Twenty-five years should be enough time for a wound to close.
For the families of September 11, it has not been.
On September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed when 19 al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial airplanes. Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, another struck the Pentagon, and the fourth — United Airlines Flight 93 — crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.
A quarter of a century later, the images belong to history. Children born after the attacks are now adults. A new World Trade Center has risen over Lower Manhattan. Memorials stand where devastation once covered the ground.
But for parents who lost a child that morning, September 11 is not primarily history.
It is the day their child never came home.
And as America marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks, some families are confronting an extraordinarily painful reality: the legal process surrounding the men accused of planning 9/11 still has not produced the final accountability they have spent decades waiting to see.
“We’re still fighting for justice to this day,” is the sentiment being voiced by families who have carried that fight through administrations, court battles and years of delay.
Their grief has grown older.
Their questions have not.
Twenty-Five Years Later, September 11 Still Feels Like Yesterday
There is something almost impossible about the number 25.
For people old enough to remember September 11, 2001, the morning remains unusually vivid. They remember where they were when the first reports arrived, the disbelief when the second aircraft struck the South Tower, and the realization that what appeared at first to be a terrible accident was something deliberate.
For families whose relatives were aboard the planes or inside the buildings, those hours were much more personal.
Phones rang without answers.
Television screens showed buildings where husbands, wives, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters had gone to work that morning.
Some families received final phone calls.
Others received nothing.
And for many, there was no body to bring home.
Across the United States, 2,977 victims were killed in the attacks, not including the 19 hijackers. The dead came from dozens of countries and from almost every imaginable background. They were executives and restaurant workers, firefighters and police officers, flight attendants and tourists, parents and children. (Reuters)
Michigan, too, lost members of its community.
The Michigan Remembers 9-11 Fund is marking the anniversary by honoring 42 victims with Michigan connections, preserving their individual stories as the attacks move from living memory into history for younger generations. (Michigan Remembers)
That transition is something families feel intensely.
They are not simply trying to remember what happened.
They are trying to make sure the people who died are remembered as people.
A Son Doesn’t Become a Statistic Because 25 Years Have Passed
For parents, the passage of time creates a peculiar kind of grief.
Their children remain forever the age they were in 2001.
The world around them does not.
Birthdays arrive.
Weddings happen without them.
Grandchildren are born whom they never meet.
Parents grow old enough to realize that they have now lived decades beyond the child they expected would someday outlive them.
The anniversary brings all of that back into public view.
But the 25th anniversary has also renewed attention on another painful issue: justice.
Families have spent years watching the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of being the principal architect of the September 11 plot, and other defendants become trapped in a legal process that has stretched across decades.
The case has been complicated by disputes over evidence obtained through torture, changes in judges and legal teams, questions over the admissibility of statements, arguments about classified material and repeated battles over whether plea agreements should replace a full capital trial.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, there still has been no completed trial of the alleged 9/11 mastermind. (New York Post)
For families who once assumed they would eventually sit in a courtroom and watch the case reach a conclusion, the wait has become almost unimaginable.
“We Still Don’t Have Justice”
Gordon Felt understands that frustration personally.
His older brother, Edward Porter Felt, was aboard United Airlines Flight 93.
Twenty-five years later, Gordon told reporters that anger remains because families still do not have the accountability they expected.
“We still don’t have justice, we still don’t have the accountability for that day,” he said while discussing the continuing legal process surrounding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other accused plotters. (AOL.com)
That frustration is shared by other relatives.
For them, justice is not simply about punishment.
It is about establishing a public record.
It is about hearing evidence.
It is about understanding how the plot happened and who supported it.
And it is about reaching an ending to a legal process that began when some of today’s adults were not yet born.
Instead, families have watched deadlines move and hearings multiply.
Even now, a trial remains in the future rather than the past.
The Parents Are Growing Older While the Case Keeps Moving Further Away
That is perhaps the cruelest element of the delay.
Parents who were middle-aged when their children died are now elderly.
Some relatives who spent years demanding answers have themselves died before seeing the process concluded.
The passage of time has therefore created a question that once would have seemed unthinkable:
Will some of the victims’ parents live long enough to see a final resolution?
The concern is no longer abstract.
The prosecution at Guantánamo Bay has moved so slowly that the gap between the attacks and a possible trial now spans more than a generation. Recent reporting has pointed to June 2028 as a tentative trial date, although the case’s history of postponements leaves families understandably cautious about treating any date as final. (New York Post)
By then, almost 27 years will have passed since the attacks.
A baby born on September 11, 2001, would be approaching 27.
For parents who lost adult children that morning, those numbers carry a very different meaning.
They measure how long they have waited.
The Fight for Justice Has Another Front: Saudi Arabia
The Guantánamo prosecution isn’t the only legal battle that has kept September 11 families fighting.
For years, relatives of victims have also pursued civil litigation against Saudi Arabia, alleging that Saudi officials or agents provided support connected to some of the hijackers.
Saudi Arabia has consistently denied responsibility for the attacks.
The litigation, however, has continued.
In August 2025, U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels rejected Saudi Arabia’s attempt to dismiss the case, allowing families’ claims to move forward. The decision represented a major development after years of discovery and legal arguments. (The Guardian)
For families, the case represents something broader than financial compensation.
They want documents.
Testimony.
Answers.
And a judicial determination of what, if any, support networks existed around the hijackers inside the United States.
Terry Strada, whose husband Tom was killed in the North Tower and who has become one of the most prominent advocates for 9/11 families, said the effort has already taken far too long. (The Guardian)
Twenty-five years after the attacks, that fight continues too.
The Morning America Changed
To understand why families refuse to stop, it is worth returning to the morning itself.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
At first, television coverage struggled to understand what viewers were seeing.
Then, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower.
There was no longer any question.
America was under attack.
At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon.
And at 10:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville after passengers and crew attempted to retake control of the aircraft.
The South Tower had already collapsed at 9:59 a.m.
The North Tower fell at 10:28.
In less than two hours, the Manhattan skyline had been transformed, the Pentagon had been attacked and thousands of families had entered a nightmare from which there could be no complete return.
The attacks reshaped American foreign policy, airport security, intelligence gathering, surveillance and warfare.
But those enormous geopolitical consequences can sometimes obscure what September 11 actually was at its most basic level.
Thousands of individual people went somewhere that morning expecting to come home.
They did not.
Flight 93 Became One of the Day’s Most Extraordinary Stories
The passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 learned what had happened in New York through phone calls from the aircraft.
They understood that their hijacked plane was likely intended to become another weapon.
So they made a decision.
They fought back.
Investigators believe the hijackers intended to strike a target in Washington, with the U.S. Capitol considered the likely destination.
Instead, Flight 93 crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania.
Everyone aboard died.
But no one on the ground at the intended target did.
The passengers and crew became remembered not simply as victims but as people who, after realizing what was happening, acted.
That is why the Flight 93 National Memorial remains such an emotionally powerful part of the September 11 story.
It preserves 40 names.
Forty individual lives.
And behind almost every name is a family that had to learn how to continue living after September 11.
For One Michigan Survivor, Remembering Has Become a Mission
Michigan’s connection to September 11 is also preserved through people who survived.
Patrick Anderson was inside the Marriott World Trade Center hotel on the morning of the attacks.
Twenty-five years later, he continues working to make sure the events are remembered.
Lansing now has an H-beam recovered from the World Trade Center wreckage, one of the physical objects that allows younger visitors to encounter the history in a way that photographs alone cannot provide.
Anderson founded the Michigan Remembers 9-11 Fund, which works to preserve the memory of the attacks and Michigan’s victims.
“It’s vital that we think back and think about the people we lost,” Anderson said ahead of the anniversary. (CBS News)
That task becomes more important with each passing year.
In 2001, virtually every American adult could remember September 11 personally.
In 2026, millions of adults have no memory of it at all.
For them, 9/11 belongs to textbooks, documentaries and photographs.
For the parents who lost children, however, it belongs to yesterday.
September 11 Is Still Killing People
The number 2,977 is used so often that it can sound like the final death toll.
It isn’t.
Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to the toxic dust and debris that covered Lower Manhattan after the towers collapsed.
Firefighters, police officers, construction workers, volunteers, residents and office workers breathed air containing a dangerous mixture of pollutants.
Years later, cancers and chronic respiratory illnesses emerged among people who had worked at or lived near Ground Zero.
The World Trade Center Health Program now serves more than 150,000 people affected by 9/11-related illnesses, and more than 9,000 members of the program have died. (Reuters)
Meanwhile, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund continues receiving new claims.
As of August 31, 2026, the fund had received more than 112,000 claims and awarded more than $18.56 billion to over 77,000 claimants since reopening in 2011. The Justice Department says it continues receiving more than 750 new claims every month. (Department of Justice)
Twenty-five years later, September 11 is therefore not only being remembered.
Its physical consequences are still unfolding.
What Does Justice Mean After 25 Years?
There may never be a single answer.
For some families, justice means seeing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other accused conspirators tried.
For others, it means finally obtaining a definitive account of who assisted the hijackers.
For some, it means accountability through the civil case involving Saudi Arabia.
For others, justice means ensuring that first responders and survivors suffering from 9/11-related diseases receive medical care and compensation.
And for almost everyone directly affected, it means refusing to allow the victims to disappear into a number.
That may explain why the phrase “Never Forget” remains so powerful.
It isn’t merely an instruction to remember that an attack occurred.
It asks people to remember who was lost.
Twenty-Five Years Have Passed. Their Child Is Still Gone.
There is a cruel disconnect between public anniversaries and private grief.
America can commemorate September 11 once a year.
Parents cannot.
For them, the anniversary may be September 11, but grief can arrive on an ordinary Tuesday.
It arrives on birthdays.
At weddings.
When a photograph appears unexpectedly.
When a familiar song plays.
When another grandchild is born.
When someone asks how many children they have and the answer suddenly becomes complicated.
Twenty-five years does not erase those moments.
If anything, the milestone makes the absence more visible.
A son or daughter who should now be approaching middle age remains frozen in photographs from 2001.
The parents have aged.
Their child has not.
And Still, They Keep Fighting
That may ultimately be the most important part of this anniversary.
September 11 created enormous political changes, two decades of war and a national-security system fundamentally different from the one that existed on September 10, 2001.
But behind all of that history are families who have spent 25 years doing something much simpler.
They have kept showing up.
They attended hearings.
They read documents.
They gave interviews.
They traveled to memorials.
They told their children’s stories.
They challenged governments.
They demanded trials.
They asked questions even when answers took years to arrive.
And now they are doing it again.
A quarter-century after the morning that changed their lives, the legal story of September 11 remains unfinished. The alleged mastermind’s case has yet to reach a completed trial, litigation over alleged outside assistance continues, and families are watching the years pass while hoping they will still be here when the final answers arrive. (The Guardian)
For the rest of America, September 11, 2001, happened 25 years ago.
For the parents who lost a child, there is another way of measuring time.
It has been 25 birthdays without them.
Twenty-five Christmases.
Twenty-five summers.
Twenty-five years of wondering what their life would look like now.
And 25 years of refusing to let the world forget why they are still asking for justice.
Because for them, the fight was never about history.
It was about their child.
