A WOMAN SEARCHING for the people in a wedding photo discovered at Ground Zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks has finally reunited the image with its original owner.
For 13 years, university professor Elizabeth Stringer Keefe has been trying to find the six people in this wedding photo, which was found in the still-burning rubble after the attacks.
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Every year, she would post it online, hoping someone would be able to connect her to the people in the photograph.
She told Boston Magazine that she didn’t want to think about “the story behind” the photo, just giving it back to the owner.
I really resisted being fatalistic about the photo, and thought that this could just be a photo that was in someone’s office, or someone that made it out alive.
This year, over a decade after the discovery of the photo, she finally succeeded when the photo went viral on social media. The original tweet also sparked a Reddit investigation, in which users looked up obituaries of 9/11 victims in an attempt to find matches for the people in the photograph.
She joyfully tweeted that all six people in the picture are alive and well, and she’d been contacted by one of them:
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Fred Mahe, the man on the far left of the picture, had reached out to Keefe on Twitter.
Mahe told Boston that the picture was on his desk in the World Trade Centre, Tower Two, on the 77th floor. He said that on the day of the attacks, he wasn’t yet at work, and “thankfully never got a chance to go up” to his office.
Mahe said he was inspired by Keefe’s “dedication and persistence” to reuniting the photo with its owner. Keefe, meanwhile, is thanking her lucky number.
