On Wednesday I spoke with Greg Sullivan, a retired NYPD sergeant whose brother Patrick was murdered in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. (I first introduced NRO readers to the Sullivan family back in 2004, and caught up with them again last year.) I asked Greg for his reaction to the death of Osama bin Laden. He was gratified that bin Laden had at last received his just deserts, but at the same time he was disappointed that the raid in Pakistan had so quickly been turned into a list of political talking points. “I expected it,” he said, “but I still don’t like it.”
More upsetting to Greg was the media’s inordinate interest in the details of bin Laden’s burial rites. “They never found Patrick,” he said. “My mother had to give up a lock of his hair from his first haircut so we would have something to bury. You think bin Laden cared that Patrick didn’t get a proper Christian burial? There were lots of people like that, friends of ours whose bodies were never found. Whatever might have been left of them ended up in the dump out on Staten Island. You think bin Laden cared about any of them?”
Neither Greg nor his brother Jerry nor their parents, Paddy and Mary, will be in attendance when President Obama visits Ground Zero today. “We weren’t invited,” he said.
— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. “Jack Dunphy” is the author’s nom de cyber.