Marietta teen organizes Tech 9/11 event

Kristen Greig was 11 years old when terror rocked the United States.

“I didn’t even know what the World Trade Center was,” the Georgia Tech freshman said Thursday morning as about 100 students gathered to mark the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

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JOHN SPINK/jspink@ajc.com

Shengfu Deng, a post-graduate student at Georgia Tech originally from China, said the memorial at the Atlanta campus is a good way to mourn those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. Georgia Tech students displayed 2,977 U.S. flags as part of a campus-wide memorial and remembrance ceremony to recognize victims and survivors of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

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Greig, an 18-year-old freshman from Marietta, organized the event, during which students, administrators and onlookers sang patriotic songs, read poems and talked of losing loved ones.

They gathered in a concrete amphitheater surrounding the Campanile, an 80-foot steel statue at the center of campus. A few yards away, the school had placed 2,977 small flags — one for each 9/11 victim — on a shaded lawn.

One of them was for Lt. Kevin W. Donnelly, a New York City firefighter who died when he was trapped in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. His nephew, Tech sophomore Sean Donnelly of Chicago, was one of those who spoke Thursday.

“I don’t always cry because I miss him,” said Donnelly, 19, who wore an FDNY hat and T-shirt and a silver bracelet bearing his uncle’s name. “I cry for all the memories we could have had.”

Greig, a Pope High School graduate, took over the Georgia Tech 9/11 Memorial Project from the now-alums who started it in 2003.

“We have to remember those who died,” she said in an interview, “and those who continue to die today in our continuing fight for freedom.”