Police Officer Walter Edward Weaver

Walter Edward Weaver, 30, of Centereach, was a New York City police officer assigned to the elite Emergency Services Unit based in the Bronx. He was last seen on the 6th floor in the north tower, attempting to free passengers trapped in an elevator. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the NYPD’s highest honor. His remains were never found. On the morning of 9/11, the Weaver family worried about son Brian Weaver, whose office was in the New York Stock Exchange near Ground Zero. They had no idea that his older brother, Walter, was on site. Tuesday was typically Walter Weaver’s day off. But that day, the family later learned, he had filled in for a fellow officer. “Walter never worked in Manhattan. He worked in the Bronx,” his brother said. “Faith led him there that day.” By the afternoon, when Walter Weaver hadn’t return calls left on his cellphone, his father, Bill Weaver, phoned the police department. There was so much confusion that the family could not confirm that Weaver was at the World Trade Center. “It took our family three days before we figured something was wrong,” said Brian Weaver, now 38, of Melville. “We held out hope for as long as we could. At some point, we came to the realization that he wasn’t coming home.” The first few years after Weaver died were the hardest on his family. “After that, my world got exponentially smaller,” Brian Weaver said. “I was part of a big, happy family. And it wasn’t anymore. It made me feel like the world wasn’t what I thought it was.” At first, their father couldn’t bring himself to go to the site where his son had perished. At his sons’ urging, he finally did. Bill Weaver took the LIRR to Manhattan, then walked around the site’s perimeter, about five miles long. He did it again the next day, then the day after that. The daily pilgrimage continued for the next eight years until he died on Jan. 28, 2010, Brian Weaver said. Life became less bleak for the Weaver family in 2005 when Brian Weaver and his wife, Alison, had a daughter, Kacey. “The world wasn’t such a bad place,” Brian Weaver said. — Chau Lam