Victim’s name spelt wrong on 9/11 memorial

The sister of a man who perished in the attacks at the World Trade Centre has been left livid after finding that his name was spelt incorrectly on the official 9/11 memorial.

The body of victim Jeffrey H Schreier was never found and for his sister, Janice Hart, a great deal of importance was placed on the memorial site which remembers her brother and almost 3,000 people who were killed.

After ten years of waiting for the memorial, Jeffrey’s name was revealed this weekend to be wrongly inscribed on the New York City memorial as ‘Jefferey.’

[Gallery: 9/11 memorial service in photos]

A distressed Mrs Hart stormed out of the ceremony after noticing the blunder when the brand new memorial was unveiled on Sunday -  the 10th anniversary of the tragedy.

Brooklyn-born Mr Schreier, 48, was one of 658 people who died from the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald when members of al-Qaeda flew a plane into the North Tower.

Mrs Hart spoke of her disgust at the typo with NBC New York. She said: “As I was looking at the name, all of a sudden, I realised this name was not quite spelled correctly.

“You feel as though Jeffrey's soul is now looking down and saying: Can't you get my name right?


“This is the only place we could go to have some solace, and to see his name engraved incorrectly was very distressing to us.”

[Feature: Facts you probably didn't know about 9/11]

Michael Frazier, spokesman for the National September 11 Memorial, explained the mistake: “We regret an error was made by reversing two letters in Jeffrey H. Schreier's name while entering it into our verification database, and we are extremely sorry for the pain this mistake has caused Jeffrey's family.

“As soon as we found out about this error we began working on how to make it right and we're engaged with our fabricators, contractors and the architect to do so.”

Mrs Hart added that the error was particularly distressing for her since many of her relatives had died in the holocaust and their remains had never been recovered.