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Talat Hamdani has spent the past twenty-one years as a member of an incomprehensibly heartbreaking and tragic club.  A club that neither she nor any of its other members wanted to join and one that each of them wishes was one to which her membership had been denied - or could be revoked.   It, of course, cannot.  

On that terrible Tuesday morning twenty-one Septembers ago, Talat Hamdani's twenty-three-year-old son, Mohammad Salman Hamdani, was among the innocents killed by the murderous cowards who flew the planes into the Twin Towers.   Mohammad was just thirteen months old when his parents moved from Pakistan to the United States, where they settled in Bayside, Queens.  "Sal" as he preferred to be called loved life in America.  He became an American citizen.  He played football at Bayside High School and after high school, he earned his degree in Biochemistry at Queens College in June 2001, while working part-time as an EMT.  His dream was to go to medical school.  In July 2001, he took a job as a research technician in the Protein/DNA Technology Center at Rockefeller University.  He also joined the NYPD's Cadet Program.  

He was on his way to work at Rockefeller University on September 11, 2001 when he saw the flames erupting from the World Trade Center.  Instead of heading to the lab, he headed straight towards the disaster.  He never made it to the lab.  He never made it home.  

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Hamdani family did what countless families all over the Tri-State Area did.  They made posters with Sal's picture on them, hung them up every place they could think to hang them, asking strangers "Have You Seen Him?"  Of course, no one had.  

Tragically, and inexcusably, Sal's "disappearance" was not treated initially as if he was a victim of that day's events but, rather, somehow connected to those who perpetrated them.  On October 12, 2001 the New York Post ran a story under William Gorka's by-line, the headline of which was "MISSING - OR HIDING? - MYSTERY OF NYPD CADET FROM PAKISTAN".  

He was, of course, neither missing nor hiding.  He was dead.  Killed in the place he had gone to save other.  

It was not until March 2002 that the Hamdani family was notified that Sal's remains had been found in the rubble of the North Tower, along with some of his belongings, forty-five days after the attack.   He was buried in April 2002 in a hero's funeral, his casket draped with an American flag, and attended by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  

In 2014, a block away from the home in Bayside, Queens where his parents raised him and where his family continued to live, a street was renamed in his honor.  His mother, exuding the grace and dignity that seems to spring from an eternal well to which mothers alone have access, called that day, "a joyous and victorious day."   Sadly, his father did not live to celebrate it.  He died less than three years after his son had been murdered - the result of a broken heart, according to Talat.  

Losing a son can to that to a parent.  Even when that son is a hero.  Perhaps, even especially so.

Mohammad Salman Hamdani

EMT (Metro Ambulance)

End of Watch:  September 11, 2001

-AK