Husband and wife Lt. Colonel Robert "Mike" Brooks and Michelina Moretti Brooks last year turned their front yard into a memorial for armed forces and police to let those who serve know they are appreciated. Recently, they have added more to the memorial to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Brad Fetchet was 24 and working at a firm called Keese, Bruyette & Woods on the 89th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

“Of course, our son was murdered,” said Frank Fetchet of New Canaan, Conn., a Youngstown native. “He was going to work just like everyone else. He really liked his job. He had a young woman I thought he was going to get engaged to.”

Twenty years later, Fetchet doesn’t dwell on the loss, though he said it never leaves him.

“I think we’re resilient and people tend to, over time, tuck that loss away. You tuck it into a safe place in your heart and your mind, and you learn over time what are the triggers that take you down that slope to something awful,” Fetchet said.

Fetchet’s wife, Mary Fetchet, who was a social worker dealing with adults at the time, saw an immediate need in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Frank Fetchett said.

“She started holding a meeting in our house once a week,” Frank Fetchet said. When those meetings became too chaotic, the Fetchets started a 501(C) 3 — Voices of September 11 — so named for all those who could no longer speak for themselves.

Before internet access was widespread, Voices operated mostly through phone calls and printed material, Frank Fetchet said. It helped provide continuing support to a community that was still healing.

“The nonprofit, we thought at the time, would be for a couple of years,” Frank Fetchet said.

Fast forward 20 years and the nonprofit — now Voices Center for Resilience — continues helping communities recover from traumatic events and provides long-term support resources that promote mental health care and wellness for victims’ families, responders and survivors.

“It’s unusual to have stayed with a population as long as we have, so we really have an intimate understanding of long-term needs,” Frank Fetchet said. Voices has helped provide support after acts of violence and most recently following the Surfside, Fla., condo collapse, Fetchet said.

As for the Fetchets themselves, Frank and Mary have come a long way from when they met at Ursuline High School. Mary Fetchet has been active in advocating for issues surrounding Sept. 11 and was active as the “powers that be” debated what would be done on the site of the twin towers.

In 2005, the Fetchets began interviewing more than 1,600 families that lost someone in the attack, helping them to digitally tell the story of their loved ones — a project that was innovative in a time before smartphones, Frank Fetchet said. That testimony was given, with the families’ permission, to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

The Fetchet’s younger sons, who were in eighth grade and college when the attacks happened, are grown now, and one has children of his own.

While the spotlight on the Fetchet family gets “very bright this time of year,” before it starts fading on the 12th, life goes on.

“And I always say your faith, your family, and your friends carry you,” Frank Fetchet said. “That’s not just a 9/11 statement.”

HELPING HANDS

Debbie Chitester arrived in New York City on Sept. 18, 2001 — one week after the twin towers of the World Trade Center were felled in a terrorist attack that also would go down in history.

As a manager of a Red Cross processing center for volunteers, she helped place the thousands of volunteers who flooded into the city to help.

“In that first month, the Red Cross sent over 20,000 local volunteers. We had a lot of people wanting to help,” Chitester said. In the city that never sleeps, the volunteer center was open 24 hours a day, sometimes placing people in volunteer roles at 2 a.m., she added.

The volunteers ran respite centers where workers and responsders digging through the piles of rubble that were once the World Trade Center towers could come to rest and eat. Volunteers also worked to reunite families and help those who lost family members or lost their livelihoods in the attack.

Chitester said almost all of the volunteers, mostly from New York and surrounding states, were just degrees away from knowing someone who was affected in the towers — a friend of a friend, a neighbor, an acquaintance lost someone or something that day.

“Everybody had some tie.”

Twenty years later, Chitester, now the disaster program manager for the Greater Akron and Mahoning Valley chapter of the Red Cross, wants people to never forget where we were as a nation during that time.

“I will never forget that it happened,” Chitester said. “The feeling of sadness, but also trying to help people.”

COMING TOGETHER

Around the same time that Chitester was arriving in New York, then-Youngstown State University student Anthony Spano learned that a YSU alumnus, Terry Lynch, was killed in the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.

“That was something that we were like, wait, what?” Spano said.

Spano and fellow student Sara O’Brien had already been talking about doing something on campus to commemorate the attack, but with the local tie, the project took on a “whole new meaning,” Spano said.

“Everyone had a passion for it. Not just that we were doing it, everyone had that special touch,” Spano said.

The campus memorial was dedicated a year later, on Sept. 11, 2002. Lynch’s wife, Jackie Lynch, spoke with some 2,000 people in attendance.

“Sometimes you look back and look at what you did 20 years ago — and the memorial is still up and still commemorating and still making an impact on faculty, students and staff over those 20 years,” said Spano, who still lives in Youngstown and holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree from YSU.

“I’m humbled at just the opportunity to have it there. I think it really says a lot about the campus community, as well as everyone who was there at the time,” Spano said. “At the end of the day, the 9/11 memorial was to honor…and bring the community together.”

REMEMBERING

In Boardman, another memorial has sprung up in the front yard of a residential home.

Michelina Moretti Brooks and her husband, retired Lt. Col. Robert “Mike” Brooks, began transforming their 8480 Hitchcock Road yard last year, when they heard about how many young veterans were dying from suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they were more isolated.

“If they drive by the house, wouldn’t it be nice for them to see something that gives them hope?” Michelina Brooks said.

As their front yard was “not doing anybody good,” the Brooks dug it up by hand and began installing signs and plaques and lighting thanking military and police for their service. As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks quickly approached, they made sure to honor that, too.

Mike Brooks, 73, a veteran of the National Guard and Air Force and a pilot with thousands of hours in the air, said he had “no words to describe” Sept. 11, 2021.

“That feeling that you had, everybody had. There was nobody that I ever talked to that didn’t remember how they felt that day,” he said. “People were scared to death for the first time in their lives.”

The Brooks’ front yard memorial has a space where people can pull in and reflect, a bench for anyone who wants to sit, and a display with a variety of flags that anyone can take for themselves, for a friend, or to honor someone they know.

“A flag is not just an ornament; it’s us,” Brooks said. “It means so much to so many people, and the first flags we bought, small flags, we had them out and they were gone in three days.”

Michelina Brooks said people have been slowing down to look at the memorial.

“It just means something,” she said.

avugrincic@tribtoday.com