A memory that never fades
She cannot forget.
Vandever’s youngest brother, Tony Karnes, 37, was one of those who died that day, so every year she publishes an “in loving memory” for him.
“We just can’t let these people be forgotten,” she said. “In fact, they’re having a memorial on 9/11, combining it
with the Stair Climb that firefighters do” to signify the firefighters who died on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York.
“They went back into the buildings to try to rescue people on 104 floors,” Vandever related. “With the Stair Climb this year, it’s at the Covenant Health Park. They’re going to have a memorial for the victims first, and then they’ll start the Stair Climb.
“I think they figured up and down the stands at the Smokies stadium would match the 104 floors,” she said.
Built primarily between 1966 and 1975, the towers were dedicated on April 4, 1973, as a complex of seven buildings in the financial district of lower Manhattan in New York City. Then, terrorists in two hijacked planes flew into the towers on Sept. 11 and destroyed them, killing nearly 3,000 people.
In an “in memory,” Vandever wrote, “On that bright, sunny day, terrorists commandeered passenger planes and killed thousands of innocent people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. From this horrific act, we began to realize the true depths of evil in the human heart and the uncertainty and fragility of life itself. We are thankful we had you for 37 years and will always remember your smile and the kindness that you showed to others as evidenced by the cards and letters that we received.”
Karnes, who lived in New York City, was a software trainer with Marsh McLennan Insurance Agency on the 97th floor in Tower One of the World Trade Center in 2001.
“There were 297 employees from his company perished that day,” Vandever said.
“Tony traveled across the United States, training people in their software updates,” Vandever said. But, “he lived three blocks from the World Trade Center.
“We think he was en route to work or he was in his office on the 97th floor of Tower One,” she related. “There’ll never be closure as to what really happened, but there were [her brother’s] remains, which were given back to us.
“There were two pieces of tissue, a little toe, a jaw bone and a tooth,” Vandever said, adding he is interred in a columbarium at a cemetery on Kingston Pike.
“I was 16 when he was born,” she mused. “He was like my child.”
There were five siblings in the Karnes family. Along with Vandever and Karnes, there are three sisters still living.
The brother and sister were close during their lives.
“I went to New York several times to visit him,” she said.
“The day after it happened, there was no phone calls from him. I was pretty sure something had happened bad.
“I couldn’t get a flight out until that following Sunday,” she recalled. “I stayed [in New York City] for a month. And, on the last day we were there, they had the memorial for all those people at Marsh. Then we came home.”
While in New York, the insurance company’s driver took the Vandevers to ground zero.
“I could see the dust in the windows of the buildings was a good inch thick,” she recalled. “We could watch the flatbed trucks going down the street with debris and body parts. That’s what was so tragic.”
Two years after the attack on the World Trade Center, “a Knox County deputy knocked on my door, and he gave me a phone number to call,” she recalled. “That’s when I knew.”
After making the call, which was to the medical examiner’s office, “they said they found parts,” Vandever said.
“Terrible,” was her initial reaction to the news. “I expected it, but I didn’t … I’ve never been through anything like that in my life. You know, you expect people to get sick, like my mom and dad, but you don’t expect your young brother to be murdered.”
Recovery efforts in identifying remains only stopped recently, she said. “They haven’t all been identified yet.
“So, ever since then, it’s been memorials in downtown Knoxville and putting
flowers (at the columarium),” she said.
