The National Park Service this week dedicated a memorial in the Pennsylvania field where Flight 93 crashed during a hijacking attempt 25 years ago. Crew members tried to thwart a hijacking of the plane, which was going to be diverted to the nation’s capitol, just one of several targets that day.
Commemoration ceremonies are also being held across the country for those who lost their lives during the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center. HPR spoke with Hawaiʻi’s Mike Latham, who was teaching at Fordham University in New York at the time.
He is now president of Punahou School and was a classmate of one of the victims, Richard Lee. Lee worked at the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which had its headquarters in the World Trade Center and lost 658 people — nearly two-thirds of its workforce — that day. Punahou will be marking the anniversary with a small private ceremony on campus for not just one, but two of its alumni.
"Punahou will be commemorating and remembering two of our graduates, Rich Lee, class of 1986, and Heather Ho, class of 1987," Latham said. "These were two people who were really beloved at the school and went on to have really kind of amazing careers before they were tragically killed at the prime of their lives."
Lee, who was 34 years old at the time he was killed, was the devoted father of a one-year-old son. Latham described him as a person of "incredible energy and enthusiasm."
At Punahou, he was one of the captains of the football team, standing at six feet and four inches tall. He went on to Yale, where he studied political science and Russian literature before graduating and entering a finance career at Cantor Fitzgerald.
"To see someone like that lose their life at that moment is devastating," Latham said.
Ho, only 32, was a graduate of Boston University. She also studied at the Culinary Institute of America before going on to work as a pastry chef at a number of prominent Manhattan restaurants. At the time she was killed, she was working at Windows on the World at the World Trade Center.
"You know, a person who was aspiring to have her own business, a person with a great deal of entrepreneurial drive and creativity, and it's tragic, even 25 years later, to look back," Latham said. "It's a sad moment to recognize the loss."
He recalled working in the Bronx on the day of the attack. In his memory, it was a "gorgeous, beautiful September day," when a colleague told him that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He went down to a conference center that faced Manhattan.
"It was such a clear day that from where we were on the sixth floor there, you could see the 12 or 15 miles south into Manhattan, where the World Trade Center was, and this horrible sight of the buildings themselves burning," he said. "It's one of those moments where you can't quite believe what you're seeing, and there's a sense of confusion, and then, of course, the sheer horror of realizing that so many mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, were being lost."
Latham stressed the importance of remembering the victims of the attack.
"I think our charge then is to continue to remember them and to try to figure out how to live in such a way that we honor their memory."
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 9, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Annabelle Ink adapted this story for the web.
