On September 11, 2001, Salman Hamdani was a 23-year-old emergency medical technician, NYPD cadet, and aspiring medical student who rushed to the World Trade Center that morning to help.
Like thousands of others, Salman never came home that night. And as his family searched for him in the weeks that followed, he was wrongfully linked as an accomplice in the attacks.
His mother, Talat Hamdani, came to StoryCorps with her niece, Armeen Hamdani, to remember the days after Salman went missing.
In April 2002, a month after his remains were found, Salman was finally given a hero’s burial — with his casket draped in an American flag. Hundreds of people attended his funeral, including then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s police commissioner.
Today, there are scholarships in Salman’s name at his alma mater, Queens College, and at Rockefeller University. The street on which he lived in Bayside, Queens, was renamed in his honor.
Originally aired September 8, 2017, on NPR’s Morning Edition.