By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 68 called Maryland home. They were flight attendants and physicists, schoolteachers and law partners, budget analysts and career Navy officers — people with mortgages, coaching schedules and half-finished doctorates. What follows is not a complete accounting of all 68, but a closer look at the lives behind a toll that’s too often reduced to a single number.
“What follows is not a complete accounting of all 68, but a closer look at the lives behind a toll that’s too often reduced to a single number.”
Montgomery County: Eleven Neighbors
Montgomery County lost more residents than any other Maryland jurisdiction — 11 people, all killed when American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Each is memorialized with a bench at Courthouse Square Park in Rockville, dedicated in 2003.
William Edward Caswell, 54, of Silver Spring, was a physicist who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland in three years before earning his Ph.D. at Princeton. His graduate studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the Army during Vietnam. He went on to do postdoctoral work at Stanford and Brown before working as a civilian physicist for the Navy. He was boarding Flight 77 for a business trip to Los Angeles; his last conversation with his wife, Jean, was a phone call from the car on his way to the airport.
Gerald P. Fisher, 57, of Potomac, went by the childhood nickname “Geep” and spent 30 years as a manpower consultant, most recently with Booz Allen Hamilton. He was at the Pentagon that morning with two colleagues, briefing Army Lt. Gen. Timothy Maude — himself among the victims — on an improved survivor-benefits system for military families. A colleague who supervised him, Joyce Doria, remembered him as “a real optimist.”
Ernest M. Willcher, 62, grew up in Montgomery County and earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland and his law degree at American University while working nights for the Army. After 40 years of federal service, he’d retired that same year and taken a consulting job with Booz Allen — which is how, at 62, he ended up in the same Pentagon briefing as Fisher on the morning of the attack.
CAPT Lawrence D. Getzfred, USN, 57, was a career naval flight officer who came from a family with a century of combined Navy service among five brothers. A P-3 Orion patrol pilot, he later trained with the Royal Air Force in Scotland — where he met and married his wife, Patricia, in Cornwall — and commanded a P-3 squadron before earning a master’s degree at the Naval War College. By 9/11, he was working strategic planning on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and had made a habit of mentoring the reservists who rotated through the Navy Command Center, where he was killed at his post.
Michele M. Heidenberger, 52, of Chevy Chase, was the senior flight attendant aboard Flight 77, with roughly 30 years at American Airlines. She met her husband, Thomas — later a founding director of the Pentagon Memorial Fund — while based in Chicago. Their son has since spoken publicly about growing up in the shadow of her death, including in a 2021 documentary made with a former classmate.
Angela Marie Houtz, 27, was born in La Plata and graduated salutatorian of Maurice J. McDonough High School before earning a full humanities scholarship to UMBC in the program’s inaugural year.
Teddington “Ted” Hamm Moy, 48, grew up helping run his parents’ grocery, the Veterans Food Market, in Washington’s Chinatown, before becoming an information-management program manager for the Army at the Pentagon. He and his wife, Madeline, had celebrated her 50th birthday with a low-key dinner the night before; he left for work the next morning as usual.
Scott Alan Powell, 35, of Silver Spring, was a musician and identical twin who, with his brother Art, formed a production company called Dem Twinzz — later Mable’s Twinzz, after their grandmother — that produced music for major labels while the two also toured internationally with a band called Shego. A father of three, Scott had also built a second career as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, which led to Pentagon work as a civilian contractor for BTG Inc. His brother recalled friends calling just to hear Art’s voice, since it sounded so much like Scott’s: “Some people just want to talk and hear that familiar tone and cadence.”
“His brother recalled friends calling just to hear Art’s voice, since it sounded so much like Scott’s.”
Patricia J. Statz, 41, moved to Takoma Park in 2000 after years working as a theater director and educator at U.S. Army base schools in Germany, where she’d met her husband. She was pursuing a doctorate in education and working to improve services for children with special needs when she took a position at the Pentagon.
Todd Hayes Reuben, 40, of Potomac, was a corporate tax partner at the law firm Venable and a graduate of Churchill High School. Colleagues described him as devoted to his family — especially his 11-year-old twin sons, whom he coached in basketball and soccer.
The eleventh name on the Rockville memorial, Lt. Darin H. Pontell, USNR, 26, lived in Gaithersburg at the time of his death — which is why Montgomery County claims him — but grew up in Columbia, in Howard County, where his parents still lived; both the Pentagon Memorial and the Naval Academy’s own memorial hall list Columbia as his hometown, which is why Howard County retrospectives also claim him. He followed his older brother, Steven, a Navy pilot killed in a 1989 training crash, into the Navy and the Naval Academy, and was finishing a 12-hour shift as an intelligence officer when Flight 77 hit.
Prince George’s County: At Least Nineteen
Prince George’s County suffered Maryland’s second-largest loss, with at least 19 residents killed, most of them Pentagon civilian employees. Four of them, profiled below, illustrate the range of that loss; a fuller county roster appears in contemporary Washington Post coverage of the attacks.
Carrie R. Blagburn, 48, of Temple Hills, was an Army budget analyst married 23 years to her husband, Leo. In the agonizing days when she was still listed as missing, Leo Blagburn kept calling her cell phone just to hear her voicemail greeting, until it became too painful to bear: “She’s missing. That’s all they could tell me.”
Angelene C. Carter, 51, of District Heights, was an Army accountant married to a retired Army sergeant, Fred Carter. She was active in the Adult Usher Board and Bible study groups at St. Paul Baptist Church in Capitol Heights.
Julian T. Cooper, 39, of Springdale, graduated from Bladensburg High School and briefly attended the University of Maryland before serving 13 years of active-duty Navy service. He remained a Navy reservist while working as a civilian computer analyst in the Navy Command Center at the Pentagon. His wife, Melinda, was expecting their first child the following March.
The county’s toll also includes one of the most widely told 9/11 stories in American education: James Debeuneure, 58, of Upper Marlboro, taught fifth grade at Ketcham Elementary School in Washington, D.C. He was aboard Flight 77 with two fellow D.C. teachers and three of their students — 11-year-olds selected for a National Geographic Society ecology expedition to the Channel Islands off California. None of the six survived. Colleagues remembered Debeuneure as a father and grandfather who enjoyed golf and collecting art; he and the other two teachers were later inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame’s Memorial to Fallen Educators.
Howard County: Columbia’s Losses
Columbia lost at least four residents. Ian J. Gray, a Scottish-born business consultant who emigrated to the U.S. in 1968, helped found the Columbia-based health-care finance firm McBee Associates in the late 1970s and was known for volunteering with the Special Olympics.
Columbia is also the hometown — though not the legal residence at time of death — of Lt. Darin H. Pontell, who grew up there and whose parents still lived there when he died; see the Montgomery County section above for the full explanation of why both counties claim him.
Baltimore County: Two Lives, Two Paths
Cortez Ghee, 53, of Reisterstown, grew up in Washington, D.C., served in Vietnam, and later worked for the Maryland National Guard before becoming an Army budget analyst — the job that put him in the Pentagon on 9/11.
Renee Ann May, 39, of Baltimore, was a flight attendant aboard Flight 77 and a graduate of San Diego State University who volunteered as a docent at the Walters Art Museum.
Charles County: Three Lives From One Town
Waldorf lost at least three residents — all Pentagon employees killed the same morning.
Donna Marie Bowen, 42, worked on contract for Verizon in an Army budgeting office and had taken an early 5 a.m. shift so she could be home for her three children after school. She kissed her husband, Eugene, goodbye at 4:15 that morning, as she did every workday: “I opened my eyes and said, ‘Goodbye, Sweetie,’ and then fell back asleep,” he later recalled. She led a Girl Scout troop, taught catechism at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church, and volunteered weekly in her children’s classrooms at Berry Elementary School in Waldorf.
“She kissed her husband, Eugene, goodbye at 4:15 that morning, as she did every workday.”
John D. Yamnicky, 71, was the oldest of the 184 people killed at the Pentagon. A retired Navy test pilot, he had survived five crash landings over 26 years of military service before dying aboard Flight 77.
IT2 Kris “Romeo” Bishundat, USN, 23, was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and moved to Waldorf with his family as a toddler. A 1995 graduate of Thomas Stone High School, he enlisted in the Navy the same year, served aboard two Navy ships, and was recognized by his commanding officer as one of the finest sailors on his vessel before transferring to the Pentagon’s telecommunications center in 2001. He died three days before his 24th birthday. His family later established an annual 5K race and scholarship fund in Charles County in his memory.
Laurel and Frederick County
Laurel — whose boundaries touch Anne Arundel, Howard and Prince George’s counties — lost retired Army Master Sgt. Max Beilke, 69, drafted during the Korean War and, by his family’s account, the last American combat soldier to leave Vietnam in 1973. He later worked on veterans’ issues as a civilian Pentagon employee.
Mount Airy, which straddles the Carroll-Frederick county line, lost two residents, both memorialized by the Frederick News-Post as part of the county’s fallen. CW4 William R. Ruth, USAR, flew medevac helicopters as a Marine in Vietnam, later served in the Army Reserve and Maryland National Guard, and was recalled to active duty during the Persian Gulf War. In between, he spent nearly three decades teaching social studies, most recently at John T. Baker Middle School in nearby Damascus, where former students and colleagues remember him as a demanding but beloved teacher who took kids on field trips and mentored younger staff. He retired from teaching in 1997 but remained an Army Reserve Chief Warrant Officer, going to work at the Pentagon in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, where he was killed on 9/11. The night before the attack, he’d presided over his first meeting as commander of Mount Airy’s VFW post; the post was later renamed in his honor.
LCDR Ronald J. Vauk, USNR, 37, was a Naval Academy graduate and former submarine officer who left active duty for the Naval Reserve in 1993 and went to work as a project manager at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory outside Columbia, where he earned an MBA from the University of Maryland. He was serving the second day of his annual reserve duty as Watch Commander in the Naval Command Center when Flight 77 struck. His daughter was born two months later. Mount Airy has continued holding Patriot Day wreath-laying ceremonies for Ruth and Vauk at Pine Grove Chapel and Cemetery in the years since — documented at least in 2014, the 20th anniversary in 2021, and the 24th anniversary in 2025 — with the Mount Airy VFW post that renamed itself for Ruth continuing to take part.
“His daughter was born two months later.”
A third Frederick name comes with its own residency caveat. Alan P. Linton Jr., 26, grew up in Frederick — his parents still live there, and a family resource center in Frederick now bears his name — but he was living in Jersey City, New Jersey, and working at Sandler O’Neill & Partners on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower when he was killed. National victim registries list his residence as New Jersey, not Maryland, so while local Frederick coverage rightly claims him as one of their own, he likely isn’t counted among the state’s official 68.
Memorials Across the State
Maryland has built several permanent tributes. In Baltimore, a memorial in front of the city’s World Trade Center building incorporates two tons of steel recovered from between the 94th and 96th floors of the North Tower, along with limestone from the Pentagon’s damaged west wall and granite from the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site — arranged so the WTC building’s own shadow marks the exact times of the attacks each Sept. 11.
State leaders have continued to mark the toll publicly. At a 2020 ceremony, then-Gov. Larry Hogan and Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford laid wreaths at the Maryland Fire-Rescue Services Memorial in honor of the 68 Marylanders lost.
“An attack carried out hundreds of miles away reached directly into Maryland communities and never fully let go.”
A Statewide Ritual of Remembrance
Every county with victims holds some form of annual observance, from wreath-layings to moments of silence in public schools. For many families, the losses remain deeply personal decades later — reminders that an attack carried out hundreds of miles away reached directly into Maryland communities and never fully let go.
Sources
This report draws primarily on the Pentagon Memorial Fund’s official biographies (pentagonmemorial.org), the authoritative record for the 184 people killed at the Pentagon, supplemented by the U.S. Naval Academy’s memorial hall (usnamemorialhall.org) for military honorees’ service records. County-level detail comes from local news retrospectives published around the 20th anniversary in 2021, including Patch’s county-by-county series (Annapolis, Catonsville, Bowie, and Columbia editions), the Frederick News-Post’s coverage of Mount Airy’s fallen, and Delmarva Public Media/WBOC reporting on Eastern Shore commemorations. State-level victim counts and memorial details come from Maryland’s official 9/11 memorial in Baltimore (open.maryland.gov), CBS Baltimore/WJZ’s coverage of state commemorations, and public remarks from then-Gov. Larry Hogan’s office. The National Geographic Society educators’ story is drawn from Education Week’s contemporaneous 2001 reporting, National Geographic’s own 2021 remembrance, and D.C. Public Schools’ anniversary tributes. Family obituaries via Legacy.com filled in biographical detail not covered elsewhere, and Kris Bishundat’s memorial scholarship was confirmed through Southern Maryland News coverage.
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