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As communities across the U.S. mark the 24th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that shook the nation, thousands of families continue to grieve the personal losses of their loved ones.
One Brooklyn family is honoring the legacy of their son and brother, Jimmy Quinn, who died at 23 in the North Tower, by attending the New York Mets game against the Texas Rangers on September 12. This event will serve as a dedicated and fitting tribute to the young finance professional who tragically lost his life while at work.
“Jimmy crammed more life in his short 23 years than most people do in a lifetime,” Joe Quinn, U.S. Army veteran and brother of Jimmy, told Fox News Digital.
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Jimmy Quinn, remembered by his brother as a New York Mets superfan, Joe Quinn, was 23 years old when he died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. (Joe Quinn)
“It’s an energy that is hard to live without, even 24 years later,” he said of his late brother, who he added was a Mets superfan.
Jimmy graduated from Manhattan College in the Bronx the year before his death. Quinn said he passed his Series 7 exam a couple of weeks before Sept. 11, 2001.
“His whole life was ahead of him, and he loved it,” Quinn said. “He used to say ‘I work on top of the world’ and that’s the way he felt about the way his life was getting started.”
At the time, Quinn was a senior at the United States Military Academy in West Point, where he described cadets, including himself, usually moving like clockwork.
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“I remember that morning, things were off,” Quinn said. “Cadets were whispering when cadets typically don’t whisper.”
Quinn’s roommate called out to the Corps of Cadets within earshot that the Twin Towers were on fire.
“The first tower collapsed, the South Tower, and my heart just fell,” he said. “I was so busy at West Point at the time, I didn’t even know which tower he was in. When the North Tower collapsed, that was probably the hardest part of it. It’s kind of, your brain sort of knew that he was most likely in there, but your heart didn’t want to believe it.”
Quinn recalls the plane’s impact on the World Trade Center looking like “tiny holes compared to the size of the towers.”
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Former President George W. Bush addressed the United States following the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. (Photo by Roger L. Wollenberg-Pool/Getty Images)
In the days following the assault on America that killed nearly 3,000 people, Quinn said his dad, a retired NYPD officer, “had the dining room table like it was a police precinct.”
“Slowly, each day, it became more and more dreadful and, like so many other families, we never found any of his remains,” he said.
“It sounds crazy to say, but even to this day, there’s that .00001 percent of your brain that has this slight hope because there was never really evidence,” Quinn added. “He kind of disappeared for us.”
Quinn graduated from West Point in 2002 and deployed to Iraq in 2003.
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The 9/11 Memorial and Museum is free and open to the public seven days a week. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
He said that, citing his circumstances, Quinn’s parents and West Point offered to relieve him of active duty.
“I wasn’t going to hear any of that,” he said. “To say I was a perfect cadet my senior year would be a lie. I really struggled just getting through that year, but thank God I did.”
Quinn trusts his calling was to serve alongside his brothers in arms both back then and today.
“I lost a brother, but my wife lost her brother in Iraq,” he said. “We lost thousands of soldiers overseas and there are a lot of families that lost their brothers because they raised their right hand to serve their country after 9/11.”
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As a managing director at Drexel Hamilton, a 100 percent veteran-owned and operated investment bank, Quinn embraces his day job as a way of honoring his brother.
“We do very normal, boring investment banking stuff, but we also have a mission of hiring veterans,” he said.
He also serves as a member of the Museum Visionary Network Leadership Council at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
“They were a huge part of my healing and my family’s healing,” Quinn said. “His name on the pole is where we go to pay our respects.”