Sep 11, 2008 8:00 pm US/Eastern
For 1 N.J. Town, 9/11 Anniversary Especially Hard
Woman Remembers Loss Of Family Members; Middletown Set To Reflect On Darkest Day In U.S. History
MIDDLETOWN, N.J. (CBS) ―
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A trumpeter performing "Taps" at the conclusion of the ceremony stands before the Ground Zero memorial site.
CBS
Middletown's pain is etched on the 37 stone monuments that sit in the township's World Trade Center Memorial gardens, where Mary Lou Byrd came to remember her sister and nephew, who were both killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
"Every year you think it will get easier and it doesn't," Byrd said. "I think because it's a public event it make more difficult."
Her nephew, Brendan Mark Lang, didn't work at the World Trade Center but just happened be there for a meeting that fateful morning.
Her sister, Rosanne Lang, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald.
"Rosanne was full of life. She was a beautiful woman. She worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and she was the life of the party and she was a special girl," Byrd said.
The more than three-dozen monuments were placed in the gardens near the township's train station because this is the place most of Middletown's fallen residents left from seven years ago Thursday, bound for the Twin Towers.
William Schamber, who sells food at the station, knew eight of the victims.
"I think of that day when I come and think about the people who used to come here," Schamber said. "Totally different thing today as it was seven years ago."
On this anniversary, Middletown will be holding its remembrance ceremony in the evening at 6:30. Several hundred people were expected to attend.
Nearly 700 people from New Jersey were killed on 9/11. The largest number of victims from the Garden State -- 57 -- lived in Hoboken.
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