Richland High School students pay homage to 9/11 events at UPJ's Heroes Memorial
Sep. 11—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — It was a short but solemn walk on Monday from Richland High School to the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown campus where students visited an artifact of the terror attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
"It's kind of a surreal thing, but it's part of our history," Richland High School teacher Virgil Wenturine said.
The events of 9/11 may seem as if it all were a bad dream, especially to 16-year-olds who weren't yet born when it happened, but a 3,500-pound steel I-beam from the World Trade Center sits at Pitt-Johnstown as a concrete reminder of the tragic reality.
Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and used them to strike targets on the ground, including the World Trade Center in New York City, killing thousands of people.
The artifact, donated more than 10 years ago by the port authority of New York and New Jersey, is set at the center of Pitt-Johnstown's Heroes Memorial. Around it are walls engraved with the names of the more than 3,023 victims of September 11 as well as thousands more U.S. military members killed in subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2021.
"This is a solemn event to share with my kids," Wenturine said. "We have a golden opportunity to show them this piece of living history in our backyard."
One of the names engraved on the wall of the Heroes Memorial is William David Moskal, of Johnstown.
Moskal was among those killed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. He was making a presentation on the 99th floor of the North Tower that morning when a hijacked jet slammed into the skyscraper.
Two passenger-loaded Boeing 767s had been used by terrorists as missiles against the twin towers of the World Trade Center, killing the planes' passengers, the terrorists and thousands of people inside the towers.
Meanwhile, a third hi-jacked plane — American Airlines Flight 77 — circled over downtown Washington, D.C., before crashing into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters at 9:45 a.m, killing 125 military personnel and civilians in the Pentagon, along with all 64 people aboard the airliner.
A fourth California-bound plane — United Flight 93 — was hijacked about 40 minutes after leaving Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. The plane's takeoff had been delayed, so passengers on board learned of events in New York and Washington through cellphone and Airfone calls to the ground.
Knowing that the aircraft was not returning to an airport, a group of passengers planned an insurrection.
Because of the actions of the 40 passengers and crew aboard Flight 93, an attack on the U.S. Capitol was thwarted. The plane crashed in a rural field in Shanksville, Somerset County, about 20 miles from the Richland school.
At the Heroes Memorial on Monday, Richland 8th-grade teacher Jacob St. Clair said he spoke to his students about Flight 93.
"I told them about how people made a choice to sacrifice themselves for the greater good rather than allow the plane to hurt more people," he said.
Richland High School 10th-grade student Ryder Anspach, 16, has visited the 9/11 memorial in New York with his parents. Although he didn't live through it, the history has an impact on him, he said. He said he felt some emotion while looking at the names inscribed at the Heroes Memorial at Pitt-Johnstown.
"It makes me emotional — there's a lot of people on that board," he said.
