This Friday marks 25 years since September 11, 2001, the deadliest attack on American soil in our nation’s history.
Nearly 3,000 people died that morning. Roughly 40 percent of them have still never been identified.
Las Vegas will mark the anniversary the way it has for a quarter century now.
The City of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Ten-13 Club, an organization made up of retired New York City police officers and other retired law enforcement, will host a public memorial at Police Memorial Park.
The park is home to a tree grove and memorials honoring fallen law enforcement, including a seedling grown from the Survivor Tree at the National September 11 Memorial in New York.
Earlier that morning, at 6:45 a.m., the approximate time the South Tower fell, Las Vegas firefighters will carry on a longtime fire service tradition called the Tolling of the Bells at Fire Station 5, ringing a bell in front of a flag that once flew over the World Trade Center.
This isn’t an abstract tragedy for Southern Nevada. Las Vegas lost one of its own that day.
Barbara Edwards, a 58-year-old teacher at Palo Verde High School, was aboard American Airlines Flight 77 when it was flown into the Pentagon. She was the only full-time Las Vegas resident killed in the attacks.
Palo Verde still holds a memorial ceremony for her every year, more than two decades later, because a community doesn’t forget a teacher who never came home.
Las Vegas also felt the loss further out.
Karol Ann Keasler, an events planner working on the 89th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower, was the daughter of a Las Vegas mother. It took New York’s medical examiner more than a decade to identify her remains.
Twenty-five years on, those names still matter. That’s what Friday is for. Pausing, remembering, and honoring the first responders who ran toward danger while everyone else ran away.
I’ll be at Police Memorial Park on Friday, where I belong.
However, my opponent, Vinny Spotleson, will not be.
While Las Vegas gathers to mark this anniversary, Vinny is holding a campaign fundraiser in Reno that same evening.
Nothing says “I understand what this district needs” quite like being 440 miles away from it on the one day it matters most.
Priorities, as they say, are revealed by where you choose to be.
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