World
25 years on, families remember a UCSB gymnastics coach and a World Trade Centre security chief
September 11, 2026 at 01:32 PM
Family and friends have marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks by remembering a UC Santa Barbara gymnastics coach and a World Trade Centre security chief.
- Mari-Rae Sopper, hired as head women's gymnastics coach at UC Santa Barbara, died when hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
- Sopper's mother, Marion Kminek, donated the memorial fund's remaining $6,223.57 in 2012 to save the Plattsburgh, New York, high school gymnastics program from budget-cut elimination.
- Godwin Forde said his father, a security chief in the South Tower and one of 67 Britons killed, stayed to evacuate colleagues and should be remembered "as the hero he was."
- Forde, then a teenager, said he and his sister searched New York for weeks before receiving their father's death certificate in late October 2001.