishes me most, given that Bobby was in late adolescence, a time when most kids morph into ruthless family vivisectionists. Yet he devotes page after page to how much he loves and admires Helen, Bob Sr., and Jeff. In May 1995, for instance, he wrote about discovering that Bob Sr.'s father had been an alcoholic. Bobby had had no inkling. He made sure that he didn't give me the bullshit, Bobby wrote of his own father.

He made sure I had something better, and only asked that I do my best. That's all he asked. That's all my mom asked. And I want so badly to make them proud, even more proud than they already are. They deserve the pride. They deserve more than I can ever give them, and yet they will never ask for more than me. I love them so much.

You can hardly blame Helen for wanting to hear what he had to say once he'd become a young man.

Jen Cobb, now Middleton, wears her hair long, rather than in her old pixie cut, but her style and demeanor remain the same. She is still animated, still gracious, still beautiful to look at; when I walk up to her door in Washington, D.C., she greets me with a long hug. There are rescue dogs, there are sunlit rooms, there is a kitchen straight from a Nancy Meyers film. (I half-expect Meryl Streep to come gliding up with a tray of unbaked croissants.)

Jen has made for herself what is, to all outward appearances, a lovely life. But she had to assemble that life brick by brick, and she works hard to keep the joints from coming apart.

When I spoke briefly with Helen about Jen, she made an astute observation: Jen came from a family with lots of money but little love, while the McIlvaines had lots of love but little money. Jen says that yes, that's partly true, though her mother was a loving soul; she just didn't see enough of Jen's life. Susan E. Cobb died on April 20, 2001, less than five months before Bobby did, of a cancer that spread slowly, then fast.

Which is to say: On September 11, Jen was already a husk of herself.

Jen's father, her remaining parent, was highly successful but only narrowly rational, a bully and a screamer. This had predictable consequences in her romantic life: Jen always demanded complete control. She was done being bossed around.

Then along came Bobby, asking for more vulnerability and a shared say in both of their lives. Somehow, she trusted him. They first met a couple of years earlier, at the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, and around the office, he was known as the good guy who made everyone feel important. The inveterate romantic, he made her feel important, asking question after question about her family, writing her love notes for no reason. For her 27th birthday, on December 6, 2000, he asked my brother to scram and rearranged the furniture in their apartment to turn it into a restaurant, where he cooked her a three-course meal.
How does she know I'm going to be okay?"
Jen would later learn that the dinner was a dry run for a proposal. She put a hold on the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia for October 20, 2002.

When her mother died, Jen could barely function. Her mother was the one who'd protected her from her father's storms of rage; she was the one who'd chatted with her late at night after Jen had spent a boisterous evening out with girlfriends. Yet Bobby remained steadfastly by her side, making the intolerable seem survivable. He would be with her every step of the way. She would still be loved.

Then Bobby died. The world became a mean, untrustworthy place. "There was not one thing I could control," she says. "Not one thing at all."

Jen keeps a steamer trunk of Bobby's things in the attic above her garage. In anticipation of my arrival, she's brought his belongings down in a turquoise canvas bag. She starts sifting through it. "There's the diary," she says, pointing. "The thing that caused all that trouble."

Bobby's other two diaries were hundreds of pages long. This one, I will shortly discover, had only 17 pages of entries. All that fuss over what was barely a pamphlet.

Then again, they're a dense 17 pages.

Jen has no memory of getting the diary from Bob Sr. But she does remember reading it immediately, voraciously, and returning to it night after night. She remembers, too, Helen asking for it back, though the tensions didn't start immediately. At first, everything was fine. Helen even gave her the engagement ring Bobby had bought for her. It was awkward and unceremonious-"He'd have wanted you to have this"-but Jen was grateful, and she wore it everywhere for months.

At some point, though, Helen started getting more vocal about that diary. "In hindsight, I don't know what my problem was," Jen says. "I was probably in pain and also grasping for control and wanted something of his that no one else had. It seems kind of ridiculous now. It's just how I felt at the time-that it was mine and I wanted it to be mine and I didn't want anyone else to have it. It probably felt like it was all I had left."

What I had to understand about those awful, leaden days, Jen says, is that she wasn't just depressed. She was wretched-"double grieving," as she puts it, for her mother and then her future husband. When her mother and Bobby died in rapid succession, she fell into a deep depression, though she did her valiant best to conceal it. She still has anxiety attacks to this day. "When something upsets me," she says, "it goes downhill fast."

Which all makes perfect sense, I say. The only thing I can't understand is why she refused to transcribe the nonpersonal parts of Bobby's diary for Helen. That's not the act of a depressed person or a grieving person. That's the act of someone who's angry. She must have been upset with Helen for some reason, no?

Here Jen pauses. Then she starts measuring her words. "This isn't a knock on Helen at all," she says. "I'm so beyond it. But at the time I remember resenting that she said, 'You're going to be okay, because you're young.' " Jen recognized that there was a difference between their two losses. "But it felt like she was saying my grief was less important than hers. I know it was coming from a place of extreme pain, but I remember thinking, How does she know I'm going to be okay? What if I'm not okay? What if I have a different kind of not-okay?  "

One thing you don't say to a person who's mourning, Jen tells me, is that they're going to be okay. She might have added: Nor do you say that to a depressed person. Depression does that-convinces you that you are never going to be okay.

"Now I get it," she says. Because of course Helen was right. Jen did find love again. But at the time, she was convinced that she wouldn't. She considered freezing her eggs. Once, in a moment of near-hallucinatory panic, she wondered if she could get impregnated with Bobby's DNA from strands of hair he'd left in a comb.

"It just would've come out better if she'd said: 'This is really sucky for you. And I'm sorry. Chances are, you'll meet somebody.' I guess there was just a nicer way to say it," she says. "However she said it set me off. Just because of my own personal shit."

I ask if it's possible that Helen did say those things, though she may have said a few artless things too. Maybe Jen missed them-or heard insults that weren't necessarily intended as such-because she'd grown up in a house that required an extra set of threat detectors, given her father's volatility.

"A hundred percent," she says. "It was probably me regressing into a little, you know, tantruming child. I was mad at the world. Of course she didn't intend to hurt me. She's the nicest person."

She and Helen are more similar than either of them realizes. Like Helen, Jen believed, at the time, in hiding her grief. Like Helen, she today takes refuge in the idea that Bobby's soul is rattling about somewhere. "I'm really showing my woo-woo side here," she says, "but I think that he'll be back, and I'll be back, and we'll finish our unfinished business."

And like Helen, she has learned to let a lot of things go. That's one of the most ruthless lessons trauma teaches you: You are not in charge. All you can control is your reaction to whatever grenades the demented universe rolls in your path. Beginning with whether you get out of bed. "And that's where I started my day, literally," she says. For years.

Today, Jen is choosing to hand me Bobby's diary as I'm walking out the door and heading back to New York. She has zero reservations about it. She says she'd like to have the original copy back, but there's no rush; the McIlvaines are free to read all of it, free to make as many photocopies as they'd like.

"I would have done it years ago," she tells me. "I think about them all the time."

Before I leave, I ask if she remembers where the phrase Life loves on comes from. She looks at me blankly. "I don't even remember him saying that. Is it in a book that he liked or something?" Tried that, I say. Searched Google Books. Nope. "Or was it a hymn?" Hymns aren't my strong suit, but I don't think so. I tell her that the McIlvaines are certain Bobby wrote it somewhere, but never mind, this is not her problem. I'll keep looking.

Memories of traumatic experiences are a curious thing. Some are vivid; some are pale; pretty much all of them have been emended in some way, great or small. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to our curated reels. We remember the trivial and forget the exceptional. Our minds truly have minds of their own.

Jeff, for instance, remembers that Jen stayed at his parents' house for half a year after Bobby died, while Helen says it was one week, and Jen thinks it was probably two months.

Or here's another: Jen remembers that Jeff gallantly slept in Bobby's childhood bedroom while she stayed with them, so that she wouldn't have to be traumatized by waking up to all of Bobby's things, while Jeff remembers her sleeping in Bobby's bedroom, and bravely waking up each day to all of Bobby's things.

And strangest of all: Though no one can remember where Life loves on came from, everyone-and I do mean everyone (Jen, Jeff, Bob Sr., and Helen)-once knew.

It's from Jen's eulogy. Which she based on Bobby's diary. The one she kept for 20 years.

"This past week I have been searching for some sort of comfort to get me through the shock of losing the love of my life," she told the mourners at Queen of Peace Church. "I came across one of Bob's journals and as I opened it, I said to myself, 'Please let there be something in here that will comfort me.' " Then she described finding this passage, which Bobby had written as her mother was dying. She read it aloud.
It is OK for people to die. It hurts, and it is a deep loss, but it is OK. Life loves on. Do not fear for those who are dying. Be kind to them. And care for them.
"Life loves on," she repeated to the crowd. "After I read this, I vowed that very instant to love on in my life, just as I had made a promise to my mom to never let her be forgotten. It was a way that I could extend a life cut short."

The only reason I know this is because my brother found a copy of Jen's eulogy. Jen had tossed hers out. She is not, as she says, a saver.

Somehow she'd completely forgotten those words, as well as their provenance. And the McIlvaines had forgotten where they came from, too, even though Helen wears them in an engraved bracelet and Bob Sr. enshrined them on his skin.

Then I remembered what Helen told me about Jen: She became a nonperson to me. She kept the words. But not Jen. She buried her future daughter-in-law too that year, just as she did her son.

Helen recently told me a story about a long weekend she'd spent with Jen, maybe 10 days before Bobby died. The whole family was vacationing in Cape May. She, Bobby, and Jen were sitting on the beach, staring at the waves, with Bobby in the middle. It was a moment of gentle bliss. Helen turned ever so slightly toward Bobby to run her hand through his hair. But at that exact same moment, that very second, Bobby turned to do the same to Jen.

It was then that Helen realized Bobby wasn't hers anymore. "I said to myself, You gotta go take a walk and look at the real estate on the beach," she told me.

In Bobby's early diaries, the McIlvaine family may show up everywhere. But not in this diary. This diary is primarily about two things. And one of them is Jen.

February 18, 2001: I love her, deeply. We communicate so well. We resolve splits between us so well. And all of this means a lot.

April 11, 2001: I miss Jen. "Big" part of my life, or descriptions of how much she means to me do not suffice.

April 22, 2001 (two days after jen's mother died): I am so sorry, Jen. So sorry for your hurt. I know it is hard. I'll be here by your side-here to love you, to listen to you, to hold you when you need to cry.

It's no wonder Jen didn't want to part with this diary. Or that she read it every night.

Helen recognized this immediately. I sent her a couple of xeroxed copies after I returned to New York.

"The Jen piece was huge to me," she says, when we have a chance to talk. "I thought of this in the middle of the night: She loses this guy that she loves-and most importantly, who loves her. Now, where is the proof that he loves her? I mean, okay, the mother gives her the ring. That's good. But there are these wonderful words: I love her deeply." She marvels. "I never thought about that. Never. That she needed that, that validation."

She also recognizes what the diary is missing. "He didn't say, I love my parents too. He said, I love her deeply." Bobby was all grown up.

Helen now wonders about her own behavior in those awful months. She tried to show Jen affection. But she'd only had sons. She didn't speak daughter. And that reserve she was describing to me earlier, the reserve I didn't believe she had-it was very real. "What happens is, I have intentions sometimes and forget to say the words," she says. "She had to guess what was in my head."

At any rate, Helen is now clear on one very important point. "It would have been beyond Jen's ability, even if she was in a good mood, to say, 'Okay, here, I'm giving it back.' I really would have had to give her at least pieces of that, somehow. That wasn't for me to own. I really mean that."

For years, Jen had been painted as a villain for holding on to this diary. Yet there never would have been a dispute if she had already been Bobby's wife, or perhaps even his official fiancée. But Jen was suspended between worlds, without influence or status. "It must have felt horrible," Helen says.

The final entry in Bobby's diary is dated September 6, 2001. It fills the whole page. When I first read it, I was disoriented. Then I realized what it was. "I feel completely unprepared. Should I rehearse?" it begins.

It should go something like this: Do you have a few minutes to talk? First, I'd like to say that it has been a pleasure-or maybe a great experience-or do I mention Jen first? Or, I have developed a very strong relationship with Jen, and along the way it has been great to spend time in Michigan ... OR ... yes-I've had the chance to grow close to Jen, and after a lot of very serious thought, and after talking to her too, I felt that it is time to make a commitment to her. OR-after a good deal of serious thought ... AND ... out of respect for you as head of the family ...

What I was reading was a script. Filled with fits and starts, but eventually he got there. Bobby was struggling to find the words to say to Jen's father, whom he'd see on September 9, to ask for her hand.

At some point, not long after Jen gave me Bobby's diary, I sent a note to my editor, telling him that I had found, at long last, the elusive Life loves on. I took a photo of the passage and sent it to him.

Amazing, he texted.

But then, three pulsing dots in a bubble. He was still typing.

Except ... I think it is (sort of) a misapprehension. Look how he writes his I's in other words. I think it says "Life **lives** on." But hard to say for sure ...

It wasn't hard to say. He was right. I went through the whole diary again. On just the page before, Bobby had written, I lived too long without thinking of "the markets" to suddenly care. But it looks like "I loved too long ..." His I 's look like backwards J 's, which can be mistaken for O's, while his real O 's stand alone, like baby moons.

I texted Jen the same photograph I sent my editor. At first, she didn't see it. Then she did. Her initial reaction was the same as mine: anxiety, despair in the form of an expletive. Then:

Still makes me smile
Me: What does?
Jen: That the people close to him saw and felt what they needed to. And that's ok. You know?

I did. The phrase certainly sounded like something Bobby could have said. It was very Yoda, and Bobby was definitely very Yoda, spouting his little aphorisms about the drives of the human heart. To me, it was the difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, or maybe what we do when we intensify the color of an image on our iPhone. We're not trying to create a fake; we're trying to align the image with the one that already lives in our memory.

We are always inventing and reinventing the dead.

You could make a case, weirdly, that Jen's withholding of the diary for all these years turned out to be a blessing. If she'd given it to Helen, it's possible Helen would have tucked it away in her safe for 10 years and barely read it, just as she did the other two diaries. Or maybe she'd have read it, but she wouldn't have mis read it.

Instead, Jen misread it, formed a eulogy around it, and handed the McIlvaine family an organizing motto for their grief for 20 years.

I still debated not telling the McIlvaines. I mean, the bracelet, the tattoo. But in a phone conversation with Helen soon after, I sensed an opening. I mentioned that I wasn't sure I was going to write about Life loves on. She quickly intuited that something was amiss. "Because it was from somebody else?" she asked.

Kind of, I said. And I explained.

Helen was fine with it. She sees the unlikely beauty of this misunderstanding, even how it was a gift. But she holds out the possibility that the phrase still lurks somewhere. She remembers it as Life truly loves on, for one thing. And it's possible that I could have missed it in the hundreds of pages of Bobby's first two diaries. There are probably some missing diaries, too-why did he stop keeping them in 1995, only to resume in 2001?

So really, who's to say?

L ife lives on, Life loves on -to me, it's irrelevant. There are far more beautiful observations in the recovered diary than that one, and they're prescient, eerie-much more germane to the McIlvaines' story once Bobby was gone.

Because the other thing his diary is about, the second thing, is grief.

In this way, the diary isn't just a time capsule. It's a crystal ball. Through an extraordinary twist of fate, Bobby spent his final few months thinking about what it meant to live with loss. He saw, through Jen, that it could render you angry, irritable, skinless. He saw that grief could utterly consume. He wondered what the utility of all this sadness was, all this suffering. Why do we have to hurt so badly? he wrote. Is that the way the person we lost would have wanted it to be?

At one point, he guiltily wished that Jen would just make a choice to seize control of the things she could.

Yet somewhere amid all the passages of exasperation and dread-and many of them are quite detailed-Bobby comes to a much larger realization. It's an epiphany, I'm guessing, that made it possible for him to stick with his plan to ask Jen's father for permission to marry her, though he seriously questioned during those months whether she was ready. The date was August 20, 2001.
There are people that need me. And that, in itself, is life. There are people I do not know yet that need me. That is life.
To me, that is the most profound quote from the recovered diary. That is Bobby as Yoda. That is Bobby at his very finest, his most humane, his most mature. He understood that our commitments to one another are what we're here for- and that, in itself, is life. Even when those commitments are hard. Even when they cause us pain.

One hesitates to say this. But if there was any path forward for the McIlvaine family, it was probably going to be through Jeff. Helen was careful never to burden him with expectations about marriage or kids-"You cannot put anything on the other child," she tells me-and he appreciated that. But it was thanks to Jeff, I think, that Bob Sr. and Helen started to muddle their way out of the dark. There were people they did not know yet who needed them. Among those people were their four grandbabies. The oldest one is named Bobby.

At 22, Jeff had a profound insight. "I remember thinking on that first day: I can't let this ruin me. 'Cause then what would Bobby think? Imagine if he knew that my parents and his brother were never able to recover. Imagine how bad that would make him feel."

He was reflexively answering the very question Bobby had asked as he watched Jen struggle with her grief: Why do we have to hurt so badly? Is that the way the person we lost would have wanted it to be? Jeff had a very clear answer: No. He had too much of his own life left to go. "I knew that if this ruined my life, his whole life was worthless," he says. "I wanted to work very hard to make sure that I had a good life."

It was so hard at first. "I remember I felt a responsibility to not die, which is a weird thing," he tells me. At the same time, he felt guilty for being the child who didn't die, thinking often of the dream sequence in Stand by Me when the father snarls "It should have been you" to his surviving son. He told no one at his first real job that his brother had died on September 11, because too many people were eager to share their own stupid stories about that day, always with happy endings. This delayed his ability to grieve for years.

But eventually, he built a rich, fulfilling life. He married a woman who could not only subdue his pain but enter an entire grieving ecosystem. He had four kids-four! two boys, two girls-and oh, the relief of not having to focus on himself!

I ask if he would have had that many kids if Bobby hadn't-

"No. I don't think I would have." Jeff lost his only sibling. He never wants any child of his to be in that position, should lightning ever restrike. "When you go through something like this," he says, "you realize that family-it's the only thing."

Those kids are now at the center of the McIlvaines' lives-even Bob Sr., who has chosen a path of daily suffering. As our conversation was winding down, he said something that stunned me: This 20th-anniversary year-a big one for the people in his world, filled with TV interviews and conferences-may be his last of 9/11 activism.
It's the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.
I wasn't sure I believed it. I remain unsure. This has been his life for 20 years. Still: Maybe it's time for a change. "I'm sick of being angry," he told me. "That's the beauty of my life now. I can really separate. I truly can. To be out to lunch with Penelope ..."

Penelope is his youngest granddaughter. He and Helen had lunch with her every Wednesday after preschool before the pandemic. Jeff and his wife and children rely so heavily on Bob and Helen that they recently rented an apartment five minutes from Jeff's house, though they live less than an hour away.

Helen can't get over having little girls in her life. They have so many opinions! She still gets depressed sometimes. She'll have a beautiful moment, then realize that Bobby isn't here to share it. "But then it'll go away," she says. "I mean, being needed-not everybody gets four grandkids."

Yes. Being needed. That is everything.

Bobby would have been 46 this September. Jeff used to have vivid dreams about him, and man, how he loved them. They were brothers again, just talking, resuming their old rhythms and habits. But he seldom has those dreams anymore. "I haven't seen him in 20 years, you know?"

He says he almost wishes sometimes that he could trade his current well-being for the suffering he felt 20 years ago, because Bobby was so much easier to conjure back then, the sense-memories of him still within reach. "No matter how painful September 11 was," he explains, "I had just seen him on September 6."

It's the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.

It's really not surprising that Jeff should have this fantasy from time to time, to trade his happiness for just one chance to see Bobby again in a warmer hue. As Bobby wrote in that last diary, suffering, or the prospect of it, is the price we're willing to pay for the bonds we make.

Helen has found herself in the grip of a similar reverie. Recently, she was out with her limping group, and as she was looking around the table, staring in gratitude at these women who have held her up these past 20 years, a thought occurred to her. "I wondered, What if God said, 'Okay, look, we gotta rewind here.' Would we go through all of this again?  "

Would they be willing to relive their same lives, give birth to those same children, fall in love with them and then lose them a second time? "And I know that every single one of them would have said, emphatically, yes."

For Helen, nothing in this world has rivaled the experience of raising her two boys. One of them, Robert George McIlvaine, died before his life truly began. But what would she have done without him, or he without her? For 26 years, she got to know this boy, to care for him, to love him. It was a privilege. It was a gift. It was a bittersweet sacrifice. And that, in itself, is life.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article appears in the September 2021 print edition with the headline "Twenty Years Gone."

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original photo courtesy of the mcilvaine family

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Bobby McIlvaine was 26 when he died in the attacks. Two decades later, his loved ones are still grappling with the loss.

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The Daily: "We're Going to Take Over the World"

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The Daily: "We're Going to Take Over the World"

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How have 9/11-focused conspiracy documentaries fueled our current culture of skepticism in America?

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For years Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times, has been spending a lot of time inside bizarre internet cultures. Corners filled with people who believe that the coronavirus is a hoax or the 2020 election was stolen, or even that Hillary Clinton is a shape-shifting lizard.

"The more time I've spent there, the more I've realized that what unites these groups is their way of finding and processing information," Kevin said. "This belief that the way to figure out what's true isn't to listen to the experts or the mainstream media, but to figure it out for yourself of the internet."

It's a way of thinking that can be traced back to the first real internet blockbuster, a 9/11 conspiracy documentary called "Loose Change."

Today, we explore the film's impact and the 9/11 truther movement.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page. Here's how.

Kevin Roose contributed reporting.

Fact checked by Caitlin Love.

The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Kaitlin Roberts, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Soraya Shockley, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop and Chelsea Daniel.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Theo Balcomb, Cliff Levy, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Erica Futterman, Wendy Dorr and Elizabeth Davis-Moorer.

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For years Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times, has been spending a lot of time inside bizarre internet cultures. Corners filled with people who believe that the coronavirus is a hoax or the 2020 election was stolen, or even that Hillary Clinton is a shape-shifting lizard.

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The Daily: "What Does It Mean to Never Forget?"

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The Daily: "What Does It Mean to Never Forget?"

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In a study of more than 3,000 people, what distinguished the memories of Sept. 11, when compared with ordinary autobiographical memories, was the extreme confidence that people had developed in their altered remembrances.

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Two planes hijacked by Al Qaeda pierced the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. A third slammed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. A fourth crashed in an open field outside Shanksville, Pa. All in less than 90 minutes.

What, exactly, do you remember? What stories do you tell when a casual conversation morphs into a therapy session? What stories do you keep to yourself? And what instantly transports you back to that deceptively sunny Tuesday morning?

In a study of more than 3,000 people, what distinguished the memories of Sept. 11, when compared with ordinary autobiographical memories, was the extreme confidence that people had developed in their altered remembrances.

William Hirst, a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, wondered whether the changes in memory are somehow linked to a sense of identity. After all, what would it say about you as a New Yorker - as an American - if you didn't know how you first heard about the Sept. 11 attacks?

Dan Barry, a longtime Times reporter, remembered "the acrid smell of loss drifting uptown through the newsroom's open windows. The landfill. The funerals." Today, he shares an essay about the effects of time on those memories.

Image

The names of the dead at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan. Credit... Todd Heisler/The New York Times

There are a lot of ways to listen to 'The Daily.' Here's how.
We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on Twitter: @mikiebarb. And if you're interested in advertising with "The Daily," write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.

Additional production for this story was contributed by Emma Kehlbeck, Parin Behrooz, Carson Leigh Brown, Anna Diamond, Elena Hecht, Desiree Ibekwe, Tanya Perez, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Margaret Willison and Kate Winslett. Special thanks to Mike Benoist, Sam Dolnick, Laura Kim, Julia Simon, Lisa Tobin, Blake Wilson and Ryan Wegner.

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Special Episode: What Does It Mean to 'Never Forget'?

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Two planes hijacked by Al Qaeda pierced the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. A third slammed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. A fourth crashed in an open field outside Shanksville, Pa. All in less than 90 minutes. What, exactly, do you remember?

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CBS News: NYPD Surveilled John Jay Muslim Students Association

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CBS News: NYPD Surveilled John Jay Muslim Students Association

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The president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice said he is "deeply troubled" about reports that the New York Police Department sent a paid informant to spy on the school's club for Muslim students.

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NEW YORK The president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice said he is "deeply troubled" about reports that the New York Police Department sent a paid informant to spy on the school's club for Muslim students.

School President Jeremy Travis sent a letter to students and professors Thursday reacting to an Associated Press report on the 19-year-old informant, Shamiur Rahman, who said he quit working for the NYPD at the end of the summer after growing uncomfortable with the job.

Rahman said his assignments included attending lectures hosted by John Jay's Muslim Student Association, photographing people attending its events, and identifying its members and leaders.

The college, located in Manhattan, is attended by thousands of students hoping to pursue a career in law enforcement.

In the letter, Travis said he was unaware of the spying, and expressed concerns about using informants for surveillance where there was no evidence of a crime.

"Any surveillance practices that interfere with constitutionally protected activities such as free speech, freedom of association and the free exercise of religion must be considered inconsistent with the mission and values of our College," he wrote.

Police Department spokesman Paul Browne wouldn't comment on Travis' concerns. In an email Saturday, he contested only one part of the letter, in which Travis cited a recent report by another news organization that quoted Browne as confirming that Rahman had indeed been an NYPD informant. Browne denied that he had made that confirmation.

In the past, NYPD officials have repeatedly said the department only uses undercover investigators or confidential informants when it has information indicating the possibility of unlawful activity.

Addressing the college community, Travis said in his letter that "I trust that you would agree that, in certain limited circumstances it is appropriate for law enforcement agencies to use informants to uncover criminal activity. There is no evidence, however, that this is the case at John Jay and we have not been advised otherwise."

Rahman said his work as an informant began last winter, just as the AP was publishing a series of stories about the police department's use of informants and undercover investigators to monitor Muslim student groups around the northeast U.S.

Those articles prompted letters from several college presidents expressing concerns about the tactic.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the department's intelligence-gathering operation as necessary to root out any potential terrorist plots.

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NYC college president troubled by NYPD spying

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NEW YORK The president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice said he is "deeply troubled" about reports that the New York Police Department sent a paid informant to spy on the school's club for Muslim students.

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In the hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a lawyer sat down in front of a computer and started writing a legal justification for taking action against those responsible. The language that he drafted and that President George W. Bush signed into law - called the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) -  has at its heart one single sentence, 60 words long. Over the last decade, those 60 words have become the legal foundation for the "war on terror."

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60 Words, 20 Years | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

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It’s been 20 years since 9/11. We bring you a story about the 60 words that ushered in everything that came after.

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The People's Forum: "Whose Narrative? 20 Years Since 9/11/2001"

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The People's Forum: "Whose Narrative? 20 Years Since 9/11/2001"

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A roundtable discussion as part of Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice. Moderated by renowned historian dr. Robin D. G. Kelley, this inaugural roundtable kicks off a semester-long intergenerational conversation that challenges the exceptionalization of 9/11/2001; legitimization of “war on terror” and other imperialist wars and interventions; justification of the “Security” State, and promotion of hyper masculinity and a colonial gender and sexualized order of modernization and “civilization.”

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Whose Narrative? 20 Years since September 11, 2001

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Interactive Tool: Muslim Abolitionist Futures

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Interactive Tool: Muslim Abolitionist Futures

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Muslim Abolitionist Futures is an interactive platform to learn and engage with the stories and work of resistance against the War on Terror.

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Grassroots Policy Agenda

Abolishing the War on Terror, Building Communities of Care" is a grassroots policy agenda. It is a labor of love, a product of lived expertise, and a model for community care. The agenda is broken into 2 main sections - one calling on abolishing and divesting from harmful state policies and the second building our communities of care.

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Abolishing the War on Terror, Building Communities of Care" is a grassroots policy agenda. It is a labor of love, a product of lived expertise, and a model for community care. The agenda is broken into 2 main sections - one calling on abolishing and divesting from harmful state policies and the second building our communities of care.

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CNN: "A Sikh man’s murder at a gas station revealed another tragedy of 9/11"

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CNN: "A Sikh man’s murder at a gas station revealed another tragedy of 9/11"

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Balbir Singh Sodhi was murdered after 9/11 when a white man assumed he was Muslim and shot him. It is just one of many stories that define so much of what happened after 9/11.

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Mesa, Arizona - Sukhwinder Sodhi is standing behind the register at the Mesa Star Chevron, the lone cashier on duty, when a customer checking out asks him about the memorial out front.

Outside in the Arizona desert, about 100 or so feet from where Sukhwinder is standing, is a spot of marble, with flowers on each side and an American flag just off to the left. A bronze plaque bears an inscription: "He was killed simply because of the way he looked."

The man is new in town and tells Sukhwinder he's been stopping at this gas station ever since he noticed the memorial. Sukhwinder points to a portrait of a turbaned Sikh man hanging on the wall above the Pepsi machine behind him. "That's my dad," the 48-year-old says. "He was killed here after 9/11."

Sukhwinder's father was the first person believed to be killed in a supposed act of retaliation for the 9/11 attacks - his killer had reportedly declared that he wanted to "go out and shoot some towel-heads." Later, he would characterize the atrocity to police as an act of patriotism.

The customer is vaguely familiar with the story. Sukhwinder, who has run the business for the last two decades, gets other questions like these from time to time. When he recounts what happened here all those years ago, many of his customers say they remember hearing about the Sikh immigrant shot to death outside his gas station because he wore a turban and full beard.

They just didn't realize it happened here.

Before September 15, 2001, the Mesa Star Chevron was just like any of the thousands of gas station and convenience store combos that dot the American landscape. It was a business that Balbir Singh Sodhi built from the ground up, in hopes that it would allow him to control his destiny and provide a better life for his family.

Four days after 9/11, however, the Mesa Star Chevron grew to represent a difficult truth: That for a certain subset of Americans, the American Dream was always fragile - and their place in the nation's fabric was too.

That day, as Balbir stood next to a team of landscapers outside the gas station he built, trying to figure out where to plant some flowers, a White man pulled up in a pickup truck and shot and killed him.

After firing at Balbir, the man drove to another gas station where he shot at a Lebanese clerk and then shot into the home of an Afghan family. Miraculously, he missed both times. That same day, a White supremacist killed Waqar Hasan, a Pakistani Muslim and father of four daughters, at his Dallas convenience store.

By one Yale law professor's estimate in 2004, as many as 17 more Sikhs, Muslims, Arabs and South Asians died in a similar manner in the aftermath of 9/11, though others put the count lower or higher. Countless others were subjected to assaults, slurs and vandalism from their neighbors and racial profiling, surveillance and detention from their government.

Balbir's murder made national headlines, inspired two documentaries and prompted an outpouring of love and support from people across the country. Yet 20 years after the fact, many Americans don't know his name. Balbir Singh Sodhi doesn't garner the same recognition as James Byrd Jr. or Matthew Shepard. His story rarely appears in history books.

Now as the nation marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Valarie Kaur and other activists hope that the rest of the country will start to grapple with what they've been seeing for the past two decades.

Kaur, a family friend and civil rights leader who made a film about Balbir's story, says there's a lot more Americans need to learn about what happened in Mesa that day.

On September 15, she, the Sodhi family and other members of the community will gather again at this gas station, like they do every year, to remember Balbir Singh Sodhi. They'll reflect on the hate that took his life and on the future that they hope to build.

"My invitation to the country this 9/11 anniversary is to see the gas station where Balbir Uncle was murdered as the second Ground Zero," she says. "If we can make the gas station a place where we remember, reckon and then commit to repair, then perhaps we can make different choices going ahead."

It's something Sukhwinder does from behind the register each day. Reliving the trauma of losing his father each time he tells his story isn't easy, he says. But it is necessary. After his father was killed, his family made it their mission to ensure that no other innocent life would be taken that way. If even one family can be spared the pain they went through, it would all have been worth it.

From Punjab to Phoenix

Sukhwinder might not have ended up in the US were it not for his father's belief in the American Dream. He initially wanted to complete his education in India and start a career there, but his father wanted more for him. In America, his father said, he would have more opportunities. He would have a better life.

Born in India in 1949, Balbir Singh Sodhi grew up in a small village in the Kapurthala district of Punjab, the third oldest of 11 children. He came from a family of farmers and businessmen and owned a fabric shop before he and several of his brothers came to the US in the late 1980s.

Balbir left his homeland for reasons that were especially American, his family members said: He wanted religious freedom and economic opportunity.

In 1984, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards after she ordered the Indian Army to storm the Golden Temple, Sikhs across India were scapegoated. Thousands were lynched, burned alive, beaten and raped by violent mobs over the course of several days because of their faith. The carnage left many Sikhs afraid for their safety.

Like many other Sikh families, members of the Sodhi clan left India after 1984. Balbir ended up in California, working at a 7-Eleven, a clothing shop and as a cab driver, before settling in the Phoenix area to open his gas station.

He had a "totally different personality" than the rest of his family, his youngest brother Rana Singh Sodhi says. He radiated love everywhere he went. Back home in India, he had new clothes made each summer and winter for an elderly woman in his village and made sure all the local school children had uniforms and shoes to wear. In the US, he'd take his nieces and nephews to swim at the community pool, give free candy to kids at his gas station and let those who didn't have the means fill their tanks for free.

Continents and oceans separated Balbir from his wife, his children, his parents and other family members but he called them all often, racking up a phone bill of about $2,000 a month. The huge cost was worth it to him to hear from the people he loved.

In fact, money never seemed to matter much to Balbir, Rana says. He was always ready to pick up the check after a dinner out with friends or to donate his money to a good cause. He pushed others to be just as generous, sometimes to their annoyance.

Once, when a group of Sikhs came to Balbir's gurdwara seeking funds to open their own place of worship in San Jose, he shelled out $500 and told Rana to do the same. Rana was reluctant - at the time, his gas station business had been closed for a few months and he had no source of income.

"Don't worry," Rana recalls his older brother saying. "God will give you more."

When planes flew into the Twin Towers, killing more than 2,700 people and leaving behind a pile of rubble, Balbir wanted to go to New York and help. One of his brothers reminded him that he wasn't trained to respond to disasters. About half an hour before he was shot, Balbir emptied out his wallet and donated $75 or so to a fund for 9/11 victims. Then he called Rana and asked him to find some American flags.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, though, Balbir knew that Sikhs could become targets and worried about his community. Rana says he had been threatened at a gas station in another part of town, and they had heard similar stories from friends. Their turbans and beards made them visible, and they doubted most Americans could differentiate between them and the images of Osama bin Laden flashing constantly across their TV screens.

Still, Balbir wasn't afraid for himself. When his son Sukhwinder called and suggested his father not wear a turban for the next few days, Balbir dismissed the notion.

"Everybody's so nice," Sukhwinder remembers his father saying. "Everybody knows me around here. I don't have any issues."

For anyone who didn't know him, Balbir had a plan. He and Rana had met with Sikh leaders in the Phoenix area and were preparing to hold a press conference to educate the community on who they were.

A day before the event was to take place, Balbir was killed.

The backlash after 9/11 wasn't new

Long before bullets flew across Balbir's gas station parking lot, Sikhs, Muslims, Arabs and South Asians across the United States faced suspicion, hatred and racist attacks.

South Asians who migrated to the US in the late 1800s were targets of racism and xenophobia. In 1907, a White mob in Bellingham, Washington, attacked and intimidated Sikh and Hindu laborers there until they left the city. Immigration laws prevented South Asian men from bringing over their wives, from owning land and from becoming citizens.

Things started to change after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which did away with immigration quotas based on national origin and allowed new waves of Arab and South Asian immigrants to enter the US. But the notion of the "perpetual foreigner" proved hard to shake, while another label - the "suspected terrorist" - also began to take hold.

Dr. Jaswant Singh Sachdev, a retired neurologist and Sikh community leader in the Phoenix area, remembers that while attending a conference at a hotel after the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, a teenager came up behind him in the restroom and told him to take the "towel" off his head. Arabs, Muslims and those perceived to be Arabs and Muslims faced similar taunts during the Gulf War in 1991 and after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

"Gradually, that ebbed down," Sachdev added. "But then 2001 came along and things picked up again."

The backlash after 9/11 was far-reaching. And Balbir's death was only the beginning.

Deepa Iyer, a South Asian American activist and author of "We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future," groups it into two buckets: the hate violence and the state violence.

On the interpersonal level, people like Balbir were getting attacked or killed, harassed on the street and painted as suspects. Some Muslim women in the workplace were told to remove their hijabs at work or be fired, and Sikh boys in patkas were being bullied in school.

And while some government agencies moved to protect Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians from hate and discrimination, other branches of the government were implementing policies that allowed the state to spy on ordinary citizens, track the movements of noncitizens from certain countries, detain people without cause and deport them - all in the name of national security.

"This undercurrent was always there, of perpetual foreigners, suspected terrorists, particularly around Muslims and Islam, and it got exacerbated," Iyer says.

Before September 11, 2001, there was a sense among many people in these communities that aside from the occasional racist comment or incident, this country was a place where they were accepted for who they were, says Valarie Kaur. What happened after 9/11 shattered those illusions.

"The hardest moment when I was gathering those stories of Sikhs after 9/11 wasn't the moment of violence," Kaur says. "It was watching our aunties and uncle-jis grapple with this lost sense of belonging, this stolen dignity and this realization that they had always been seen by others as automatically suspect, perpetually foreign and now potentially terrorist."

That's how it felt for Rana Singh Sodhi.

"I never got threats before 9/11. I could go anywhere in the United States - daytime, nighttime - and I'm never concerned about my security," he says. "This episode changed our lifestyle, though."

Now that the Taliban have seized power and Afghanistan is making global headlines again, Rana's wife worries that people will once again associate his Sikh turban with terrorists. And when he leaves the house, she tells him to be extra vigilant.

Progress has been slow, but the family fights on

The murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi turned Rana into a national advocate against hate.

Over the past two decades, Rana has crisscrossed the country to share his brother's story and educate other Americans on who Sikhs are. At his home in Mesa, Arizona, objects on display in the foyer provide snapshots of his journey.

There's a charcoal drawing that a junior high student drew of Balbir after Rana spoke to her class. A collection of glass awards from the Anti-Defamation League, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee and Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund in recognition of Rana's leadership. A framed photo of Rana at a state dinner in 2009 shaking hands with President Barack Obama.

Asked if he ever gets tired of repeating the same story over and over again, of continually trying to educate Americans on who Sikhs are despite their long history in the country, he says he feels quite the opposite: Doing so gives him energy and peace.

"It's my responsibility," he says. "I think every person who lives in this country has a responsibility to make this country beautiful, to educate each other."

But change has been slow. The nation never fully reckoned with the hate and violence that Sikhs, Muslims, Arabs and South Asians in the US experienced after 9/11, a reality that became clear in the years that followed.

Near the Arizona state capitol, 54 phrases are etched onto a circular piece of steel, each capturing some element of what happened after 9/11. One of the names carved into the metal is Balbir Singh Sodhi's, along with the phrases "fear of foreigners" and "foreign-born Americans afraid."

To some state lawmakers, Balbir's name didn't belong there because he wasn't killed in the attacks that took place on September 11, 2001. After years of efforts to change the memorial, a bill that would have removed Balbir's name passed both chambers of the state legislature in 2011. That stung, Sukhwinder says.

"Do you think that my dad would have lost his life if 9/11 didn't happen?" he asks.

Thanks to the work of advocates, thousands of people wrote letters to then-Gov. Jan Brewer, requesting that she veto the bill. She did, right in front of the Sodhi family. The Republican lawmaker who proposed the bill apologized to the family, too.

It was a small step forward. But in the coming years, there would be huge steps back.

In 2012, a White gunman opened fire on a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring four others. The hate that had always been there reared its head again through more mass shootings, attacks on houses of worship and hostile rhetoric. The nation elected a president accused of demonizing people of color. And all the while, many of the harmful policies instituted after 9/11 remain on the books.

"We really do need to look in the mirror and have some really honest and transparent conversations about 9/11 and its aftermath and its ongoing impact," Iyer says. "Unless we do that, we're doomed to repeat these cycles."

Rana is hopeful. With more awareness and dialogue, he says, the ignorance that fuels people's hate can be eradicated. He witnessed it firsthand when he spoke with Balbir's killer, 15 years after his brother's murder. As they talked on the phone, Rana says the man told him he was sorry for what he did to his brother and that if he were ever released, he would join Rana in helping to tell this story. Rana says he forgave him.

"I believe one day we can finish hate in our community too," he adds. "It takes time, but one day it can be finished."

Despite the pain his family has experienced, they haven't given up on America.

Balbir Singh Sodhi showed the world who Sikhs are

Twenty years later, most of Balbir's huge extended family now calls the US home.

At a family gathering at a sprawling home in Paradise Valley last week, Joginder Kaur is stationed on the couch, dressed in a pastel green salwar kameez. There's hardly a moment that someone isn't by her side - sisters-in-law, daughters-in-law and grandchildren come up to her throughout the night to chat, joke around or just be close.

At other points in the evening, women take turns doing karaoke to old Bollywood songs, couples take a few spins on a makeshift dance floor in front of the couch and kids dart back and forth across the room. The room is full of love, joy and laughter.

These moments are what have helped Joginder Kaur get through the last 20 years.

She was living in India when her husband Balbir was killed. That upcoming November would have been their 25th wedding anniversary. For years they had lived apart as Balbir worked to build a better life for them all. Shortly before he died, though, he had made plans to retire and come back to India so they could be together again. His eldest son Sukhwinder would take over the Mesa Star Chevron, and Balbir and Joginder would live in the new house they had built in Punjab.

"We never got the chance," she says in Punjabi through tears.

She reflects on everything that Balbir has missed out on: his sons' successes in the US, his daughter's wedding, his 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. It hurts to imagine him here, playing with the kids and enjoying the fruits of his labor. She misses him all the time.

But God had other plans for his life, she says.

While in the US, Balbir kept a diary. The last lines he ever wrote in it turned out to be prophetic:

"God, you are my friend. You are my companion. You've given me so much happiness in my life that I can't even begin to tell you. Whatever task you need me for, I am ready."

Balbir's death helped show the world who Sikhs are. His story continues to inspire those who know it. And after all this time, people still remember him.

"He fulfilled his life's purpose," she says.

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A Sikh man's murder at a gas station revealed another tragedy of 9/11

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When Balbir Singh Sodhi was killed outside his gas station four days after 9/11, it was just the beginning of more hate and violence to come for Sikhs, Muslims, Arabs and South Asians. Twenty years later, the nation has yet to fully reckon with the impact.

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They Lost Loved Ones In 9/11. We Invited Them To Leave A Voicemail In Their Memory | NPR