On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Director of Public Safety Todd Pelazza was seated at his desk. Larri Mazon, director of multicultural relations at the time, went to Pelazza’s office to tell him about an incident in New York. Mazon had a large TV in his office and they proceeded to watch history unfold.
By about 10:30 a.m., Fairfield University had closed its gates and manned the front entrance to campus with an officer. Off-duty officers were called in.
“I vividly remember that day,” said Pelazza, “One of the things that still strikes me is the weather. It was a crystal clear day with literally not a cloud in the sky.
“Whenever there’s weather like that today, it still sends a chill down my back.”
In 2001, it was school policy for student residences to have landlines. There was no StagAlert system. Calls came pouring in to the Department of Public Safety office from students unsure what to do.
Pelazza had been at Fairfield for almost 10 years at that point, but the situation was unprecedented. Disaster planning had been done, but nothing quite applied to 9/11. The closed gates and checkpoints remained for more than a week after that cloudless Tuesday.
“Because of our location, we knew there would be students affected,” said Pelazza.
ResLife, Campus Ministry, Counseling Services, DPS and others in the campus community began their search for whom Fairfield might have lost.
The World Trade Center had so many people working there every day that it had its own zip code. At the Office of Alumni Relations, Janet Canepa ’82 began combing through files for alumni that were listed under the WTC zip code. When they were found, their home telephone numbers were called.
Canepa remembers what some of those calls were like. “You know, you could hear that there would be a lot of people over the house and the house would calm down [when the phone call started]. … They were there to console.”
It took until the month of October 2001 for the school to determine that 14 alumni perished in the attack.
One of Canepa’s classmates, Patrick McGuire ’82, was at work on the 84th floor of 2 World Trade Center. McGuire was about to evacuate the building, but an announcement over the building intercom said the situation was under control, so he resumed his work at Euro Brokers, Inc.
His long-time friend and Fairfield classmate, Michael Murray ’82, had made it down to the 40th floor of that building, but was on his way back up when a plane slammed into floors 78 through 84.
Ryan McGuire ’16, son of Patrick McGuire, remembers a phone call at his house around 6:30 p.m. “It was his best friend who worked right next to him and he had gotten out and he was on his way home at that point because the city was locked down – couldn’t get ahold of him, couldn’t get ahold of anybody …
“… It was so hectic. We understood it was going to take more than a day to find out if he was dead or alive. Like four or five days later, that’s when we realized, ‘OK, we just want to find him, just have something to bury, something at all, even a little bit.’
“Ten days later … they came up to our house saying they found his entire body. They found every bit of him.”
The first Mass on campus to honor the victims was on October 28, 2001 and was held in Alumni Hall. It was presided by Rev. Aloysius P. Kelley, S.J., and the Fairfield University Glee Club closed the Mass with a singing of “America the Beautiful.”
“The reason I remember it is because I actually fell asleep during it,” said McGuire ’16. “I’m this little 7-year-old kid who hasn’t really slept at all and then we get into this Mass and I pass out. I wake up 15 to 20 minutes later and my brother is laughing hysterically at me and my mom’s laughing. You know, it was one of those moments where it was like finally something funny happened and … the tension was settling.”
About 13 months after the attacks, on Oct. 22, 2002, a Fairfield maintenance van drove down to New York City and brought a piece of steel, once part of the towers, to campus.
“Nothing felt right,” Canepa said. “It was just so hard. Everybody was just so lost at what to do. And then we just were lucky. I think the piece of steel made it easier, you know, to kind of figure out what to do because it would be something really special.”
At that time Fairfield was the first college campus to have a piece of the debris from Sept. 11 memorialized. It still rests today near the front door of Alumni House on a stone carved with the names of the 14 alumni victims: Michael Andrews ’89; Jonathan Cappello ’00; Christopher Dunne ’95; Steven Hagis ’91; Joseph Heller ’86; Michael Jacobs ’69; Michael Lunden ’86; Francis McGuinn ’74; Patrick McGuire ’82; William Micciulli ’93; Marc Murolo ’95; Christopher Orgielewicz ’87; Johanna Sigmund ’98 and Christopher Slattery ’98.
“Each year I visit the site usually a day before [the anniversary], and then of course on the day of,” said Pelazza.
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