Missing Photos of 5 Immigrants who Died on 9/11 Finally Found

TRIBECA, NY — The National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center has finally been able to add five missing portraits of people who died on Sept. 11, 2001. This was largely thanks to what Jan Ramirez, senior vice president of collections and chief curator at the Memorial and Museum, calls "a small, wonderful miracle."

It started when Katherine Lotspeich, deputy chief at the Verification Division of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, saw a New York Times article about how the museum was still missing seven portraits for its gallery of the 2,983 victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and Feb. 26, 1993.

She told her boss, Tammy M. Meckley, and they quickly realized from the descriptions that many of the missing people were likely immigrants who had filed for citizenship or naturalization whose files they might have.

"Unbeknownst to us," Ramirez tells Patch, they decided to try their very best to locate the "A files"— which stand for "Alien files." Their search took them to "this cave right in the middle of the U.S., in Missouri" — an underground limestone cavern at Lee’s Summit that serves as a storage facility for the country’s largest collection of inactive immigrant records.

There, researchers found “A files” for five people who were killed at their jobs at the World Trade Center on 9/11. According to the New York Times, they were: Gregorio Manuel Chavez, from the Dominican Republic, who worked at the Windows on the World restaurant and became a permanent resident in 1999; Kerene Emeline Gordon of Jamaica, who worked for Forte Food Service in Cantor Fitzgerald’s cafeteria and became a citizen in 2000; Michael William Lomax of Britain, an executive at Aon who had been a permanent resident since 1996; and Ching Ping Tung from Hong Kong, an employee of First Commercial Bank and a citizen since 1996.

"Incredibly and happily," says Ramirez, "not only did they include up-to-date information, and not only were there portraits, but there were handsome portraits — and all of a sudden the missing puzzle pieces were there."

"It was so beautiful" to be able to retire five of the swamp oak leaves that the museum had been using to represent the missing portraits, says Ramirez. (Swamp oaks are the trees that were also chosen to be planted outside the memorial).

After the found portraits were installed on Dec. 29, only five oak leaves remained in the gallery. Three represent victims whose next of kin did not want their portraits exhibited; the reasons include religious reasons or privacy concerns, says Ramirez.

The last two represent the final portraits that have yet to be located: Antonio Dorsey Pratt and Albert Ogletree, both American-born men who worked in the food services industry at the Cantor Fitzgerald offices in the north tower.

"We know very little about them," says Ramirez. "All of our efforts [since the Memorial Museum was founded in 2006] have gotten us no further. But we're still hoping [...] Our goal was and still remains to have every person featured."

Image via National September 11 Memorial & Museum.