A Red Cross volunteer, Mrs Kennedy, 63, was aboard the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that ploughed into the Pentagon at 9.37am.

Shortly before, at 8.46am, former Parramatta Marist High School 1979 dux, Mr Tompsett, 39, was in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre where hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the building.

Mr Tompsett, a computer expert, was in the Windows of the World restaurant and above the point of impact but trapped in the tower where he was visiting that morning for a conference.

“I still wonder how he died because he was above the point of impact of the first plane,’’ his brother Geoff Tompsett, of Cherrybrook, said.

“After the impact he communicated with (his wife) Dorry via his BlackBerry so we know he was alive for some time but we don’t really know.

“I guess I’m a bit numbed to seeing the planes plunging into the building or the building collapsing.’’

Mr Tompsett was a year younger than his brother who had lived in New York since 1986 after a three-week business trip with a small computer consulting firm turned into him adopting Long Island as his home when his contract extended and he met and fell in love with Dorry, a native New Yorker. They had a daughter Emily, who will soon turn 30.

Stephen was the eldest of four children born within five years of each other and attended St Margaret Mary’s Primary School, Merrylands, Newman High School (now St Paul’s College) at Greystanes before sitting his HSC at Parramatta Marist, where Geoff said his brother developed his love of computers and led to him becoming a “software whiz”.

He recorded the school’s best HSC mark, a stellar 469 out of 500.

Mr Tompsett, a Westpac executive, said even for a bunch of intellectually-bright siblings, Stephen was a standout.

“From the day dot he was extraordinarily gifted,’’ Mr Tompsett said.

“There was no time that he didn’t top pretty much everything that he tried academically.’’

He also accomplished the University Medal at Sydney University in 1983 after attaining an Honours degree in economics and computer science, a “strange combination at the time”.

“I would say computing was starting to kick off at the time. Prior to that it wasn’t something the average person really had much to do with so he was a bit of a trailblazer in some respect.’’

At the time of his death, Stephen was the vice president of Instinet, which, Mr Tompsett said, was “for a substantial Wall St organisation, a pretty great achievement for someone so young, and, quite frankly, from someone from Down Under”.

“It was nice, as our lives converged again, we had a lot more in common and as someone who was working his way up the corporate ladder, I liked bragging about him, so it was good to spend time with him — he was a deep thinker.’’

After his death, the Tompsett family, including his now-late parents Jack and Rae, flew to New York for a memorial service two weeks following the event that changed the world.

They spoke to colleagues who showed he was an “extraordinarily-skilled people leader as well’’.

“A lot of technologists are really geeky and they don’t relate to people but I think part of the reason he was so successful so quickly was a) he had superior technology capabilities, but he combined that with really great people skills as well, so that what stood him apart from a lot of other geeks,’’ Mr Tompsett said.

Apart from a pastime of teeing off at Cumberland Golf Club at Greystanes where he was a member, Stephen wasn’t into sports like his brother, and it wasn’t until they were each married with children that their lives converged, despite him living on the other side of the world.

In December 2000, Mr Tompsett’s wife Sue and his children Sarah and Lachlan, spent what was to become Stephen’s last Christmas with him and his family at their home in Garden City, Long Island, before a trip to Disney World in Florida.

A couple of months shy of the terror attacks, Stephen’s family visited their Aussie relatives, first in Cairns, then Sydney where a home reno project became a poignant memory.

“It’s funny how things you would never remember take on an extra significance, but while they were here we were about to pull down an old pergola in our place because we were getting a new deck built,’’ Mr Tompsett said.

“So my brother Steve was here on holidays and (my youngest brother) Ian, who lives here, came over and spent a day helping me pull down this old pergola at the back of my place.

“We got some photos of it, I can’t remember why we even bothered to take photos, but it’s something that I would never have remembered for any other reason other than it was probably the last time that I saw him.’’

About 3.30am Sydney time on September 12, Dorry called to deliver gut-wrenching news to her brother-in-law.

“I was probably numb for the first, realistically, two or three weeks,’’ Mr Tompsett said.

“Steve was the oldest child so he was the leader of the kids, and all of a sudden without ever having contemplated it, that became me.

“My parents were reasonably elderly at the time. Dad would have been in his 80s and Mum in her 70s and I knew this was going to be a pretty cataclysmic news for them so I just steeled myself to be the strong one, because things would have to be done and it probably wasn’t for some time that I was able to switch off a bit more. And then it hit me.

“As my kids grew up, it’s sort of an important part of their history as well. My daughter was seven at the time so she was old enough to understand and the attention she got because of the connection I think is sort of rubbed in as a reality of her life.

“I regret my son, who would have only been three, and he only spent time with his uncle a couple of times, I think that’s really sad for me that my son never got to know him because I think that would really got on well.’’

Like Stephen, Mr Tompsett is a deeply spiritual person who credits his Christian faith for helping him cope, and rejects hatred towards the men who cut the life of his brother - and almost 3000 victims - cruelly short on September 11.

“I think evil people will use all means to justify their actions and I don’t have anything against Islam,’’ Mr Tompsett said.

“Even the people who did it, I think were manipulated into it. As a Christian I forgive and I chose to forgive those people almost immediately.’’

Stephen’s legacy runs deep in his adopted home of New York and Sydney.

At Parramatta Marist, the school where the Tompsett family’s links stretch over a century, the Year 12 major technology prize is named in his honour.

In New York, since 2003, the Stephen K. Tompsett Memorial Fund for Technology in Education Award rewards students in Garden City with a $1500 grant to pursue studies, while a series of other awards into the community recognise pupils for compassion and faith along with academic talent.

Yvonne Kennedy

The Tompsett and Kennedy clans never met before September 11 but there are clear parallels between family matriarch Yvonne, and Stephen, besides the horrific way they died.

Mrs Kennedy left an indelible legacy on those she met, whether it was from helping out at her two sons’ primary school St Anthony's Girraween or the parish church at Toongabbie, the suburb where she lived until the mid 1990s when she moved to Westmead.

“She was heavily involved in everything,’’ her youngest son, Simon, said.

“She was a real doer and a real giver, she was great.

“She was really active and had so many friends through the school community. She was also involved with the church there, St Anthony’s, but her involvement with the Red Cross is what really had her out there.’’

Mrs Kennedy, who was a widow after her husband died of a heart attack when Simon, 46, and his brother Leigh, 47, were young, was involved in the Hills District Red Cross and she helped establish the Holroyd branch after starting out as a first-aid instructor with the humanitarian service.

“She was always involved in disaster welfare and various things so when things like the Granville train disaster happened, Thredbo landslide, she was hands-on in helping with emergency services, in those particular events and various other things, such as the floods in the early ‘90s,’’ Simon said.

“She was hands-on, wasn’t one to stand back and watch. She’d get in there.

“I imagine if she was say a resident of New York, or someone who worked in the Pentagon, she would have been one of those people coming in to do what she could do to help.

“I like to think that if anyone was in need on that flight she was on, if something had happened, she probably would have would be helping them there.’’

Mrs Kennedy was one of 189 people who died after the American Airlines Flight 77 ploughed into the Pentagon at 9.37am. She was flying from Washington DC to Los Angeles when suicide hijackers took control of the plane.

Simon received a call from Leigh in London after he saw the terror unfolding on television, prompting him to check the itinerary his mother copied for him. Unfortunately the flight numbers matched up.

“I think I sat in a state of shock for 24 hours making numerous phone calls around the world, trying to work out if there was an alternative to the reality that was written down in black and white in front of us,’’ Simon said.

“So we were searching for a bit of hope in what seemed hopeless. But the shock and numbness was something that lasted a while.’’

In 2019, the Lane Cove comedian made the remarkable journey to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where one of the architects behind the attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, faced pre-trial hearings.

The move was more about shedding hatred than forgiveness.

“Forgiveness is such a loaded word,’’ the father-of-two said.

“It’s a hard word to quantify because I think it insinuates that the person you’re forgiving wants forgiveness as well, and is sorry for what they did but in this circumstance there’s no remorse so forgiveness might be hard.

“However, holding on to hatred for someone who makes these choices, that’s a choice you can make yourself … and that’s something that I decided.’’

He suspects it’s a value he inherited from his mother at birth.

“I think her legacy has been her sense of humanity, something that was quite obvious through her involvement with the Red Cross, and the ideals of the Red Cross movement, and she was always espousing those ideals to my brother and I,’’ he said.

“It’s something that kind of stuck.’’

Had Mrs Kennedy still been alive, Simon is adamant she would be trying to help the community.

“Right now the Parramatta area is one of the most multicultural areas in the country,’’ he said. “My mum would have been one of those people who I think would reach out to people in various communities and make them feel part of society.

“I think looking at things unravel in Afghanistan right now, she would have been one of the first people to say ‘We have a duty to look after these people who are fleeing horrendous circumstances and we need to make them feel like they have a safe home and a safe harbour in this country’. That’s what the Red Cross was all about, that’s what my mum was all about.’’

On the 20th anniversary, Covid will mean the milestone anniversary will be “the most understated day” with the Kennedy family’s plans to travel to the US thwarted.

And while local travel restrictions will stop Simon from even venturing into the CBD, he has encouraged those who can travel to the Royal Botanic Gardens to pay their respects at the Norfolk pine tree that was planted a decade ago to mark the lives of the 10 Australian victims killed on 9/11, including his mother.

“We miss her every day and it’s hard to imagine it’s been 20 years,’’ Simon said.

“She has four grandchildren. My brother has two daughters and I have a girl and a boy and she would have loved being a grandmother, for sure.’’

Like Stephen Tompsett, Simon and Leigh attended Parramatta Marist and the school honours the victims and their families each year.

Assistant principal Adam Hendry said Mr Tompsett’s memory was kept alive through the award named in his honour and endorsed by Dorry, Emily and Geoff, which was “about celebrating Stephen’s life, his achievements and perhaps, his unrealised potential, by encouraging the next generation to take up his mantle in the applied sciences and do so with the same integrity”.

“Lastly, the senseless loss of two members of our wider school community 20 years ago is a constant reminder to pursue peace vigorously and to seek fraternity and love wherever possible,” Mr Hendry said.

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