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Anger, elation at trial venue

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The New York Times

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 14, 2009

NEW YORK - To many, it felt exquisitely right: This is where it began. This is where it must end.

Others wished to push it far away, to a setting less tormented by that indelible date.

This sharp duality of reactions greeted the news Friday that the government would have the accused plotters of the Sept. 11 attack stand trial in New York, in a federal courthouse a few blocks from where two tall towers of the World Trade Center stood and then fell.

"Let them come to New York," said Jim Riches, a retired deputy chief of the New York Fire Department, whose son, Jimmy, also a firefighter, died in the attack.

"Let them get on trial. Let's do it the right way, for all the world to see what they're like. Let's go. It's been too long. Let's get some justice."

A trial will mean a forced public reattachment to a terrorist act that took almost 3,000 lives and singed the city's soul and tested its resilience.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the attack, will be ferried to the city's own jail cells along with four others accused in the plot and put on trial almost in sight of the flattened crime scene.

New York's public officials, for the most part, lined up in support of a trial here. And many others accepted the development as poetic justice, an appropriate circling to an endpoint.

"I welcome anything that would bring these terrorists to trial," said Sally Regenhard, whose son, Christian, was killed in the attack, his remains never recovered. "After eight long years there has been no justice on this on any level, and we want these people brought to justice."

To many others, the prospect of the trial was both unfair and too repulsive to entertain.

"It's absolutely disgusting," said Joan Molinaro, whose son, Carl, a firefighter, also died in the attack.

She said of Mohammed, "He was willing to plead guilty in a military court. Now he comes to New York and gets all the rights of an American citizen, which he isn't. He's going to be, what, two blocks from ground zero, where he can see his handiwork and mock those he murdered."

She started crying. "Every day I get up and know I'll never see my son again," she said. "This is just a smack in his face."

Margit Arias-Kastell lost her husband, Adam Arias, in Tower 2. She, too, could not countenance the prospect of the suspects being defended by lawyers in a court in her city. She was among scores of relatives who had signed a letter opposing regular criminal trials for them.

"It's totally unfair," she said. "Why do we have to constantly relive this? When do we get to be at peace? They should be hung."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, "It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site, where so many New Yorkers were murdered."

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