Community Corner

'It's 10 Years Too Late for Us'

The news of Osama bin Laden's death was "bittersweet" for Nick Brandemarti Jr.'s family.

Nick Brandemarti Jr. isn’t coming home.

The football star who once rushed for 337 yards in a single game for the West Deptford High School Eagles, the newly minted investment banker embarking on a career with Keefe, Bruyette and Woods, the beloved son, Brandemarti was taken from this world nearly a decade ago, when a quiet Tuesday morning was shattered by Osama bin Laden’s coordinated terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

So the news late Sunday night that bin Laden, the man responsible for the deaths of 2,752 people at the World Trade Center, was dead, killed by a Navy SEAL team during a raid on his compound in Pakistan, came as small comfort to his parents, Nick Sr. and Nancy.

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“It’s 10 years too late for us,” Nancy Brandemarti said Monday, calling the announcement “bittersweet.”

While she knows the death of one man can’t bring her son back, she said the family feels as many do across the country.

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“We’re happy justice has been done,” she said.

And she’s happy the al-Qaida leader and terrorist mastermind is gone, for the sake of her other children and grandchildren.

“Am I glad he’s not in this world any more? Yes, I am,” Nancy Brandemarti said.

At the Place of Remembrance in Chestnut Branch Park, where Brandemarti and fellow Gloucester County victims John Rodak and Perry Thompson are memorialized, it was oddly quiet Monday afternoon.

Aside from the drone of a plane approaching Philadelphia International or the occasional chittering birds, the grove encircling a trio of monuments and a twisted steel beam from the World Trade Center was utterly silent and undisturbed.

A lone jogger passed by in the course of 15 minutes, and her footfalls were barely audible in the stillness.


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