25th Anniversary of September 11 — Remembrance Ceremony 

The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown marked the 25th anniversary of September 11 with a remembrance ceremony held at The Heroes Memorial, located behind the J. Irving Whalley Memorial Chapel. Believed to be the only memorial of its kind on any college campus in the United States, the site is built around a 3,500-pound steel I-beam recovered from the World Trade Center and now bears more than 9,200 names — service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside those lost on September 11, 2001. The Memorial also honors the more than 46,000 members of the military wounded in hostile action in those conflicts.

The campus community gathered and observed a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m. — the exact minute, twenty-five years earlier, that American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center, marking the beginning of the deadliest terrorist attack in world history.

Many of the service members named on the Memorial were between the ages of 18 and 24 — the traditional college-age population, and the age of many students who gathered at the Memorial that morning.