On Sept. 11, 2001, Rye lost 15 sons, fathers, husbands, brothers, and friends: Thomas Crotty, Benjamin Fisher, Yugi Goya, Ward Haynes, Takashi Kinoshita, Gary E. Koecheler, Teddy Maloney, Francis N. McGuinn, Robert McLaughlin Jr., Christopher D. Mello, George W. Morell, Sean Gordon O’Neill, Thomas A. Palazzo, Michael J. Simon, and Allen V. Upton.
Their names are inscribed at Rye’s 9/11 Memorial gazebo, at Westchester’s Kensico Dam Memorial, and at the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero. Their lives and how they lived, worked, played, laughed, and loved, are forever imprinted on the family and friends that remain – and can never forget.
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“I hate this time of year,” said Mark Morell, whose older brother, George, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.
“You don’t get over it.”
George Morell, 47, was the fifth of seven siblings. He was “unforgettable,” said his sister Mary Jane Haggerty. “He was the life of the party, but so unassuming.”
“A huge Giants fan, he once struck up a lengthy conversation with someone he didn’t know at a game,” she recalls. “When the guy walked away, a friend laughed and said he couldn’t believe George didn’t know he had been talking to Frank Gifford.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t know who I was either,” George replied.
“They say you meet the same people on the way up as on the way down,” Mark said. “George was as good to the shoeshine guy as the CEO. Some people collect cars, George collected friends. I feel like I didn’t really appreciate him enough growing up – but I did as we started our careers and families. I was the quieter one, and George was so outgoing. We walked into a restaurant once and the next thing I knew, we were having dinner with George Steinbrenner.”
Mark Morell worked across the street from the World Trade Center at Merrill Lynch. His brother, George, a father of four, and his best friend, Tommy Palazzo, 44, a father of three, also worked at Cantor.
“I was there that day. I stood and watched,” he said.
The Palazzos lived up the street from the Morells. The kids aligned in age. Running up and down the block, they celebrated birthdays, holidays, and milestones together. George and Mark graduated from Harrison High School, which Tommy also attended, later graduating from Brewster Academy.
As they have every anniversary, the Morells and Palazzos will attend Mass at Resurrection Church, visit Gate of Heaven Cemetery, where George and Tommy are buried, and the Kensico Dam 9/11 Memorial, and gather for dinner together back in Rye.
“The community was great,” Mark said. “So many showed up in so many ways.”
Mark’s daughters attended Rye Presbyterian Nursery School, and the school gave his family a tree, which he planted in his front yard. When Mark and his wife sold their home on Osborn Road three years ago, the new owner assured him he would take care of the tree.
“And every year on 9/11 he sends me a picture of George’s tree,” he said.
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Barbie Haynes wonders from time to time how her son Ward might have aged. Ward Haynes, 35, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, a devoted son, husband, and father, was the kind of guy who lit up the room.
Barbie has never visited the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan.
“Everyone grieves in their own way – no one knows what someone carries inside,” she said.
Barbie, who lost her husband in 1990, has always chosen to smile. She walks miles in the winter and swims in the summer. She keeps moving.
Ward, the oldest of her three children, was born when she was 21.
“I remember looking at him looking up at me in his playpen when he was only about three and saying to him: ‘Listen, I’m young, and you’re young – and we’re going to help each other get through this,” Barbie said.
Barbie believes in signs, whether it’s hearing a favorite song of Ward’s on a down day or a bright star in a dark sky. She recalls feeling low one morning and deciding to just stay in bed.
“A few minutes later, the smoke alarm went off.” She laughed and thought: “OK, Ward – you got me, I’m getting up.’
Theirs was the house where Ward’s high school friends gathered. Many have kept in touch with Barbie.
“Ward had only worked at Cantor for three weeks,” she said. “I do wonder what he would look like now – would he have gone gray?”
She pauses and looks out the window at a brightening afternoon sky.
“He’d be 60 now.”
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“His sense of humor, his love of music, just how much we enjoyed each other’s company,” said Holly O’Neill Melville when asked about her husband, Sean O’Neill, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. “He is still with me every second of every day.
“I know it sounds cliché,” she added, “But everyone who knew Sean always said what a nice guy he was.”
Holly and Sean grew up in Rye. Both graduated from Rye High School, Holly in 1987 and Sean in 1985. They were married in June 2001, and shortly after Holly learned she was pregnant. She named their daughter Sean.
Holly and her daughter will mark the 25th anniversary as they do every year. They will travel downtown to the 9/11 Memorial, they will visit the room that holds the remains, they will listen as the names are read, they will share a meal at their favorite restaurant and stories about Sean, about his life and their lives today.
Sean, who graduated from Rye High School in 2020, teaches history at a private school in the city, and Holly, a licensed clinical social worker, has a private practice in downtown Rye. She also works as a counselor at the Rippowam Cisqua School in Bedford, N.Y.
Looking back at the past 25 years, Holly references the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, that two diametrically opposed forces and feelings can exist at once – both parts essential to the whole. Since losing Sean, her life has been a continuous interplay of grief and joy.
“The heart can hold so much,” she said.
When it first happened, people flocked to help. Her initial reaction was to pull away, to protect her unborn child, to hold her grief close. For a time, she lost her sense of self. She couldn’t work and left her job at Barrier Free Living in the East Village, where she counseled the disabled and victims of domestic violence.
Gradually, she realized the community that raised her was what she needed to heal. She gave herself over to the outpouring of love and leaned on family, friends, and strangers who helped remind her who she was.
“Within vulnerability there is strength,” she said. “I fought it at first but finally allowed people to help, and that’s how I began to heal.”
In the aftermath of the attacks, Holly helped to form a widow’s support group that worked to establish Rye’s 9/11 Memorial, as well as the Kensico Dam Memorial. She has read the names at Ground Zero for many years. And she and Sean have participated in Diane Sawyer’s Children of 9/11 documentary.
While she and friends have worked to ensure that her daughter intimately knew who her dad was, what and who he loved, she has seen him come to life in Sean. They share not only an uncanny resemblance, but also a “silly sense of humor and a passion for music.”
Holly also allowed herself to love again and in 2007 married a “wonderful, kind, and generous guy who could take all this on,” she laughs. She and her husband, Garth Melville, have a son, Jack, who graduated from Rye High in June. She describes Jack, along with her daughter, “as the light of her life.” Her face brightens but voice breaks when she describes dropping Jack off at college.
“It was not an easy day,” she said.
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Chris Mello was only 25 when he boarded American Airlines Flight 11 in Boston, where he worked as an analyst at Alta Communications. Headed to Los Angeles for a business trip, Chris was accompanied by David Retik, a manager at Alta. Chris graduated from Rye High School in 1994, a standout student and athlete with a world of possibility ahead.
“We miss Chris terribly and still feel his loss every day,” said his older brother, J.D. “We often wonder what his life would have become had he not been taken from us so soon. He was a wonderful son, brother, and friend, but he was robbed of the time to build a family and a career, and we lost the opportunity as a family to share in his life over these past 25 years.”
A standout student-athlete with a long list of accolades, Chris is remembered by friends and colleagues as a “talented, kind, humorous, modest, and passionate young man with a resume of accomplishments and a life full of potential.”
Along with family and friends, Chris’s father, Douglas Mello, who died in March 2025, established the Chris Mello Scholarship Award in 2002. Presented at the annual Rye-Harrison football game to a student from each school, the award celebrates the qualities Chris embodied: sportsmanship, competitiveness, academic achievement, and leadership. In the wake of unspeakable loss, Doug Mello and his family and friends created a lasting legacy in Chris’s name.
“We find solace in the many ways we remember Chris,” J.D. said, “including the Rye High School scholarship, the Golden Dozen scholarship, the annual Chris Mello award at the Rye-Harrison game, and the Retik-Mello Foundation.
Today, Chris is known to a whole new generation of Rye kids and parents. His name is synonymous with dedication, grit, loyalty, teamwork, and accomplishments on and off the field. Since its inception, more than 50 student-athletes have received the Mello Award. Money is raised through an annual golf outing, which will take place this year Oct. 5 at Harrison Meadows Country Club.
“The memories of Chris still bring us joy, and the support of our communities has given us comfort, yet the loss and sadness remain ever present,” J.D. said. “With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaching, we recognize the historical significance of that terrible day, but we choose to remember and celebrate Chris on a more personal level.”
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The Rye Rangers Hockey Club lost three members on 9/11. Rocky Shepard played and coached alongside his nephew, Teddy Maloney, as well as Ward Haynes and Tommy Palazzo.
“All in their mid-30s, two or three kids each, just wonderful, wonderful guys,” Shepard said. “Shortly after 9/11, the Rangers held a fundraiser for the widows and their children – we had a big hockey bag and people tossed in donations and raised a considerable amount for the families.
“Teddy, a goalie, was a happy-go-lucky, fun guy. If he played well, he was happy; if the other team scored, well – we all waited to see what would happen. He was just loved by everyone.”
At the time of the attacks, Teddy had a 14-month-old daughter named Mason, and his wife, Brinley, was expecting a second daughter, who was born in November 2001. She is named Teddy.
While the hockey game was an immediate response to the attacks, the Maloney family launched the Big Dog Classic, a golf tournament in Teddy’s honor, named after his nickname. Since 2001, the event has raised more than $800,000 for a scholarship in Teddy’s name at Proctor Academy, from which he graduated in 1988. This year’s Big Dog Classic is Friday, Oct. 9 at Harrison Meadows Country Club.
The Rye Rangers also established The Good Skate Award in honor of Teddy, Tommy Palazzo, and Ward Haynes. Since 2001, the award has been given annually to a member of the club who best represents the goodness, generosity, and spirit of these three players, coaches, and friends.
“Who can believe it’s been 25 years?” said Shepard, who questions whether the younger generation, or people who were not here on 9/11, can truly understand or appreciate the impact the attacks had on Rye – and the greater New York area.
“The churches were back-to-back with funerals. We went to three in one day,” he said. “It brought the community together; it brought the city together. People on the subway said hello. Strangers hugged each other. It changed the city for a time, for the better.”
“I think about Teddy, about that time, every day,” said Shepard, who plays a regular Wednesday round at Rye Golf Club with a friend who was a firefighter and first responder on 9/11.
“Not a week goes by that we don’t talk about it.”
