Suburban natives with 9/11 ties react

The death of Osama bin Laden won't bring back Dan Shanower or Mari-Rae Sopper. Both died at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, he on the ground and she on the plane that crashed.

But Pat Shanower, Dan's mother, sees some hope for the living with the news of bin Laden's death.

“We just hope that it means that the end of war is in sight,” she said Sunday night from her Naperville home, “a step toward eventual peace.”

Marion Kminek, the mother of Mari-Rae Sopper, said she was “blown away” by the news Sunday night.

Still, the former West Dundee and Inverness resident, who now lives in Florida, cannot rejoice.

“I don't know what difference it makes,” she said. “Everybody is still dead.” As well, she said, new people are running al-Qaida.

Pat Shanower said she has not obsessed on bin Laden for the past 9½ years.

“It has not been foremost in my mind,” she said. “I hate to think of going out to kill someone in retaliation.”

Still, “It's a sense of relief, I think for everyone. It has to be a great satisfaction to all that lost people that day to know that the leader is no longer a threat.”

U.S. Navy Cmdr. Dan Shanower was a Navy intelligence officer stationed at the Pentagon when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the building. A memorial in his name was dedicated in Naperville in 2003.

Mari-Rae Sopper was 35 years old when hijackers crashed the plane she was on into the Pentagon.

Sopper, a Navy lieutenant and military attorney, grew up in Inverness and was a star gymnast at Fremd High School.

“9/11 never would have happened if there wasn't the hate and fear in the world that is still in the world,” Marion Kminek said Sunday night.

“And it comes from our side too,” pointing out that one religion alone wasn't responsible. “It was a few extremists.”

Joseph Dittmar was an Aurora resident on Sept. 11, 2001. The insurance executive was in a meeting on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center when the planes hit. Only seven out of 54 people in that meeting survived.

On Sunday evening, Dittmar was in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he now lives. He is vice president of property for Risk Evaluation & Design in Durham, N.C., and for several years, he has been giving presentations about his experiences.

“It's kind of an odd serving of justice, I guess,” he said about the death of Osama bin Laden. “It's not normal to celebrate someone's death, but in a sense the symbolic serving of justice tonight is something that certainly can be felt by all of us.

“Especially for the 3,000 people who were lost and their families ... I hope they can find some closure in this. And I hope that they can find some level of personal satisfaction.

“It's not going to bring anybody back. It's not going to change what happened. But it is going to at least let them know that this country did what it said it would do — continue to pursue until they brought this criminal home.”

Ed Ballinger of Arlington Heights said Sunday night, “Justice was finally done.”

Ballinger was a flight dispatcher for United Airlines Sept. 11. When he realized Flight 175 had been hijacked he hurriedly got word to other flights, “Beware any cockpit intrusion.” One of those, Flight 93 got the message, but too late; it was hijacked and eventually crashed into the Pennsylvania field. But another plane, Flight 23, may have been saved — after getting Ballinger's message it told passengers flying from Newark to Los Angeles that the plane had mechanical trouble and returned to the gate.

The capture and death of bin Laden “was something I knew we would eventually obtain,” Ballinger said with satisfaction. “We eventually got the man, the mastermind.”

Still, Dittmar said, the pain of Sept. 11 is permanent.

“For those of us that were involved, this is a wound that will always be there,” he said. “It's never going to go away. And so from the perspective of this happening. it brings some semblance of satisfaction and some semblance of justice being served.”