Twenty-five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, victims’ family members are sharing how they’ve turned their grief into positive action—and they’re still calling for accountability, transparency and justice as two 9/11 court cases remain ongoing.
Beth Murphy was left to raise two children alone after her husband, Kevin James Murphy, was taken from her on the 100th floor of the north tower. He had just turned 40 on Sept. 1.
She was already fighting cancer when the attacks happened.
“Just days before 9/11, Kevin stood beside my hospital bed and begged me to live because we feared my stage-three melanoma had returned. I went on to survive three cancers, including lung cancer connected to Ground Zero exposure.”
Throughout the years, she’s served as an advocate for 9/11 victims, other victims of extremism, and their families, successfully helping advance legislation supporting those affected by attacks.
Two days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, she suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke.
Doctors said she would most likely never walk again.
“But I promised Kevin I would,” she told The Center Square. “Today, I walk miles and continue regaining movement in my affected hand and arm.”
She also plans to walk unaided at the wedding of her daughter, who is now 29.
As chief ambassador at Neuroanimation, Beth Murphy is also helping others living with neurological injuries, drawing on her own experience to offer encouragement, advocacy and hope. The organization combines neuroscience, immersive experiences and precision programs to help patients improve cognition and everyday function.
She’s continuing to share Kevin’s life and her journey from unimaginable loss to purpose, service, and hope.
“I have learned, ‘If there is a WHY there is a WAY for hope, health and survival throughout the most tragic times of one’s life,'” she said.
Suzann Cayne was 7 when her father, Jason David Cayne, was taken from her while working on the 104th floor for Cantor Fitzgerald. He would have turned 33 on Nov. 11 that year.
His widow and teenage sweetheart, Gina, was left to raise three children on her own—Suzann, 7, Marissa, 4, and Raquel, 22 months.
“Twenty-five years later, I still think about how one ordinary morning divided our lives into a before and an after,” Suzann Cayne told The Center Square. “At seven years old, I understood that my dad wasn’t coming home. But I couldn’t possibly understand everything that meant.”
She says she understands it differently now, now that she’s a mother. She’s older than her mother Gina was at 30 when she became a widow.
The hardest part is explaining to her children that their grandfather was taken by people who had never met him.
“How do you explain hatred that enormous to someone who hasn’t learned to hate yet?”
“I have stared that hatred right in the face,” she continued.
Years after 9/11, she stood in a courtroom at Guantánamo Bay as a Jewish woman, an American, and the daughter of a man taken by those attacks.
“I stood there knowing I represented everything that hatred tried to destroy…and I was still standing,” she said. “But beneath all of that, I was still the little girl whose father never came home.”
Families of those lost on 9/11 are demanding justice, accountability and transparency as two 9/11 cases are ongoing—a criminal trial against 9/11 conspirators still being held at GITMO and a civil trial against the Saudi government by 9/11 victims’ families.
Since 1979, there have been nearly 70,000 attacks committed worldwide, The Center Square reported. Last year was the third most violent year on record for American Jews, with antisemitic incidents on the rise since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Suzann Cayne says she is teaching her children to remember what happened without learning to hate.
“I can’t give my children their grandfather. But I can give them his story. I can say his name. And I can teach them that remembering what happened to our family never requires hating someone else’s,” she said.
The 9/11 families also are encouraging Americans to remember the 2,977 lives taken on Sept. 11.
