Shortly before midnight on September 11, 2001, Henryk Siwiak, a Polish immigrant to the United States, was fatally shot on a street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he had mistakenly gone in order to start a new job. He was able to make it to the door of a nearby house before he collapsed. The homicide remains unsolved. Siwiak has been described as “the last person killed in New York on 9/11”, although he wasn’t a victim of the terror attacks earlier that day. Police believe the initial investigation may have been hampered by the diversion of law enforcement resources in the city in the wake of that day’s terrorist attacks, which ultimately killed 3,000 people. Since Siwiak wasn’t robbed, wore camouflage, and spoke with a heavy accent, detectives have speculated that his killer may have thought he had something to do with the attacks. Siwiak’s homicide is the only one recorded in New York City on September 11, 2001, since the city doesn’t include the deaths from the attacks in its official crime statistics.
