Every year, university assistant professor Elizabeth Stringer Keefe posted the picture on social media, hoping someone would recognise the bride and groom or their wedding guests. But for more than a decade she had no luck – until last week when the image went viral with more than 40,000 shares – and its owner Fred Mahe came forward.
He responded with the tweet: “I know the people in the picture! I was at the wedding.”
The photo was taken at the Colorado wedding of Christine and Christian Loredo. Mahe kept the photo of his friends on the wall of his office cubicle on the 77th floor of the second World Trade Center tower. Luckily, he was not in the office that fateful morning. Keefe was handed the picture by a friend who had found it at Ground Zero just weeks after the terrorist attack.
[It’s a] great memento of resilience,” bride Christine Loredo told ABC. “I think it’s nice to know that people out there care so much for strangers. It gives me confidence in humanity.”
“9/11 was a traumatic event for everyone, but there’s no description for the horrors that the people who worked in the World Trade Center and the area experienced,” Keefe told Today.com. “If the photo was connected, I wanted to do just one small thing to bring some comfort.”
On Monday, Keefe and Mahe met in NYC and she returned the photo to him. The two even shared a selfie!
