World Trade Center Blog and Journals

This is a 2996 Tribute to James Brian Reilly

For James Reilly, that Monday night in September was typical. He met his roommates Jon Johnnidis and Matt Brush at Crunch Fitness on Lafayette Street in New York City. tags: James Reilly was very athletic, and he had just done five miles on the treadmill there. 

The three of them went shopping, then went home and made chicken nachos. Jim enjoyed cooking, according to his roommates. They relaxed and watched 'Monday Night Football.'  It was a nice evening," Jon Johnnidis said. 

No one had any idea that it would be Reilly's last.

Early the next morning, Jim Reilly went to his work at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, where he was a bond trader, so he had to be there for meetings between 7:30 and 7:45 AM. The company's offices were on the 89th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. 

The day was Tuesday, September 11th, 2001.

At 8:46 AM, American Airlines Flight 11, a tags: Boeing 767 aircraft, crashed into the north side of the North Tower. Jim called his roommates and his father, William Reilly, to assure them that he was safe on the 89th floor in the South Tower, although a plane had rammed the North Tower. Then at 9:02 AM, as television broadcasters from around the world watched, United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767 airplane, crashed into the South Tower.

Jim Reilly's family and friends never heard from him again.

He was not married, and had no children, but he was godfather to his niece, Katherine. He would swoop her from the arms of whoever was holding her and coo like he was the father. He really liked to make his other nieces and nephews laugh as well. 

He had the kind of personality and humor that brought pleasure wherever he went, friends said. "Jim could turn around any situation and make it funny," said Jon Johnnidis, his best friend since the eighth grade in Huntington Station. Reilly liked to make people laugh, even to cramming his 6-foot frame into a child-sized electronic train to amuse his young nephews and nieces. His family called him "the world's funniest uncle."

He was the youngest of the five children of William and Virginia Reilly, and was an honor student and a soccer player at Walt Whitman High School, in Huntington, NY, where he graduated in 1994. He went to college and graduated from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where he was a member of Theta Delta Chi fraternity. 

"Jim was so intelligent, we know he would have done something great if he had survived," said Jon Johnnidis' sister, Melissa. He was also "very gentlemanly," she said. During a snowboarding expedition he lent his ski jacket to his girlfriend, Jennifer Bresler. As a beginning snowboarder, "more down than up, he soon looked like a big white snowball," she said.

Jim's memorial mass was attended by over 850 people including his girlfriend.

There are a lot of people who remember Jim Reilly, and wrote some pretty nice things about him over the last five years and what he meant to them. He will not be forgotten.

James B. Reilly was one of 2996 victims of the September 11th tragedies.

We should never forget all that was lost on September 11th, 2001.

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