For Gov. Kathy Hochul and her Republican challenger, Bruce Blakeman, appearing at the memorial for the Sept. 11 attacks on Friday will be the culmination of a solemn string of events commemorating a tragedy from 25 years ago. But for Mr. Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, the list of those who lost their lives on that day will include friends, former colleagues from his time as a Port Authority commissioner and in one case, a family member.
After the planes struck the World Trade Center towers, Mr. Blakeman’s nephew, Sgt. Tommy Jurgens, a court officer, rushed to the site with his colleagues to help evacuate people from the buildings.
Mr. Blakeman also was stirred to action. After picking up his son from school, he decamped to the command center of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where he and other Port Authority officials determined how to respond to the tragedy.
Around 11 p.m., Mr. Blakeman said he received a call from his brother, Brad, who was then an aide to President George W. Bush. “He calls me and he says: ‘Tommy’s missing,’” Mr. Blakeman recalled in an interview.
Amid a blur of grief and work — during which Mr. Blakeman attended 30 funerals for people who died — it took weeks for the loss of his nephew to land. It finally did when Mr. Blakeman and his sister visited a Red Cross center to provide saliva samples in an effort to identify his nephew’s remains.
“That’s when it all hit me. I had a little bit of a breakdown,” Mr. Blakeman said.
“My family, we dread this week,” he continued. “We dread it, because of the sorrow, the destruction, the death. I mean, it was just horrible.”
Mr. Blakeman said his nephew, who was also a medic in the U.S. Army reserves, loved the idea of public service and wearing a uniform.
Sgt. Jurgens’s gun and shield were found in the wreckage, but nothing else. He was one of three court officers who disappeared that day. His cousin Paul Jurgens, a Port Authority police officer, died as well.
Mr. Blakeman recalled the agonizing choices that Port Authority commissioners were presented with in the days and weeks after the attack, as they contemplated scenarios like whether to close the bridges.
“By and large, people go about their day, and maybe that is a good thing,” he said. “They don’t think about it. But as a public official, it’s something I think about every day.”
Similarly, Ms. Hochul spent much of this past week reflecting on the anniversary and the lessons it could teach about public service and sacrifice.
In 2001, Ms. Hochul was in Hamburg in western New York. But she nonetheless recalled where she was the moment she learned the towers had been hit.
“Like many Americans, I was watching the ‘Today’ show as the first plane struck,” Ms. Hochul said in an interview, recalling the horror of watching the towers fall. In the coming hours and days, she found herself trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless violence — first to her children coming home from school, then to her constituents.
“Even in 2001, as a local town board member, I knew that I had to protect my community and reassure my neighbors that we would be OK,” she said. “I’ve viewed that as my job from my early days, this sense of responsibility for others, and have carried that with me all these years.”
As governor, Ms. Hochul has aimed to center the experiences of those who gave their time, health and lives.
“Let us reflect on what it means to be an American, what it means to be a New Yorker and what it means to be people who value the work of our public servants every single day,” Ms. Hochul said at a ceremony honoring members of the Port Authority who died in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001.
This week, she signed three pieces of legislation aimed at making it easier for emergency medical workers, Sept. 11 victims and their families to access the benefits they are entitled to.
The first two bills extend the window to apply for workers’ compensation and retirement after Sept. 11 cleanup efforts. The third extends death and disability benefits to the members of the National Guard and their beneficiaries.
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