On September 11, 2001, amid the burning ashes of the World Trade Center, three New York City firefighters hoisted a small American flag removed from a nearby yacht.
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It’s now on display at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum in NY.
Brian arrived at a fire station in Everett, Washington on November 4, 2014, according to HeraldNet. He told them it was given to him by a widow of a 9-11 victim.
The Everett Police Department, with help from forensic experts, made the assessment after the flag turned up in 2014.
It even became the subject of a History Channel documentary, which sought to solve the mystery of the missing flag. “We were never pressured to say it’s the flag”, Massingale said. Detectives also compared video of the flag being assembled, including the hardware used to raise it, to the flag in their possession. “We only had the clothes on our backs”, Dreifus said.
But 13 years of the flag’s life remain a mystery.
“At first I doubted that that could possibly be true, it’s definitely such a big deal that it’s hard to imagine the Everett Police Department on the West Coast could be involved at all with having custody of the flag”, said Paxton. Also, the History Channel will air an episode on the recovery of the flag, called “America’s 9/11 Flag: Rise from the Ashes”, on Sunday at 10:30 p.m.as part of the network’s 15th anniversary tribute to September 11.
Within five hours, the flag was gone, but it lived on in the photograph by photojournalist Thomas Franklin, a symbol of hope and resilience following the terrorist attack. Somehow, the flag went missing.
When an official was sent to pick up the original flag a week or so after 9/11, he apparently received a larger flag which was flown at subsequent events, the film’s director said.
The flag was originally taken from a yacht owned by Shirley Dreifus and her late husband, Spiros E. Kopelakis, which had been docked at the World Financial Center, according to a statement put out by the 9/11 memorial announcing the flag’s return. The recovery of the flag is the inaugural project under the new HISTORY Saves History initiative.
The insurance company said Tuesday that it paid a claim to the owner, adding that “the value of the now-historic flag was significant”. The museum’s president, Joe Daniels, calls it “one of the most emotionally and historically powerful” artifacts in the collection.
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“We got to handle the flag several times”.
