Velazquez family remembers 9/11, City Hall memorial

Although 25 years have now passed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ed Velazquez and Vice Mayor Diane Velazquez remember the day all too well. 

“I smell smoke sometimes, and I remember the smoke,” said Ed Velazquez in a sit-down interview with The Apopka Chief. “Those fires didn’t go out for three months.” 

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Velazquez family lived in New York City. Diane had recently retired from her detective work at the New York Police Department (NYPD), and Ed was an assistant vice president for the Bank of New York. As assistant vice president, Ed would visit the World Trade Center every Tuesday morning from 7:15 to 8:30 a.m. to have breakfast with his boss at the Windows on the World restaurant. But on that fateful Tuesday, Ed’s boss was in North Carolina, so the meeting was canceled for the day. 

“So I didn’t have to go to the World Trade Center, and I missed it. That Tuesday, it happened,” Ed said. “Isn’t that weird? Otherwise, I would have been up there.” 

Instead, Ed heard the news on the way to work, afterward heading to the supermarket where Diane was shopping to tell her what happened. 

“I said to you [Ed], ‘What do you mean, like one of those Cessnas from Teterboro?’ Because New Jersey has an airport called Teterboro,” Diane said. “He goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I paid, and we left and went home. We turned on the TV … All of a sudden, we see the second plane coming in and hitting the second building. I looked at Ed and I said, ‘Is that a rewind, or is that a new plane?’ And it was the second plane.” 

Ed then volunteered as a first responder, since he had also retired from NYPD. After he left on 9/12, he did not return home until 10 to 12 days later. 

“I was at the scene and working from Wednesday, the next day, almost all the way till Thanksgiving, and the first week-and-a-half, I was staying in a hotel and going to the site and then work maybe 14 hours, then go to the hotel, eat, wash up,” he said. “I remember the next day, when I was there, we were reporting into different sections, and they were going to assign us jobs, and the ground would be shaking because of the fires underneath … nobody knew where to run to.” 

Ed described his 9/11 work as a “partnership” between his job at the bank and NYPD. For the first few days, he searched the buildings for survivors and those who had died. Afterward, he started recovering “financial information from the bank — CDs, anything that got the bank going again.” 

Meanwhile, Diane focused on raising their then-teenage son, but she vividly remembers attending funerals almost every day. Through it all, though, life continued. 

“I had tickets to see Tony Bennett … and I remember it was empty. No one showed up, but Tony Bennett and k.d. lang gave the show. It was very somber, because it was literally days after 9/11,” she said. “Everyone decided, ‘No, we’re not canceling these events. We are going to show that we are resilient and that life goes on, and we’re just going to make it through’ … I felt, ‘Well, you know what? If he’s willing to show up and give the audience his show, I’m going.’” 

Diane said both she and Ed lost many friends and have several who are sick, likely from working through 9/11. Ed is among those who fellill shortly afterward, later receiving diagnoses of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, prostate cancer, and follicular cancer.  

In 2005, Ed and Diane moved to Florida. Little did they know that, in October 2015, Boy Scout Christian Lamphere would appear before the Apopka City Council to ask for help finding an artifact from 9/11. His succeeding partnership with Ed and Diane Velazquez led to his Eagle Scout project — a 9/11 memorial still standing in front of City Hall today. 

“I’m glad that was what he chose to do as an Eagle Scout, because — I always said this to Phil [Christian’s father] — it allowed us to have some closure for that chapter,” Diane said. “The fact that I am a commissioner, and now the vice mayor, and I get to go to City Hall every day and see 9/11 — for me, that’s the attachment. It’s like it was meant to be — it’s like a full circle for me.” 

Lamphere had chosen the memorial as his Eagle Scout project to honor his family’s legacy of service. 

“My dad was in the fire service, and also my grandfather was in the fire service — he lived in Vermont,” said Lamphere in a phone interview with the Chief. “The fire service was like my second family growing up.” 

To bring a piece of 9/11 to Apopka, Diane Velazquez contacted her friend Karen LeMelle, who was then a special assignment lieutenant for NYPD. LeMelle passed along the message until Apopka was awarded an artifact in April 2016. Ed then drove to hangar 17 of John F. Kennedy International Airport on May 9, 2016, to pick up one of the pieces of the Twin Towers — and received one larger than what was awarded, since a larger piece had been returned from a museum. 

“It took me 26 hours to drive back because I had the piece, and it was like a sail, so I couldn’t go over 60 or 65 miles an hour, because then the truck would start weaving,” he said. “When I came back, I came home, then we went to City Hall because everybody was there waiting — channel six and nine, I think, were there, and the firemen were there, and then Phil Lamphere and Christian were there.” 

In August of that year, Ed drove up again — this time, for the memorial’s granite. 

“We went to Pennsylvania to pick up the granite that we use in this memorial, because the granite that they use in the memorial in Pennsylvania for Flight 93 is from the same quarry,” he said. “It was pretty far, because the quarry was on the east side of Pennsylvania, and the airplane crashed close to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is on the west side of Pennsylvania. So we had to go through the mountains and everything; it took us almost a day to get there.” 

The memorial was unveiled on Sept. 11, 2016. Diane hopes it will be preserved long after her tenure as vice mayor and that the memory of 9/11 will be passed on to those like Lamphere, who were not born on the tragic day. 

“I try to tell my grandkids, when you go to the airport and what you have to deal with just to get on the plane, that was 9/11. Going into buildings with metal detectors — that’s 9/11,” Diane said. “Our son went to two wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — why? Because of 9/11 … If you’re born after that, you don’t realize the impact of what 9/11 was, but for many of us who understand what 9/11 is, we realize the impact of it, and it’s changed us forever. It made us realize that we were no longer isolated from being attacked.”