Jason Seymour has loaned his late mother’s purse and boarding pass to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, nearly a quarter-century after she perished on American Airlines Flight 11.
Seymour, who lives in California, received the mystery package about a month after the attacks. Inside was the boarding pass his mother, Jacqueline “June” Norton, had used that morning at Boston’s Logan International Airport. She and her husband, Robert, were headed to Los Angeles before continuing to Santa Barbara for their son’s wedding just four days later.
“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 tattered pocketbook also held Norton’s cellphone, a Tiffany pen and a newspaper clipping with a poem about tolerance. Seymour suspects it was sucked from the aircraft and discovered on a nearby rooftop by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
He likened the survival of the documents to “two tickets from the Titanic.”
Seymour chose to loan the items this year so visitors would remember how ordinary the victims’ lives had been. “It’s one of those things that everybody pictures: their mom with a purse,” he said.
Darlene Keohane reached a similar decision about her brother John’s belongings. The 41-year-old had not been scheduled to work at Zurich Insurance on Sept. 11, but stopped by his office near the World Trade Center that morning. When the attack began, he helped evacuate dozens of coworkers from One Liberty Plaza and reunited on the street with his domestic partner, Mike.
“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,” Keohane recalled.
The explosion John heard was the South Tower collapsing. Separated from Mike in the chaos, his body was not found in the wreckage for three days.
Desperate for answers about his final moments, the family sent letters to area buildings. Father Andrew Cieszkowski, pastor at nearby Our Lady of Victory, responded that he had performed last rites.
“It’s amazing. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known really where he was exactly,” Darlene said. She donated the shoes her brother had worn that morning. “The museum will preserve John’s memory. He went to [his office] that morning in those shoes and hours later he died running for his life in his shoes.”
Another recent donation came from the family of FDNY Battalion Chief Brian O’Flaherty. His life-saving helmet had already been given to the memorial before the museum even had a permanent address, but the hat’s front piece remained with him until his death from 9/11-related cancer in 2022.
O’Flaherty had rushed into the Marriott Hotel concourse with the 9th Battalion when the South Tower collapsed, an event that killed several of his men and severely injured many survivors. A piece of concrete struck him unconscious and crushed his shoulder — injuries his family said ultimately saved his life.
He had passed his helmet to a fellow firefighter, who lost it in the chaos. When the helmet was found in the debris, his wife Karin was warned he might have been among the 15 men from the 9th Battalion killed that day.
“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,” Karin O’Flaherty said. Her husband struggled with survivor’s guilt for the remainder of his life and kept the front piece in case it might comfort the children of his fallen brothers. The family has now donated it to join his helmet at the museum.