I don't know what to say about this story, but it has moved me more than I thought possible.
November 6, 2004, 4:39 PM ESTI used to live just blocks away from the Trade Center and for over six months even here on 23rd Street I lived with the acrid smell of the fires which destroyed it on September 11. I watched out the front windows and I heard hundreds of police motorcycle-escorted ambulances speed down the street to a temporary morgue on the East Side which is still there. For a dozen years I worked at the Trade Center, each day entering and leaving the 1/9 subway line through the concrete structure on top of which Veal took his life; it's the only part of the original complex remaining above ground today. I made repeated heartbreaking trips to the site beginning two days after its destruction. The neighborhood was my first home in New York.A 25-year-old university worker from Georgia shot and killed himself at ground zero Saturday morning, authorities said.
The man, Andrew Veal, of Athens, Ga., was found atop the structure housing the 1 and 9 subway lines after a hotel worker spotted what he believed was somebody sleeping inside the site around 8 a.m., said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
A shotgun was found near the body, Coleman said. No suicide note was found, he said.
Police were investigating how Veal entered the former World Trade Center site, which is protected by high fences and owned by the Port Authority.
Veal worked in a computer lab and was planning to marry, friends said Saturday.
I'm still in New York today and I've grown to love it even more than I did when its wonders first brought me here. This also means, strictly speaking, that I'm still in the country where I was born, but I no longer feel that I am. If this was true before the election on Tuesday, the results which were announced have confirmed my exile.
Andrew Veal felt that dispossession more deeply than most. His despair brought him to the site which is still cynically being used to feed the agony in which so many of us share, and there Veal at least was able to end it.
It is interesting to read your perspective of this story. My own perspective was so much different...
I viewed this as just another sensless piece of violence in which more families will feel more pain and again... it resolved nothing but creating more hurt.
I understand, well actually, i don't understand completely the gentleman's anquish... but I don't think this was a solution that resulted in much more than making more people hurt senselessly.
Just my thoughts, thanks for sharing yours!
- Dana
P.S. Have you been back to the restaurant we disgraced with our tactless fun in May?
In my opinion, if this guy had a fiance and was in college, he had things going for him. This is just another example of how people take things too far. What did he really think was going to happen when he shot himself? I personally didn't even hear about it on the news on TV...I was surfing the net and recieved an email about it. All he got for himself and his causes was a hole in his head and a label of idiot. Get over it, live your life...apparantly he just didn't have the strength to move on...and these were the kind of people voting for Kerry?