After 13 years, woman identifies people in wedding photo found at Ground Zero
It is a haunting, beautiful photo; beautiful because of the beaming bride and groom at its centre. And haunting because of where it was found; dust-covered and creased, on a street near Ground Zero in the days after 9/11.
When a friend handed the picture to Elizabeth Stringer Keefe only weeks after the attacks, she had no idea who any of the smiling people in the picture were. But the picture was hard to shake.
"It's a snapshot of a moment in time where everyone was joyful, and happy. It's not a posed photo. It's a photo where a variety of people are looking in different directions but what they have is the general feeling," explains Keefe, an assistant professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For Keefe, the contrast was almost overwhelming; the joy captured in this candid wedding moment, and the desolation where it was found at Ground Zero.
"I tried not to speculate about the photo or where it came from, but I did on different occasions. It was very hard to resist thinking about it because obviously there's an unimaginable ending to the story that is so terrible that you don't want to consider it, "Ms. Keefe tells Carol. "But because the photo was so beautiful and so powerful, because of the visceral pain that everyone on that day experienced, I felt it was worthwhile to try to return it to the owner, just to give some small piece of comfort."
Keefe did what she could to try to track down the people online, which didn't go far. Every year on the anniversary of 9/11, she posted it on Facebook and Twitter, but that didn't generate many leads either. Until last week; on Sept. 11.
"It was 11:30 that night, I was sitting in front of my computer thinking about the photo, and despite having posted it several times during the day, I was going to do it one more time." But this time, she decided to post it to her work account on Twitter. And she tagged a local online media publication. The tweet immediately took off. "And about 45 minutes later, she knew it was going to go viral."
More than 40,000 people re-tweeted the photo and Keefe's plea for information. She got leads from all over the world, and then on the evening of Sept. 12, she got a tweet from man in Colorado. His name was Fred Mahe, and he said he was in the photo.
"I was sitting in my office in Boulder, and I received a text message from an ex-colleague of mine who said you should really check out this link," Mahe explains.
He clicked on the link, and saw the wedding picture he had tacked on the wall by his desk at the World Trade Center. He immediately called Keefe, and told her the good news: Everyone in the picture is alive and well. It was his photo; no one else was near the World Trade Center on 9/11. The bride and groom are happily married, living in California.
"I have said it several times and I believe it to be true: you couldn't fabricate a better ending to this story," Keefe says.
On Monday, Keefe and Mahe met for the first time in New York, where she returned his long-lost photo. Both are quick to say their unique bond is strong.
"The real point of this story for me is on 9/11 we saw the worst of humanity; the gates of hell opened. but on 9/12, the day after, we as humans were at our best. It was the best of humanity," he explains. And the coolest thing is how Elizabeth has been embodying that, and on 9/12, 2014, the mystery was solved."