[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 16]
[House]
[Pages 23287-23290]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



             REMEMBERING THE VICTIMS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Jeff Miller of Florida). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from 
North Carolina (Mrs. Myrick) is recognized for the balance of the time, 
until midnight, as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. 
Grucci).
  Mr. GRUCCI. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentlewoman and 
the gentleman from North Carolina for their leadership and their 
compassion in orchestrating these special orders this evening as we 
memorialize the names of so many brave Americans who did so many brave 
things that day,

[[Page 23288]]

when all they really wanted to do was get up and go to work, hug their 
children, see them again that evening, to love their spouses and their 
families and to be home with them, but ended up becoming American 
heroes, heroes that they chose not to be, and the stories that we have 
been hearing about the bravery of New York's new twin towers, the human 
twin towers, New York's finest and New York's bravest, New York's 
Police Department and New York's Fire Department.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor one of the many heroes who lost 
their lives in the attack on our Nation on the World Trade Center on 
September 11, New York City Police Detective Joseph Vigiano of Medford, 
within my Congressional District on Long Island.
  The loss of Detective Vigiano was only half of the tragedy of that 
day for the Vigiano family. John Vigiano, Joseph's brother, was a 
member of New York City's Fire Department Ladder Company 132 in 
Bedford-Stuyvesant, who ran into those buildings that morning and has 
been missing ever since.
  While the attack on our Nation that day was shocking, there was 
nothing surprising about the response of the Vigiano brothers. Coming 
from a long line of city firefighters, doing anything other than 
rushing into those dangerous buildings at risk to their own life would 
have been out of character.
  These two men were the sons of Captain John Vigiano, a retired city 
firefighter, who is considered a living legend within the department, 
and the grandson of a city firefighter as well.
  By the age of 34, Detective Vigiano had also distinguished himself as 
a police officer. Recipient of numerous awards and citations, he was 
one of the first and only detectives to serve with New York City's 
Emergency Services Unit. At his funeral, which I attended on October 
30, New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerrick spoke about his 
personal friendship and working relationship with Detective Vigiano. He 
detailed Joseph Vigiano's commitment to serving others and his 
willingness to risk his life to help others, having been wounded twice 
in the line of duty in the streets.
  His brother, John, was the same way, and both shared a special 
relationship with each other. As boys, when Joe was about to become an 
eagle scout, John said, ``Wait for me. We will do it together.'' And 
they did, a few months later.
  These two men epitomize everything that our Nation stands for and the 
bravery and the courage of our firefighters, police officers and other 
uniformed services. In the midst of chaos, carnage and danger, these 
two brothers stood tall and stood together with their fellow 
firefighters and police officers and did not think twice about entering 
the North Tower, while thousands of others ran in terror looking for 
safety.
  It is something that the Vigianos have done for generations. His 
wife, Kathleen, who was also a New York City Police Officer; three 
sons, Joseph, James and John; and his parents, John and Jeanette, 
survived Detective Vigiano. His brother, John, is married to Colette, 
and has two daughters, Colette and Ariana.
  Mr. Speaker, the thoughts and prayers of myself, my family and my 
colleagues here in the House of Representatives go out to the Vigiano 
family, and all of the families affected by the attack and the tragic 
events of September 11. May God bless them and keep them, and may God 
bless their families, and may God bless and keep the United States of 
America.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North 
Carolina (Mr. Watt).
  Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, to my colleague the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Myrick), I want to first express 
my sincere thanks to her for helping to organize this and for coming up 
with the idea and supporting this effort.
  I was listening to the tributes that have already been done this 
evening, and I thought about a book, and I could not think of the name 
of it. I thought it was Three Degrees of Separation. I was later told 
by the Parliamentarian that it was Six Degrees of Separation.
  As I recall the theory that is advanced in that book, if you go six 
people out from yourself, you will always find someone who has a 
relationship to you. Now, I may not be expressing it exactly right. The 
Parliamentarian probably knows the theory better than I do.

                              {time}  2320

  But certainly, the statements that have been made this evening 
suggest to me that somewhere within several degrees, perhaps no more 
than 6 degrees, we are all related to each other in some special way. 
The people who were killed as a result of the terrorist acts of 
September 11 are related to all of us now because they have become our 
special heroes. I did not know any of these people personally, but 
every time I turn around, I run into somebody who knew one of these 
people personally and I know that person, so we are 2 degrees separated 
from a person who died on September 11.
  So what I would like to do is give some examples of that from my own 
experience. Again, these are not people that I know, but they have a 
strong connection to me now in some special way. Mr. James Debeuneure, 
a fifth grade teacher, who happens to have attended and graduated from 
the Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. Prior to 
his death, he lived in suburban Washington, a 58-year-old elementary 
school teacher, and died while making the kind of effort to which he 
dedicated much of his adult life, helping children learn. On Tuesday, 
the jet carrying Debeuneure and dozens of other passengers on a flight 
from Dulles Airport outside Washington to Los Angeles was hijacked by 
terrorists and crashed into the Pentagon. His family says that he was 
headed to California to attend a National Geographic program designed 
to help teachers in presenting geography and science issues.
  ``He was going to learn as much as he could about rivers and ocean 
sides so he could bring it back for his kids,'' his son, Jacques 
Debeuneure, said. Speaking from his family's home in Upper Marlboro, 
Maryland, Jacques recalled the extra efforts that his father always 
made for his fifth grade students at the Ketcham Elementary School in 
Southeast Washington.
  ``My dad was a good man who loved to teach kids,'' his son said, his 
voice cresting with emotion. ``He would give his own lunch to those 
kids in his class when they would forget their lunch. He was a very 
compassionate man whose focus was educating youngsters. He wanted to 
make a difference in their lives.'' Three degrees of separation from a 
gentleman who attended college in my congressional district.
  The story of Sandra Bradshaw, who grew up on a 90-acre farm in 
Climax, North Carolina. Sandy Bradshaw dreamed of being a flight 
attendant, but the reality was that she and her 4 siblings had to tend 
to more than 30,000 chickens being raised for a poultry producer. But 
Pat and John Waugh did not hold their children back. At age 16, they 
were allowed to find another job other than tending chickens. 
Ultimately, Sandy Bradshaw kept her eyes on the goal of being a flight 
attendant, and in 1990 joined US Airways as a flight attendant. Five 
months later she was laid off during cutbacks, but beginning in October 
when she married U.S. Airways pilot Phil Bradshaw, her luck changed. By 
December of that year, she was working for United Airlines.
  While family vacations in North Carolina had rarely ventured beyond 
the State's borders, the Bradshaws saw the world: Australia, New 
Zealand, Hawaii, the Caribbean, and most of the United States. ``Every 
place we went we had a blast,'' Phil Bradshaw said. ``My wife loved to 
travel. That is why we waited so long to have kids. Alexandria was born 
in 1998, Nathan last year, and Sandy cut her flights to the bare 
minimum, 2 day-trips a month from Newark to San Francisco, or to Los 
Angeles. She always wanted to be here for the kids,'' her husband said. 
Yet, she loved the days she had between return flights since it gave 
her a chance to relax, do her nails and catch up on magazine reading 
before returning home to Greensboro, North Carolina

[[Page 23289]]

and her husband, children, and her flower garden. Sandy Bradshaw died 
in the crash in Pennsylvania.
  A third connection to people that I know that are connected to me, 
Johnson C. Smith must have suffered a severe impact from these events, 
because Leon Smith was the parent of 2 young people who are now 
students at Johnson C. Smith University, again, in my congressional 
district. Leon Smith was many things to many people in his New York 
community. Generous, affable, and a hero. A New York firefighter who 
was killed when the World Trade Center collapsed after a terrorist 
attack on September 11, Leon Smith was a community anchor in the 
Brooklyn Heights community his daughter, Yolanda, said Tuesday at 
Johnson Smith University where she is a freshman with her twin sister, 
Tiffany. ``He had a sense of humor, and I did not realize how much he 
affected everybody in the community that he worked in,'' his daughter 
said. ``It is like I go down there and everybody knows him as a gentle 
giant. He was 6-feet-4, had a heart of a Teddy bear, a little baby. He 
was the most sensitive guy you would ever meet. He was handsome and 
strong and he is my hero. While people were running out of the World 
Trade Center, he was running in trying to save people.''
  One of Leon Smith's goals was to see that his daughters graduated 
from Johnson C. Smith University, and they will, with the help of a 
scholarship fund established for children of victims of the terrorist 
attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The United Negro 
College Fund is providing full scholarships to its 39 member schools 
for students who lost parents in the attacks. The Smith sisters and 
Vernessa Richard, another Johnson C. Smith senior, were the first to 
receive scholarships, something Yolanda Smith said her dad, who did not 
get to finish college, would have really approved of.
  ``I could just see him smiling and saying, `you go, girl' or 
something of that nature, and just being really proud like when he 
found out we were going to school. He was just so proud. He worked so 
hard for both my sister and I, and our sister back home in New York, to 
continue his dream and have us finish college.'' Another degree of 
separation.
  Well, it is even closer than that almost for me. My son lives in 
Brooklyn, New York, taught 4-year-olds in the Brooklyn public schools, 
New York public schools, and played basketball with Kenny Caldwell. 
Kenny Caldwell. We know how most people have to bend down to scratch 
their knee. Kenny Caldwell did not have to do that, because his hands 
were the size of baseball mitts and arms that went on forever.

                              {time}  2330

  ``He was a little slim Jimmy,'' said his mother Elsie Caldwell from 
her hometown in Philadelphia, ``with big hands and a big, big heart. I 
called him my little chocolate drop.''
  Mr. Caldwell, Kenny, 30 when he was killed, liked being a technology 
salesman for Alliance Consulting Group on the 102nd floor of 1 World 
Trade Center, but what he loved was figuring out ways to get people 
together.
  ``I used to call him the CEO, chief entertainment officer,'' said his 
older brother, Leon Caldwell. He even invented an annual event, the 
International Kicknic Contest, held every August in Prospect Park in 
Brooklyn for an ever-expanding circle of friends and family to play 
kickball and catch up.
  ``My neighbors used to tease me about him while he was growing up,'' 
his mother said. ``They would say, 'Other kids collect stray cats and 
dogs, but your Kenny collects stray people.''' He was a good friend and 
basketball companion of my son, who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
  Within that 6 degrees of separation, we find people who were killed 
in this tragic event, and it reminds us more and more, as I yield back 
to my good friend and colleague, the gentlewoman from North Carolina, 
that what we give out comes back, and we should be giving out good all 
the time. These heroes did that, and for that, we are proud to honor 
them this evening. I thank my colleague for joining in this special 
order tribute.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. There were some nice 
reminders and hometown ties there that are important to a lot of 
people.
  It is really true, because as we look back on this tragic episode, it 
seems like everywhere one went in the weeks following, people were 
saying, golly, I know somebody. There were ties to somebody, this 
person knew this person who knew that person, and it touched all of us 
so dramatically all around this country, literally.
  I know that people around the world were touched because there were 
people in those towers from 60 different countries, and a lot of people 
today are still, I know, wondering why.
  There are a couple of people I wanted to just say a word about. 
Again, I did not know them, but Mary Lou Hague had North Carolina ties. 
She was a graduate of the University of North Carolina in 1996, and she 
was a Tri Delt there.
  She was really from West Virginia, and was the kind of girl who went 
to New York and just loved every minute she was there during the 3 
years; everything she did, she loved. Her friends and her family 
remember that when she loved something, she just loved it very big. She 
loved Michael Jackson so much that she spent $1,500 to see him the last 
weekend of her life.
  A lot of people would say, wow, $1,500 is a lot of money to do that, 
but it was something that was important to her. She loved 1980s music 
and Twizzlers, which she gave up for Lent; carried them in a bag with 
her to church that last Sunday so as soon as she was out of church, she 
could eat some Twizzlers.
  Anyway, her friends say she just had a Miss America smile, and she 
was one of those people that definitely got people's attention, and her 
share of attention all the time.
  She had decided, even though she lived in New York and loved it, that 
she probably would like to move back and meet a southern guy back home 
in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and have a dog. She was one of the 
people that was on the 89th floor of the second tower to be hit, and 
her entire floor, according to her mother, Liza Adams, was wiped out.
  But everybody that knew her says they want to remember her as what 
she was. She was recalled doing her ``happy dance,'' where she would 
wave her arms in the air and go out onto the dance floor hollering, 
``Woo-hooo.'' She was just one of those people that energized everybody 
around her.
  There was another gentleman named Frank Schott. His wife, Dina, said 
she could set her watch by his habits. He was up every morning at 5:20, 
he got the train at 6:09, and every evening at 7 o'clock the door 
opened and he came into the house, and immediately changed his clothes 
and went out into the garden to pick his vegetables. She said he never 
stopped.
  Then while his wife got the children ready for bed and bathed them, 
he would cook dinner. Of course, she said that was wonderful, because 
what woman would not get used to her husband cooking dinner every 
night?
  Then on weekends he would jog and ride the bike and play with the 
kids, and a lot of times he took them into work with him on Saturdays, 
because they loved to ride the train.
  But I thought this was what was so interesting about his wife's 
comments. She said, ``If he had survived what happened and knew of the 
hate that I have for what these people did, he would say, `Ah, don't be 
so hard on them.' '' She said he would always say, ``You can't judge a 
whole group of people for the actions of a couple of bad apples. I just 
know that is what he would say.''
  I think that is a good lesson for a lot of us for whom it is hard 
when something like this happens not to harbor hard feelings, and 
especially as we go into this holiday season, where so many of us are 
fortunate to have our families around us and with us; and there is 
nothing more difficult than having to go into a holiday when you have 
lost a loved one, and especially when you have lost a loved one in a 
senseless, tragic situation like the people in New York and Washington 
did.

[[Page 23290]]

  So I hope that all of us, as we look toward the holidays and the joy 
that we will have, will remember these people and just say a little 
prayer for the fact that God will give them grace to get through this 
difficult time that is coming upon us.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, when Melissa Rose Barnes was 
killed in the terrible attack on the Pentagon September 11, a mother in 
my district lost a daughter who put her career on hold for a year to 
care for an ailing sister. A family in my district lost the woman who 
could light up a room with her smile. And we all lost one of the young 
people who have devoted their lives to defend our Nation.
  Yeoman Third Class Melissa Rose Barnes was at her post in the Naval 
Command Center on the morning of September 11, no doubt making those 
around her smile with her optimism and sunny California spirit. Navy 
friends say the office was always a happier place with Melissa on duty.
  Melissa joined the Navy in 1992 after she graduated from Redlands 
High School. She served as a medical aide at Navy hospitals in Maryland 
and Virginia until 1998, when she took off time to care for her sister, 
Jennifer Mennie. For a year she watched over Jennifer until she died 
from lupus. Her mother, Linda Sheppard, remembers Melissa putting on a 
disco outfit and dancing around the room to make her sister smile.
  She came back to the Navy in 1999 and went to communications school. 
When she completed the course, she was assigned to the Pentagon. There 
she served her Nation in the command center, helping maintaining 
contact with our naval forces around the world. She was just 27 years 
old and a month away from an exciting new assignment on the U.S.S. 
Nimitz, her first sea-going duty when the jetliner smashed into the 
Pentagon on September 11.
  Mr. Speaker, there is no way to describe the sadness and feelings of 
loss we all have experienced as we realize the wonderful lives that 
were ended by those senseless attacks. Forty-two people who had devoted 
themselves to defend our Nation died in that attack, along with the 142 
passengers and crew of the hijacked airliner. We feel the loss, and the 
anger at the attacks. But we must also feel the pride that mother Linda 
Sheppard feels, that Melissa's father Alan Mennie feels, when they know 
that their daughter served her country to the end. We will all miss 
Melissa--let us all cherish her memory and her dedication.
  Mr. RAHALL. Mr. Speaker, the Scriptures tell us, ``Blessed are the 
pure in heart, for they shall see God.'' Paul Ambrose surely looks upon 
His face today.
  Paul Ambrose possessed a clerical passion for public health. After 
graduating from the Marshall University School of Medicine, he 
completed his residency in family medicine at Dartmouth. He then earned 
a master's degree in public health from Harvard. Paul used his ample 
political skills to influence health policy as the Legislative Affairs 
Director for the American Medical Student Association and as a fellow 
with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Most recently, 
he worked as a family physician in Arlington, VA, helping mostly poor 
Salvadoran immigrants. C. Everett Coop said that Paul Ambrose would 
have made a great U.S. Surgeon General.
  Paul's heart found joy in helping improve the lives of others. His 
influence spread far beyond his medical practice. Visitors to the 
American Medical Student Association website are invited to share their 
thoughts and remembrances of him. The single-spaced entries fill 12 
printed pages. The words of those who knew him well describe the 
vibrant human being inside the talented physician.
  ``The most amazing thing about Paul was his ability to inspire hero-
worship, even among the skeptical.
  ``Paul listened to cool music, read odd books, and watched obscure 
movies. He marched to this own beat and made us all feel cool by 
association .  .  . he danced at my wedding.''
  ``My memories of Paul always included his most popular question, `How 
can I help?' ''
  ``I knew that he was going to be fun to work with when he arrived at 
AMSA with the cappuccino machine for his office .  .  . He's the only 
person I know who could wear steel-toed boots with a suit and pull it 
off.''
  ``It wasn't unusual to see people hanging out at his office door, 
taking in the ambience, talking about everything, getting inspired, 
enjoying Paul's wit and wisdom.''
  ``I hope that I am able to raise my son to feel as passionate and 
committed to causes that make as large a difference as that for which 
Paul tirelessly worked.''
  ``I try not to think of what it was like on those four doomed 
airplanes. And yet, I can picture Paul being a comfort to others. 
Listening to someone who needed to talk, saying some reassuring words. 
Or maybe, and perhaps, just as likely, saying something so off-the wall 
that the other person would be able to temporarily forget their 
surroundings and situation and think to themselves, `what is that guy 
talking about?' ''
  He was only 32. He and his fiancee were planning a wedding and a life 
together. He boarded a plane that awful morning for California and a 
meeting about his professional passion, public health. In 6 quick 
years, Paul rose from a medical student to a confidant of the U.S. 
Surgeon General. His work lengthened people's lives. His talents could 
not have been more nobly used.
  Dr. Paul Wesley Ambrose should not have been taken from us on 
September 11. We must maintain a firm resolve to bring to justice the 
agents of global terror who killed him, and will gladly kill again if 
given the chance. We must do justice for Paul. Justice for his family 
Justice for liberty.
  Mrs. MYRICK. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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