NYPD: Remember the Heroes

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • President Barack Obama and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, left, meet with police officers and first responders at the First Precinct before visiting the National Sept. 11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York, Thursday, May 5, 2011. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Obama made a brief but solemn visit to the site of Osama bin Laden's most heinous crime Thursday, meeting with first responders and the family members of 9/11 victims in his first trip to New York since the al Qaeda leader's death.

At the World Trade Center site itself, he made no speeches, simply leaving a wreath composed of red, white and blue flowers in front of what has come to be known as the "Survivor Tree." Then Obama walked over to 14-year-old Payton Wall, whose father was killed nearby nearly ten years ago, and gave her a hug.

"We just talked," Wall told television crews after her meeting with the president, which was prompted by a letter she wrote him just days ago. She was joined by her younger sister, a friend who also lost a parent on 9/11, and her mother.

Before that visit to Lower Manhattan, Obama met with a group of New York City firefighters in a station that lost 15 members on September 11, 2001. Bin Laden's death, he said in his most extensive public remarks, sent a message "that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say."

And, he added pointedly, he believed that "when those guys took those extraordinary risks going into Pakistan, that they were doing it in part because of the sacrifices that were made in the States. They were doing it in the name of your brothers that were lost."

Although some on the right had contended that Obama's visit to New York would serve as little more than a "victory lap," including, supposedly, an anonymous member of the George W. Bush camp, the mood throughout the day was somber. The trip was Obama's first to Ground Zero since 2008.

After he laid the wreath just steps from where the World Trade Center towers once stood, Obama had a private meeting with about 60 family members.

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For Lee Ielpi, a retired member of the FDNY whose firefighter son died responding to the attack on the World Trade Center, that meeting was "casual." He noted that "there was no script. I was impressed, he spoke from the heart, he was very sincere, he spoke about the mission and that it was accomplished, which I really thought was very nice."