Police search for thief who stole 9/11 memorial gold rose from New York Catholic church

CNA Staff, Nov 22, 2024 / 13:35 pm

Police are searching for a thief who entered a Manhattan Catholic church this week and stole a gold rose that memorializes a priest who perished in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

Police said in a release that on Wednesday afternoon an individual entered the Church of St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street and “removed a gold-plated metal rose from the 9/11 memorial inside without permission or authority to do so.”

The suspect on Friday was identified as 21-year-old Deikel Alcantara. The incident was being treated as an act of grand larceny. In New York State, grand larceny involves the theft of property worth at least $1,000. 

Father Brian Jordan, the church’s pastor, told the New York Daily News on Thursday that Alcantara was “known to church staffers and had been asked to leave on several occasions,” the newspaper said. 

For years, the memorial has stood in honor of Father Mychal Judge, a former pastor at St. Francis who served as a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. Judge was struck and killed by debris during the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. 

The priest had rushed to the scene of the crisis after the first plane struck. He was reportedly asked by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to pray for the victims who had initially died in the attack; Judge did so, including at a command post inside the North Tower.

Though not the first to die in the crisis, Judge was designated as “Victim 0001” of the day’s mass murder, becoming the first certified victim of the terror attack. He “refused to flee to safety” before the South Tower’s collapse, Giuliani said in a memorial tribute last year. 

The memorial is also dedicated to Carole LaPlante, a secular Franciscan and former parishioner who died in the attack. 

The small monument inside the church incorporates a section of twisted steel beams pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center after its collapse, along with the gold rose. 

A plaque attached to the monument notes that the rose “transcends the senseless brutality” of the attacks “with an enduring promise of hope.”