A 9/11 victim whose image was the only one missing from a memorial wall honouring all 3,000 fatalities has now been immortalised in a photo.
Prior to Sunday’s 21st anniversary of the terror attack, a picture of Albert Ogletree was discovered in a vintage high school yearbook in Michigan and placed to the wall of victims at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.
A picture of Ogletree entering Michigan’s Romulus High School as a freshman in 1966 has taken the place of the oak leaf that formerly covered it.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists crashed a hijacked airliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center while Ogletree was at work in the cafeteria of the financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald.
His wife passed away just three years after the attack, and he did not survive.
It was more difficult to locate a picture of Ogletree since the couple didn’t have any children and because he was camera-shy.
Given the circumstances surrounding their being there, no one wants to see their loved one there, according to head curator Jan Ramirez. Nevertheless, replacing that leaf symbol tile with this quietly striking photo is incredibly fulfilling.
Ramirez told CBS News that it “brings up instantly the variety of the victims, the enormity.”
When visitors are at the gallery, they will head to the wall and look for interesting faces.
The museum team had attempted in vain to locate his employment records at Forte Foods, which supplied Cantor Fitzgerald, in their quest to learn more about him and get his photograph.
Although she did not have a picture of him, Ogletree’s stepdaughter also paid homage to him on Facebook.
Grant Llera, a museum employee, eventually took it upon himself to locate Ogletree’s photograph.
The lack of images disturbed me because it left a gap in their narrative that needed to be filled, said Llera, 30.
The majority of his time is spent handling admissions and responding to inquiries from visitors in the galleries, but he said that he was eager to take on the job.
He went to the genealogical firm Ancestry.com, and they were able to locate him an address in Romulus, Michigan, which is 23 miles southwest of Detroit.
Pictured in 1966, during his first year of school, Albert Ogletree was 15 years old.
I believed that if I could discover his high school, maybe they might have a picture of him, Llera remarked.
The high school he attended could be located, and Llera contacted them for a picture, but they did not have a collection of yearbooks from the 1960s.
Kathy Abdo, a retired math teacher and Romulus councilwoman, discovered Ogletree’s black-and-white photograph for the museum last year while searching through yearbooks that had been kept at the city’s Historical Society.
Abdo told the Free Press, “The school phoned me and said—you know, we had this request and we don’t have any photos—and I said, “I’ll check into it.” “I felt obligated to discover his image since a Romulus student perished on 9/11.”
Abdo said, “I went over and looked through all of the yearbooks in the 1960s since I had a notion of what decade he was in in Romulus.”
Page by page, I had to search till I came upon Albert Ogletree.
Simply said, it appeared to be the proper move to make.
He was around 15 years old when the photograph was taken, and it is currently displayed in the proper location on the museum wall.
Ogletree was born on Christmas Day in 1951, and his family, along with a sister, resided in Romulus. Later, he settled in New York and wed.
According to the museum, it discovered Ogletree’s wife’s obituary, which was written in 2004. There were no known offspring of the marriage.
Justine Jones, one of his stepdaughters, had written a tribute for him online.
She remembered Ogletree as a “skillful electronics repairman” and “a caring man who played a significant part in her life.”
Jones verified that Ogletree, whose look had essentially not altered over the years, was in fact the young yearbook picture.
She expressed happiness at seeing a picture of him and stated his features resembled what she recalled, according to Llera.
Because he “did not enjoy having his photo taken and was camera shy,” according to Jones, she did not have any pictures of him.
The penultimate victim, Antonio Dorsey Pratt, eventually had his or her picture added in June.
When the first aircraft hit, Pratt, 43, was a chef in an investment bank restaurant on the 101st level of the North Tower.
The 9/11 Memorial and Museum personnel cropped, enlarged, and retouched a group shot of Pratt with his coworkers, so “Tony” did not leave any digital traces.
Just one week before to 9/11, Pratt accepted a position as a cafeteria server at Cantor Fitzgerald, becoming one of the 658 people employed by the company who perished in the attacks.
CEO of Memorial Alice Greenwald stated: “A lot of effort had to be done to zero in and expand and enlarge to the point where it could be acceptable for the size of the installation in order to concentrate on his gorgeous face.
A process that started nearly 16 years ago, when work on even conceiving what the 9/11 Memorial and Museum would be and what it would include, she said, came to a conclusion with Pratt’s inclusion, which took the place of an oak tree placeholder sign.
Asmareli Soga, the woman whose teenage children Pratt assisted in raising, is still alive.
On September 11, 2004, Tony’s remains were ultimately discovered, giving Soga and her children some closure.
She said, “Now maybe he can be in peace and we can hold his funeral.” ‘It’s a miracle. God is merciful.
But now, after all these years, I suddenly feel more pain, Soga said. This is reawakening ancient wounds. The suffering never ends. It abides in you.
The 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which is located in the vicinity of the two destroyed towers, contains enlargements of the 2,977 victims of the four Al Qaeda attacks on the Pentagon, United Airlines Flight 93, New York City, and other targets.
It also honours the six people who lost their lives in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which Ramzi Yousef, whose uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the “primary architect of the 9/11 attacks,” planned and carried out.
In south Pennsylvania, United 93 was brought down by its passengers while most likely on route to the White House.
More workers from Cantor Fitzgerald than any other company perished on September 11, 2001. Cantor Fitzgerald had its corporate headquarters and New York City office on levels 101 through 105 of the North Tower.
Due to the fact that he was driving his kid to his first day of kindergarten, CEO Howard Lutnick was able to flee the assault.
Gary, however, was one of the 1,402 fatalities in the North Tower.
Seventeen minutes after United Airlines Flight 175 struck the North Tower, another 614 people perished in the South Tower.
On September 11, nearly 350 New York City firefighters along with 23 NYPD officers and 37 Port Authority police officers perished.
115 different nations’ citizens were victims.
In particular among first responders, hazardous chemical exposure in the aftermath of the attacks has been linked to more than 2,000 cancer deaths after 9/11.