Editor’s Note: The Two River Times is publishing several articles this month as part of its coverage of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
By Eileen Moon
Sept. 11, 2026, will be an official Day of Remembrance in Monmouth County, marking the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on that day in 2001.
Nearly 3,000 people from 90 countries, including 750 residents of New Jersey, died on 9/11. Monmouth County was particularly hard hit: 147 people died. The loss of family, friends and neighbors in the unfolding tragedy reverberated across the landscape like the aftershocks of an earthquake, impacting virtually everyone.
“It was 25 years ago, but it seems like yesterday,” said Monmouth County Commissioner Director Thomas A. Arnone.
While the county has long held memorial ceremonies on 9/11, the official designation of a Day of Remembrance was adopted in 2023 through Arnone’s efforts and approved unanimously by county commissioners.
“Those of us who experienced 9/11 will never forget,” Arnone said in a prepared statement. “But it is our obligation and duty to ensure that future generations understand what happened that day and the profound impact it had on our nation.”
Despite Arnone’s efforts to encourage other counties to adopt a similar designation, Monmouth remains the only one of New Jersey’s 21 counties to do so.
“In my eyes, when you look back at what occurred, it pretty much stopped the world,” Arnone told The Two River Times.
Like tributes to the fallen of conflicts past, sculptures, park benches and plaques silently attest to what occurred on 9/11, honoring not only those who died, but the hundreds of first responders from the county who participated in recovery efforts.
In the Two River area, the global tragedy was both local and personal, affecting residents in unforgettable ways. Here, we return to that day through the eyes of several individuals directly impacted by the tragedy.
Mike Sheehan
On that sunny, blue-sky morning, Red Bank resident Mike Sheehan was at his desk on the 55th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit the North Tower. He was already a veteran of the 1993 terrorist attack at the WTC that killed six people.
When he saw smoke and papers flying outside his window on Sept. 11, 2001, he made an immediate decision to get out of the building, taking a young woman from his office with him.
They were about halfway down when building officials announced that workers should return to their offices.
“I was not gonna do that,” he said.
When Mike and his co-worker reached the lobby, a security guard directed them to an exit where an overhang offered some protection from falling debris, shielding them from the horror unfolding above them.
Picking up a fallen piece of paper, Sheehan saw it was a flight itinerary for a trip from Boston to Los Angeles.
“That’s when I knew it was terror.”
Twenty-five years later, he wonders about the fate of the security guard who helped him, remembering with gratitude the courage of the men and women who did their jobs in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
Now retired, he lives with the memory of friends and colleagues who never made it home.
“I lost two grammar school friends from Holy Cross (School in Rumson), other friends, people I knew from the business,” he said. “I also have friends who never recovered. They were profoundly affected by it.”
As he has done for many years, Mike will go to the beach this Sept. 11, a favorite place of solace.
Lisa Luckett
Fair Haven resident Lisa Luckett, whose husband, Ted, died in the World Trade Center attacks, won’t be participating in any memorial ceremonies this year. She has taken September back.
“I spent 23 years letting those bastards take that from us. I’m taking that back,” she said.
Luckett, a mother of three, said she now thinks of September as the month when her daughter Jen was married.
And she said she doesn’t need to remember her husband on Sept. 11. “I loved my husband. He is with me every single day.”
Lisa said she is angry that the national focus on revenge after 9/11 obscured accountability for the complicated issues of wealth, politics and power that may have precipitated the attacks. “Shame on us for being this arrogant,” she said.
Twenty-five years later, she has made a life she couldn’t have anticipated on Sept. 10, 2001.
She has not only reclaimed September, but she has taken her life back from the tragedy as well. Lisa has written a memoir, started a business and trained as a life coach. She also delivered a TEDx Talk about her experiences before and after 9/11.
“When 9/11 happened, it shot me out of the box, so that I can now help others,” she said.
In the wake of her terrible loss, “People needed to touch me and see me,” she reflected. “They needed to know that if it happened to them, they would be OK.”
Suzanne McCabe
Suzanne McCabe’s brother, Mike McCabe, started a new job at the World Trade Center a week before the attacks, working at Cantor Fitzgerald with his best friend, Mike Tucker. Although she lived in the city, Suzanne was staying with her parents in Rumson because her father was very ill.
She was on the ferry to Manhattan when the first plane hit the North Tower. “At first, it seemed like an accident,” she said. “When we saw the second plane, we knew that it was an attack.”
She tried to reach her brother on her cell phone, but he didn’t answer. A “big, strong,” athletic man who loved the ocean, she allowed herself to believe that if anyone could escape unharmed, it was her brother and his best friend.
When the ferry reached Manhattan, it was told to turn back, taking on passengers escaping the disaster. As they left the city, the second tower collapsed. Emergency workers would find Mike’s body two days later. He was 41.
“We were lucky,” she said.
“We weren’t in that limbo that so many families were.”
If Mike were still living, he would undoubtedly be enjoying his two beautiful grandchildren, Suzanne said. “It seems like a miracle to me,” she says now. “It was hard to imagine that we would ever rise from the ashes.”
Kathy Shoup and Laura Layton
Little Silver resident Kathy Shoup was thousands of miles from Manhattan when the attacks occurred. A United Airlines flight attendant, she was working a return flight from London to Newark when the pilot announced they’d be landing in Nova Scotia.
With all commercial flights to the U.S. suspended, “There were about 60 jumbo jets on the tarmac,’’ she recalls. All the travelers had to claim their bags and go through Customs. Rising to the challenge, the Nova Scotians put out the welcome mat, swiftly organizing food and shelter for thousands of stranded travelers.
“The Canadians were unbelievable,” Shoup said. “It was just the most moving thing I’d ever seen in my entire life.”
Shoup’s friend and fellow flight attendant Laura Westerlind Layton frequently flew Flight 93, the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Had she not forgotten to get her bid in on time, she would have been on it that morning.
Instead, she was working as purser on a flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles when she heard from a passenger who worked for the Federal Aviation Administration that an American plane had just hit the World Trade Center.
“The captain called me and said he had to cease all communications between the cockpit and the cabin. ‘This is not a drill,’ ” she said he told her.
The flight diverted to Ontario, California, where fire engines and emergency personnel were standing by in case of trouble. The crew drove to Riverside, California, where they would stay for several days.
All her crew members had friends aboard United Flight 93. The evening ended with a prayer. For many years, she and Shoup attended the memorial services for Flight 93 in Shanksville. And often, on Sept. 11, they were accompanied by passengers who flew on that day in memory of those who were lost, creating a family of friends united by tragedy.
Andrew Murphy
Every Sept. 11, former Little Silver resident Andrew Murphy posts “Boatlift 9/11” on his Facebook page. The documentary narrated by Tom Hanks recounts how an eclectic armada of tugboats and other commercial vessels ferried more than 300,000 survivors of the attacks from lower Manhattan to safe harbors along the New York and New Jersey coasts.
Now a tugboat captain, Murphy was working as a deckhand on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. He remembers seeing the Twin Towers for the last time as the boat left New York Harbor around 4 a.m. on the way to Philadelphia.
They were north of Barnegat when they got word that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. The crew’s first thought was that it was an accident. They soon learned otherwise. When the Coast Guard issued a call for assistance from all available watercraft to evacuate survivors, Murphy’s boat was too far away to help, but friends and co-workers on other boats swiftly responded.
“We’re basically the truck drivers of the maritime world,” Murphy said. “We’re not rocket scientists out here. But boy did these guys really step up.”
Twenty-five years on, he is still in awe of what they achieved that day.
“I will always applaud them on 9/11,” Murphy, who now lives with his family in northeastern Pennsylvania, said.
Stephen Shaheen
In September 2001, Rumson native Stephen Shaheen was in the final three months of a two-year stone carving program in Rome. He and his friend, Evan Urbania, who was visiting from the U.S., had just toured a 14th-century cathedral in Siena when a man ran up to them shouting in Italian about what had happened in New York City. Even in Italy, the shock of those events was immediately apparent. There were lines at public telephones and cafes full of people watching the tragedy repeat on television screens.
Seeing the events unfold through the lens of a foreign country was surreal, Shaheen said. He remained in Italy until his program finished in December. When he returned to the Two River area, he immediately noticed the makeshift memorials that had sprung up in Riverside Gardens Park in Red Bank and in other public places.
He had just come from a culture with a long history of carving in stone. Driving out to Sandy Hook, he began to envision a memorial that would feature two marble figures looking out toward Manhattan, where the sky stood empty where the Twin Towers once were.
It was the start of a long road that included the establishment of the nonprofit Memoria Project, donations of marble from a quarry in Vermont, lectures by art historians, the labor of master carvers who came from Italy to participate, and the embrace of the community that funded the project, housed the volunteers and even helped chip away the marble as the skilled carvers coaxed figures from the stone.
Today, the two figures emerging from marble pillars now stand in their permanent location, installed in 2011, overlooking the water from Veterans Park in Highlands. The names of those who died in the attacks are also memorialized there.
Now a professional sculptor, Shaheen considers his work on the memorial the most meaningful of his career.
“It was just an absolutely beautiful and life-changing experience,” he said recently. “To be part of something owned, inhabited, honored and visited by the community is a kind of meaningfulness that is hard to put into words.”
The article originally appeared in the September 3 – 9, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
