IT WAS only six people. As for the damage, well, they could patch that up after a while, and people could forget what happened and get on with their important lives.
But Michael Macko would never forget. His father was one of the six who died while eating his lunch that day in 1993, so Macko hardly needed the total collapse of the World Trade Center to remind him what had happened there before.
Still, in the weeks and months after the planes hit, Macko waited. He read everything he could read and watched everything he could watch. He knew somebody would say his father’s name.
“I kept reading, looking for some word about a memorial for my father and the other five victims,” Macko said. “But we weren’t included in that. We felt forgotten.”
Macko and the other families used to gather at a granite memorial every Feb. 26 for a moment of silence.
But like just about everything else in the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, the monument was obliterated, so the families observed last month’s moment of silence on a wooden platform.
William Macko, 57, a mechanical engineer for the Port Authority, had been a Marine. His son thinks about that every time he sees a flag.
Also killed in the 1993 attack were John DiGiovanni of Valley Stream, Robert Kirkpatrick of Suffern, Steve Knapp of New York City, Monica Smith of Seaford and Wilfredo Mercado of Brooklyn. More than 1,000 people were injured.
Macko has written to legislators urging them to extend the benefits offered to families of Sept. 11 victims to those from the 1993 attack.
Members of the six families were not included in a tax-relief package signed into law by President Bush, a bill that included victims of the Oklahoma City bombing.