Curly's Photo and Fishing Blog
Never Forget
We should never forget the attack on 9/11 and how many families that were effected by their cowardly act.
My wife’s best friend Debbie lost their son in the attack on the towers and every year I put this up to remember the tragic waste of our best minds that were murdered.
His name was Brock Safronoff and here is his story.
TRAVERSE CITY - Brock Safronoff wasn’t just on the road to success - the Traverse City native was in the passing lane.
A top scholar-athlete both in high school and college, Safronoff was an up-and-coming computer programmer in a worldwide Fortune 500 company in New York City. He had recently been married and the young couple had just settled into a new apartment they bought in Brooklyn. Less than a year in his new job, he was already being sent out to train other employees of the company. His future seemed limited only by his own ambition - and he had plenty of that as well.
“Brock was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” said Joel Cronk, a friend and teammate of Safronoff at Amherst College in Massachusetts. “Everyone who knew Brock knew that he was a very special guy.”
Safronoff was at work a year ago this morning, working more than 80 floors up in the north tower of the World Trade Center, when a hijacked jetliner slammed into the building. A few minutes later another jet rammed the south tower, and both superstructures soon crumbled into a massive pile of steel, concrete and ash.
In all, the act of terrorism masterminded from half a world away by Saudi exile and Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden claimed 2,801 lives in and around the World Trade Center.
Including Brock Safronoff. His death following the attacks of Sept. 11 have forever changed the lives of his family and friends - folks who are still struggling to understand how such a bright and caring person could be taken in such an evil act of violence.
Like his parents Joel and Debra Safronoff, Brock was born and raised in the Traverse City area. His father says Brock grew up doing what a lot of kids do - playing catch with his dad in the yard, shooting baskets and fishing with his brother in Acme Creek.
He also took an early interest in his home computer - still a relatively new thing back in the ‘80s. His dad recalls how the two boys would spend hours on the computer, playing games but also delving into more complicated areas like data entry and program writing.
It was a youthful pastime that would flourish into a career. While he majored in chemistry and was a pre-med student in college, his expertise in computers began shaping his young professional life. After college he worked writing computer programs for a radiologist in Cincinnati. For a while he considered going to medical school, but decided instead to take a position at the center of the business universe - at the World Trade Center in New York City.
In New York, Safronoff worked as a computer systems analyst for Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., one of the world’s top consulting firms in insurance and business management with clients in more than 100 countries and annual revenues exceeding $10 billion.
“The fact that he was working in downtown New York at the World Trade Center at his age, I think that says a lot about the kind of person Brock was,” said Jim Schramski of Traverse City, a high school classmate and friend of Safronoff.
Marsh & McLennan had more than 1,800 people working in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, and lost 295 employees in the terrorist attacks including Safronoff. Company spokeswoman Barbara Perlmutter said the firm decided against doing interviews or otherwise issuing public statements about its workers, saying it wanted to respect the privacy of the victims and their families.
Joel Safronoff said his son enjoyed his job and was just starting to get comfortable in New York City. Brock and his wife, Tara, were married Aug. 4, 2001, at St. Paul’s Church on Staten Island. She was a school teacher and the couple had just bought an apartment in Brooklyn. He was also doing post-graduate work at Columbia University in New York.
“He was real happy where he was,” his father said. “He liked the East Coast, but he always liked to come home, too.”
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People who knew Brock Safronoff were not at all surprised with his achievements.
He was a top 10 graduate of Traverse City Senior High School’s Class of 1993, and a star pitcher on the Trojan baseball team. When it was time for college, he chose small but prestigious Amherst College in Massachusetts - both for its reputation as one of the country’s top liberal arts colleges and its strong baseball tradition.
At Amherst, Safronoff again excelled both in the classroom and on the athletic field. A four-year varsity player, Safronoff led the Lord Jeffs with a 1.87 earned run average in his junior year, and was the winning pitcher in the school’s first win in the NCAA tournament.
Cronk says he was amazed at Safronoff’s ability to focus on the task in front of him, whether it was a final exam, a project in the chemistry lab or the team’s next game. Cronk tells a story about Safronoff being scheduled to pitch a game on the same day he had a major project going in the chemistry lab. He arrived at the field just 20 minutes before the game was to begin - and went out and hurled a dominating 1-hit shutout.
“That was just Brock,” Cronk said.
One of Safronoff’s mentors was longtime Amherst College head baseball coach Bill Thurston, a former baseball star at the University of Michigan who also played professionally in the Detroit Tigers farm system.
Thurston, who has been enshrined in the American Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, called Safronoff “one of the best kids I ever coached.”
“He had no personal ego for himself,” Thurston said. “He was much more concerned about the success of his teammates and the team. ... He was just a class individual - and a very good baseball player.”
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Safronoff was among around a dozen former baseball players from Amherst who worked in and around the World Trade Center. They were there on Sept. 21.
“I called a bunch of them to see if they were OK, and thankfully they were,” Thurston said.
But the coach was unaware that Safronoff had left Cincinnati less than a year earlier to take a job in New York City. It was several days later before Thurston learned that he, too, had suffered a personal loss that day.
“Once we heard that Brock was lost in the World Trade Center, we were just devastated,” Thurston said. Amherst lost three of its graduates in the attacks, including a woman who also worked in the World Trade Center and a surgeon who was on the hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
“It really hit this campus hard,” Thurston said of Sept. 11. “It really affected our alumni, our people.”
As a tribute to Safronoff, the baseball program dedicated a new centerfield flagpole at the college’s Memorial Field and installed a memorial plaque at the stadium at their annual alumni game June 1.
The school retired Safronoff’s number 22 uniform, the first athlete in the school’s history so honored. The baseball program also created a “Brock Safronoff Team First Award” that is now presented annually to the Amherst player showing the dedication and leadership qualities that made Safronoff a special student-athlete.
Cronk spoke at the memorial ceremony, which he said involved a mixture of sorrow and pride that he had never experienced before. Cronk said it was devastating to see the tears of Safronoff’s family during the ceremony, but uplifting to see so many people - some who knew Brock but many others who didn’t - gather to honor him.
“It was tough being there without Brock,” Cronk said. “We never knew a game at Amherst where he wasn’t with us.”
As sad as the day was, Joel Safronoff said it was a rewarding one for his family. Seeing the Amherst family come together to honor their son was among the few bright spots his family has experienced in a long and difficult year.
“We were really impressed with what they did,” Safronoff said. “It really meant a lot to us.”
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Joel Safronoff said it’s difficult not to dwell on his family’s loss. He said it can get overwhelming at times - especially in recent weeks as the first year anniversary of the tragedy grew closer.
The family has been peppered with media requests for interviews about Brock over the past year, but have politely declined nearly all of them. A close and private family, the Safronoffs say it’s still too difficult for them to talk publicly about their experiences over the past year.
“Maybe someday,” he said softly. “Not yet.”
While search crews were able to positively identify Brock’s remains using DNA testing, the Safronoffs still have little information about their son’s death.
“We don’t have the details of what happened yet,” Joel Safronoff said, noting that search crews found a portion of an airplane wing right next to the area where Brock’s desk was located. He believes the wing indicates that it is unlikely that Brock and others in the office were killed instantly in a jet fuel fireball that some of the experts have theorized.
Sometimes, the family finds itself turning off the television news because it confronts them with the events of Sept. 11 again and again.
“The best thing is keeping busy - keeping busy doing something else,” he said. “If you don’t you find yourself thinking about it all the time.”
There was one passion that consumed Mr. Safronoff, 26, long before his freshman year at Amherst College, when he and his future wife were physics lab partners. It was his devotion to the Detroit Lions, which stemmed from his upbringing in Traverse City, Mich., and which required the strength to withstand continual heartbreak, said Michael A. Cohen, a friend and fellow fan.
Their friendship was based on a shared fantasy that the Lions would one day make it to the Super Bowl. When they met to watch games at an Upper East Side bar, they rarely discussed work.
Mr. Cohen, in fact, had forgotten Mr. Safronoff worked as a computer programmer at Marsh & McLennan. “I had to look up on his wedding announcement where it was that he worked,” Mr. Cohen said. “I remember now that he told me he had this great view.”
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