When Franklin took the photo on the day of the terrorist attacks, the firefighters – Billy Eisengrein, George Johnson and Dan McWilliams – had removed the flag and its pole from a yacht named Star of America which was docked in the Hudson River near ground zero.
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In a story Sept. 8 about a flag being exhibited at the National Sept. 11 Museum, The Associated Press reported erroneously that a photo of the flag being planted at ground zero had won a Pulitzer Prize.
He said he was invited to the ceremonies that are set to take place Sunday to remember the 15th anniversary of the terror attacks, but he declined saying that he’s no hero and that Americans should all remember the victims, first responders and the families involved in the attacks. After plucking the flag from a nearby boat, three firefighters hoisted it amid the ashen destruction as photographer Thomas E. Franklin of The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, captured the scene.
Two years ago, the flag was turned in by an unidentified man at a firehouse in Everett, Washington.
Brian told the firefighters he had been watching a documentary on historical artifacts, and one segment detailed the missing ground zero flag. That October, the History Channel broadcast a show about the mystery of the missing flag.
And 15 years later – nearly to that unforgettable day – the men who found it are taking it to its rightful home.
The only other information Brian gave was that he had been given the flag on Veterans Day 2007 by a man who had received it from the widow of a 9/11 firefighter, said Everett Deputy Police Chief Mark St. Clair.
“I was working at the Police Department, I was in training at the time”, Templeman said. After disappearing for more than a decade, the 3-foot-by-5-foot flag goes on display Thursday at the museum.
The investigation began in 2014, when a man dropped off a flag at an Everett fire station. He said video footage from the area taken five hours later shows it was not on the flagpole.
A retired New York Police Department officer who now works with the Everett Police Department held the flag as it was being packaged to return to New York City.
The mystery of what happened to the ground zero flag was the subject of a 2013 CNN film “The Flag”.
“It’s truly awesome”, Dreifus said.
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“We got to handle the flag several times”. “He called it the icon of the century”, she said.
