OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Those whose lives were touched directly by the terrorist attacks of September 11th say the recently completed metro-area memorial brings them some comfort. Dozens gathered Thursday morning to pay tribute to those killed in the attacks and honor their families.
New features at this memorial have been made possible thanks to donations from a lot of people and companies.
The addition attracting the biggest crowd is a weeping wall of water, made from three eroded metal panels. The flowing water represents all the tears shed on September 11, 2001.
And for some, like Amy Axtell of Kansas City, those tears haven’t stopped flowing 13 years later.
Amy was an American Airlines flight attendant based out of Boston on September 11th. She was on stand-by to work the first flight that crashed. And she says she’ll never forget the crew that died on American Airlines Flight 11. They were all her good friends.
“They were good people,” Axtell said. “They were kind people. They were some of the first people who perished and were slain that day. They also made phone calls to help people understand who the terrorists were. They named people sitting in the seats who had gotten up and attacked passengers and pilots and flight attendants alike. They were there, they were there in the very beginning.”
Two granite floor tiles from the World Trade Center also have been embedded into the walkways at the memorial. They are engraved with the phrase: Honoring footsteps gone silent. A steel I-beam from the twin towers has long been a central feature of this memorial, and even those who survived the attacks say it’s important to take time to remember the horrors of that day.
“On 9/11 my son was a thousand feet away from that piece of steel,” said Bruce Yakre of Overland Park. “He got a working cell phone, called us up said he loved us and goodbye. He wasn’t coming home. That’s not what you want to hear from your kid. And that probably would have happened that way had not the building straightened up. It was tilting, it would have hit the Chase building where he was working, but it straightened up and went straight down.”
Many say it’s important that our nation have memorials like Overland Park’s, so that we never forget and will be vigilant to prevent something similar from happening in the future.
