Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?: Memories of 9/11

From New York to California, powerful emotions rocked the American nation the day the World Trade Center towers fell.

Ten years ago today, on Sept. 11, 2001, we experienced a national tragedy and the attacks spurred changes that have echoed throughout public policy as well as in own personal lives.

To help reflect the vast array of experiences, Patch looked out across our hundreds of news sites to pull together snapshots of everyday Americans whose lives were changed by the events of 9/11.

From across the country, this Patch site and hundreds of others captured the faces, keepsakes, memorials, ceremonies, flags, fund-raisers, deployments and the still-raw emotions that followed the attacks.

Today, hometown man Andrew TePas is boarding a plane to Germany, for his first assignment with the U.S. Army.

His mom recalls her 4th grader—now a 19-year-old man, and an El Toro High graduate—standing in the family room watching the twin towers on TV asking "Mom, are there people in those buildings?"

"I had to tell him that yes, indeed there were and that all we could do was pray for their safety," she said. "You could hear a pin drop in our family room that morning."

Years later, on TePas' 13th birthday, she took him to New York City.

"He insisted upon going to ground zero immediately when we arrived and we spent four hours there," she recalls. "He read every memorial, every sign and we attended a service in the church across the street. I could see something in his eyes then, because he was so determined not to miss a single inch of ground zero."

Andrew's story is just one from Lake Forest that shows how the attacks irrevocably changed a life.

Together, Patch sites across the country have created a powerful mosaic that shows how lives in small communities across America were changed that day. Click through to see how your neighbors near and far have dealt with the events of 9/11 in the past decade.