A month after his mother’s death, Jason Seymour found an unexpected package waiting at his California home.
Inside was an object almost impossible to comprehend: the boarding pass his mother, Jacqueline “June” Norton, had carried when she boarded American Airlines Flight 11 at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Sept. 11, 2001. She and her husband, Robert, were headed to Los Angeles that morning.
Their trip was supposed to continue to Santa Barbara, where Seymour was set to be married just four days later.
The boarding pass had been kept in Norton’s purse and became one of the rare personal belongings recovered largely intact after hijackers crashed the plane, carrying 92 passengers and crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
“It’s the most jaw-dropping thing. It was literally on the plane when it went into the tower, which is just crazy. Because of the destruction of the towers, obviously there’s not very many items that survived,” Seymour told The Post.
“To think of the fragility of a boarding pass surviving that explosion is just kind of crazy … it’s kind of a miracle.”
The pass is now among hundreds of newly loaned or donated 9/11 artifacts connected to the Sept. 11 attacks and preserved by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. To Seymour, its survival feels comparable to discovering “two tickets from the Titanic.”
He believes the battered purse, which also held Norton’s cellphone, a Tiffany pen and a newspaper clipping featuring a poem about tolerance, may have been pulled from the aircraft’s wreckage and later recovered on a nearby rooftop by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Seymour decided to loan it to the museum this year so that visitors are reminded of how normal the victims were.
“It’s one of those things that everybody pictures: their mom with a purse,” he said.
Darlene Keohane’s decided to donate her brother’s shoes for a similar reason. John wasn’t supposed to report to work at Zurich Insurance on Sept. 11, but fatefully decided to stop by his office when the attack on the World Trade Center began just one block away.
The 41-year-old helped evacuate dozens of his coworkers from One Liberty Plaza and connected on the street with his domestic partner, Mike, seemingly safe.
“He called my mom on the telephone and was saying, ‘This is awful. There’s been a plane crash into the World Trade Center,’ and he told her he thought that a third plane had hit … and that was the end,” John’s sister, Darlene Keohane, recalled.
The boom he heard was actually the South Tower collapsing. In the chaos, he was separated from Mike.
It would be three days before John’s family in San Francisco got the call that his body was found in the wreckage. Desperate to learn more about his final moments, they submitted letters to buildings in the area looking for anyone who might have crossed paths with him.
Father Andrew Cieszkowski, a pastor at nearby Our Lady of Victory, replied to say he was able to perform last rites.
“It’s amazing. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known really where he was exactly,” Darlene said.
“The museum will preserve John’s memory,” she added of the decision to part with his shoes. “He went to [his office] that morning in those shoes and hours later he died running for his life in his shoes.”
Another recent addition to the museum came from the family of Brian O’Flaherty. While the FDNY Battalion Chief’s life-saving helmet was given to the memorial even before the museum had an address, the hat’s front piece stayed with O’Flaherty until after his death from 9/11-related cancer in 2022.
He was part of the 9th Battalion crew who rushed into the Marriott Hotel concourse when the South Tower collapsed, killing several of his men and severely injuring many of the survivors.
A piece of concrete slammed down on top of O’Flaherty, knocking him unconscious and crushing his shoulder — injuries his family said ultimately saved his life.
His helmet, however, did go back into the towers: He passed it off to a fellow firefighter, who ended up losing it. When it was found in the debris after the buildings collapsed that day, O’Flaherty’s wife, Karin, was warned he may have been killed with the 15 other men from the 9th Battalion.
“He did what every other firefighter, whether they were working or at a beach, wherever they were, ran into the city, ran through the tunnels, ran towards the event,” said Karin O’Flaherty.
He was later located by his family at a hospital. But O’Flaherty grappled with survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life and, even after donating his helmet to the museum, held onto the front piece in case it could bring solace to any of the children of his fallen brothers.
Now it’s a symbol to remind us all of the many sacrifices made that day.
