Manuel Emilio Mejia: the 1624th name (from the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center)

The Cinch Review ^ | 04/03/2009 | Sean Curnyn

[Merciful_Friend]

Yesterday, it was reported that a victim of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center by Islamic jihadists was positively identified, seven and a half years after his death:

The city medical examiner's office says 54-year-old Manuel Emilio Mejia has been identified from remains found at the World Trade Center site in the months after the 2001 terrorist attack.

Mejia was a kitchen worker at Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the trade center's north tower.

Manuel Emilio Mejia was the 1,624th victim to be identified. More than 1,100 others still have not been positively identified.

It's not easy to find information on Mr. Mejia, other than that he was a 54 year-old man, an immigrant from -- I believe -- Ecuador, and he worked in the kitchen at that Windows on the World restaurant, in the north tower of the World Trade Center. (A little bit about Windows on the World is at this link.) Although tributes to many of the victims are easy enough to find online, I can't find anything personalized to Mr. Mejia: no photographs, no written remembrances. I wouldn't assume from this that no one misses him. I can't say. It seems very plausible that his loved ones are not the kind of people who spend a lot of time doing things on the internet.

[Merciful_Friend]

This piece juxtaposes the recent news of the positive ID of this WTC victim to the news that Ward Churchill was found to be "wrongfully terminated" for calling the victims "little Eichmanns."

[livius]

When you think of all the wonderful, decent Americans (including immigrants) who were just there in the Towers doing their work that day, it makes you sick that anybody like Ward Churchill or any other slimeball would say these things.

I have a horse, and a few days after 9/11, I read something posted by a group of folks at a barn where one of the 9/11 victims had kept her horse. The barn was in Jersey, IIRC, and the woman who had owned the horse worked on one of the upper floors -- I can't even remember her job.

After the first plane struck and they were evacuating the employees, people were standing in the corridor joking about having to get home or their husbands/wives/whatever would "kill them." She joked that she only had a cat and a horse to get home to, but they were waiting for her. Then the second plane struck, and she was thrown against the wall of the corridor and killed immediately. The other people who were still alive after the concussion checked her pulse, but she was dead. What a "little Eichmann."

[Publius6961]

BUMP!