The 3-foot-by-5-foot flag took a symbolic and curious journey from a yacht moored in lower Manhattan to the smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center, then to a firehouse about 2,400 miles away in Everett, Washington – and now to a glass case at the National Sept. 11 Museum.
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The flag’s original owner also determined that a recently recovered one must be the original.
But it now now hangs on display at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City – after being returned by a mystery man in 2014. They enlisted a crime lab in Washington State, which confirmed that the flag was embedded with dust particles from the 9/11 site.
The flag was turned over to the Everett Police Department and was analyzed for dirt and dust samples. He said he was a Marine and was given the flag in honor of his military service on Veterans Day 2007.
169-a-17-(Alice Greenwald, director, 9/11 Museum, speaking to reporters)-“in that flag”-9/11 Museum director Alice Greenwald says the flag is an important symbol”.
DNA discovered on electrical tape on the flag’s halyard did not match DNA from any of the three firefighters who raised the flag on 9/11, or the owners and crew of the yacht where the flag had initially flown. Four days later, a man carrying a plastic bag walked into a fire station in Everett, Wash.
A grainy surveillance video featured on the pilot episode of Brad Meltzer’s “Lost History” shows that the original “9/11 flag” went missing hours after it was raised at the site.
Dreifus said she was saddened that her husband, who died almost two years ago, could not share in the news. One of the firefighters in the photo had taken it from the vessel and hoisted the flag above the rubble of the towers.
The composition of “pulverized building material” was a match.
KOMO reports ( http://bit.ly/2cpH3TW ) the finding comes after a two-year investigation by the Everett Police Department, with assistance from forensic experts. “We knew it would be scrutinized”. “We then began working with our contacts in NY to develop a plan to return and preserve the flag”.
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The two breathed a sigh of relief on August 4 when a museum curator came to the police station to collect the flag and halyard, knowing it was headed back home to Manhattan.
