Frank Siller knew his brother was gone before anyone told him.
“I turned to my mother-in-law and said, ‘I think I just lost my brother.’ I was sick to my stomach,” Frank told an interviewer of the morning of September 11, 2001. The Staten Island native, now 73, was recalling the hours after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, when his youngest sibling Stephen Siller, then 34, made a fateful choice that would define both their lives.
Stephen had just finished his shift as an FDNY firefighter and was driving home from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Staten Island when word came that the North Tower was hit. He turned his truck around, strapped on 60 pounds of gear, and ran on foot through the closed Brooklyn Battery Tunnel toward the burning towers in Lower Manhattan. He never came back.
The official confirmation came from Stephen’s friend and fellow firefighter Richie Obermeyer, who called Frank from Ground Zero. “No one is coming home, Frank,” Obermeyer told him. “No one.” Stephen, a married father of five children, was among the 343 FDNY members killed that day.
“It was brutal, but that’s when our faith kicked in,” said Frank, a devout Catholic. The six surviving Siller siblings faced what he called an agonizing choice. “Are we going to let that define everything — or are we going to take what Stephen did and thank him for his sacrifice?”
They chose the latter. In 2002, the family launched the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, initially to help children who had lost parents in the attacks. That first year they staged a 5K run retracing Stephen’s route through the tunnel; 1,500 people showed up. This year’s event will draw 30,000 participants. The charity has since expanded far beyond its original scope, building smart homes for injured veterans, housing homeless veterans, paying off mortgages for Gold Star families, and funding scholarships for children of fallen first responders.
The foundation’s name and mission draw from St. Francis of Assisi’s words: “While we are here, let us do good.” Frank’s new memoir, “Let Us Do Good,” traces both the charity’s growth and the family story behind it. “I wanted to introduce people to my mom and dad,” he said of parents George and Mae Siller, who raised seven children in a crowded Staten Island home anchored by faith. “We had each other, and we had great friends,” he said, though money was always tight.
The book also revisits Stephen’s difficult childhood. Their father died of a heart embolism when Stephen was just 10; their mother passed a year and a half later. The older siblings took him in. Frank, 14 years Stephen’s senior, once took the boy to a park where he broke down crying, saying he wished he had never been born. “I know God put you on this Earth for a reason,” Frank told him. “And I know someday you are going to do something very special.”
Stephen carried a heaviness beyond his years. “Stephen admitted to [his wife Sally] that his need to make the most out of every day stemmed from a deeply held premonition that he was going to die young,” Frank writes. That urgency drove him toward the towers when others fled.
The foundation’s work has attracted celebrity supporters including Sylvester Stallone, Mark Wahlberg, and Dave Portnoy, but Frank emphasizes the ordinary families at the center of the mission. “I have sat with these families in the raw aftermath of their losses, when the shock is still fresh and the reality hasn’t set in,” he writes. By end of 2026, Tunnel to Towers expects to have delivered more than 2,000 mortgage-free homes.
Frank has also found himself defending the memory of that day against revisionism. After political streamer Hasan Piker said “America deserved 9/11,” Siller pushed back without naming him directly. “Somebody that says America deserved 9/11? It’s the greatest country in the world… It’s not true.” He admitted his younger self would have handled it differently: “25-year-old Frank would punch Piker in the face,” he said, but at 73, “it’s not going to settle anything.” He called such commentators “naive kids that have been brainwashed.”
Through it all, Frank still returns to that morning and the brother who ran toward disaster. “I’d rather have him back, in a very selfish way. That’s hard to say,” he admitted. “I wish I was helping somebody else’s foundation and he was still here.” He imagines Stephen’s final thoughts, torn between the family waiting at home and the duty pulling him forward. “That’s a hero,” he said.