Patricia Del Rio

Who else put the heat on today? It’s so chilly in Connecticut right now! I can’t believe it’s days away from Memorial Day weekend. It feels like November!

What a special evening celebrating the legacy of Denise D’Ascenzo with a beautiful award dinner filled with love and inspiration.

We celebrated some very special people in CT who are inspiring others to make a difference in their communities.

The 2024 Award Recipients:

Kindness Award: (Posthumously) - Dan Nolan

Human Spirit Awards:
The Bristol Police Department
Lesley Bennett
Dave Stevens
Dr. William Petit
Jalyn Hunter

It was my absolute honor to work alongside Denise’s husband Wayne, her daughter Kathryn, and and so many other wonderful people with less recognizable names to put this event together. Denise would be so proud of how hard they are working to keep her memory alive and honor her beautiful spirit by awarding people who are doing kind and inspiring things in this world. As Denise would say, “Be open, be brave, be kind.” We all never know how long we have on this earth, but with those guiding principles, it is a life well lived. Denise’s certainly was.

Take a few moments today to stop and reflect….

23 years ago today I lost a good friend who died in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. I also covered this tragic event in our nation’s history. As a former journalist and as a friend of a victim, I will repost this every year. I bore witness to the horrible sights of this attack and I feel obligated to do my small part in making sure we never forget what happened.

On September 11, 2001, I was working as a reporter at KTLA in Los Angeles, but I happened to be home in NY visiting my family and then the unthinkable happened. My news director Jeff Wald called me and said "can you get down there and we will link you up with a satellite truck." To this day, it is the most gut wrenching event I’ve ever covered. I still think about the faces of the victims from their pictures and the tears in the eyes of the family members left behind. Seeing a random shoe on the ground or article of clothing covered in the ash. You knew what it was. Many were from the jumpers. I think to my self the hell they must have been in to have to choose between jumping to their deaths or burning alive. It’s painful to let my mind go there and think about some of that stuff, (some of it too horrific to describe) but I force myself on this day because we can’t forget. Not the day, not the people...none of it.

Some of the things that stay with me until this day about the days reporting from Ground Zero are the grey powdery dust that smelled of jet fuel and ashy rubble that was everywhere. My heart breaks for the family members of the victims who would come up to any reporter they could find and hand them a photocopy of a picture of their loved one. Tears in their eyes, begging us to put the person's picture on the news because maybe they were lost, or had amnesia in some hospital or something. We had no idea then that these people were never coming home. When we ultimately realized it, the feeling in your soul is crushing. I can still feel the pain in my heart when I conjure up the memory of the moment the reality of the magnitude of what had happened settled in my brain.

On September 11th, I was supposed to be meeting a good friend of mine Eric Lehrfeld. I hadn't seen him in a while since I had been living in Los Angeles. He was married and had a baby girl and was excited to get together and fill me in on his happy life and show me pictures of his wife and daughter.

I kept leaving him messages on his cell phone telling him I was caught up covering the planes in the buildings and that I would be in touch. I never made the connection that he was killed on 9/11. He did not work at the World Trade Center. As it turns out, he was there that morning at Windows on The World having a breakfast meeting. He was 32. A life cut too short like all the others.

I don’t remember how and when the day came to be called 9/11. To my memory it wasn’t until probably weeks later.
In the early hours and days after the attack we had no words to encompass all that had happened. We referred to it on TV in our reporting as “Ground Zero.” So much had happened, but the collapsed buildings and all the devastation that surrounded it was the epicenter of the attack and so that was the word we used.

My heart is heavy today. Hard to believe 19 years have gone by. 2,997 lives lost, more than 6000 injured and other people who would later die of cancer and respiratory disease related to the 9/11 attacks. The picture below is the skyline I will always remember in NY from my childhood with Lady Liberty standing in the foreground. It is forever in my mind’s eye of what the skyline would have looked like when I first visited the Statue of Liberty as a child.

The second picture is of Eric. The smartest person I ever met. Seriously. He taught me how the stock market works. He taught me how to navigate the internet. He taught me about Japanese Anime (animation). I still have books he gave me which are some of my favorites to this day. (A Simple Plan by Scott Smith) Who knows what he would have accomplished in life.

The third photo is of Eric’s name at the memorial at the site. His name, like all the other’s forever etched in history as victims of a senseless attack.

I will never forget him. I will never forget any of the people I met during that time. WE MUST NEVER FORGET!