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Kristen Breitweiser

At 32, with a head of unruly, sun-tinged curls and a shy smile that can instantly grow wide as the surf, Breitweiser still appears very much the beach rat she was while growing up in the Shore town of Manasquan.

Though her father, John L. Winterstella, got involved in local government when she was a toddler and has been the town's mayor since 1984, it would be a mistake to assume his daughter inherited his civic-mindedness; too many interrupted family events over the years had soured Kristen on politics and government.

After graduating from Rutgers, she earned a B average and a law degree from Seton Hall Law School in 1996, with an eye toward doing criminal work. But she wound up getting sidetracked into family law, and just three days into her career at a firm specializing in divorce, she quit the profession, finding it corrosive to her psyche.

She needed to find a new direction, and, fortunately, she could take her time finding it. The summer of her bar exam, she'd started dating Ron Breitweiser, a rising money manager from Rutherford, and five months later they eloped to a secluded Caribbean island.

By the time Kristen quit her job, she and Ron had settled into a spacious house in a verdant corner of Monmouth County near Sandy Hook, where she tended a garden and indulged her sartorial preference for blue jeans and baggy sweaters. Her new mission in life arrived in the form of a strawberry blonde daughter, Caroline, now four years old.

After that, being with Ron and Caroline, taking care of the house, and planning for holidays was all Kristen wanted in the way of worldly responsibilities.

HELLO .. a fax she shouldn't have rec'd??

http://www.njmonthly.com/issues/Mar03/widows.html
(SNIP)

Widows' Walk

In the depths of their grief, four World Trade Center widows get the political education of a lifetime.

By John T. Ward

On September 11, 2002, Kristen Breitweiser's home fax machine printed out a document that U.S. intelligence officials didn't want her or anyone else in her situation to have. It was a letter from the congressional committee examining the failure of the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency to detect and prevent the terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 men, women, and children exactly one year earlier. Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was among the nearly 2,800 victims at the World Trade Center, was being invited to the Capitol to testify.

"Who's running this investigation, Oprah?" one exasperated intelligence insider asked in USA Today. It was hard to see how heartbreak qualified relatives of victims to talk about national security matters, the unnamed government official added. Emotional testimony could only stoke anger directed at the intelligence community. And while the mutterer didn't mention Breitweiser by name, it's not a stretch to conclude that the spy set saw her as little more than a potential fount of lump-in-the-throat sentiment.