Workers run from the aftermath of 9/11 (Picture: AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)

A banking firm that lost 66 employees in the 9/11 terror attacks has paid the college fees for 54 children of their fallen workers.

The workers at investment banking firm Sandler O’Neill & Partners were killed when terrorists smashed a hijacked passenger jet into the World Trade Center’s South Tower –with the firm’s offices situated on the 104th floor of the building.

Just days after the attack, company bosses established the Sandler O’Neill Foundation – to provide lasting support for the families of the workers who lost their lives.

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To date, 54 children of the workers have had their college education paid for by the initiative, and a further 22 are still eligible.

They have attended prestigious institutions such as Stanford and Notre Dame, while others have gone on to study at community colleges and technical institutes.

Explaining the fund’s initial establishment, founder Andy Armstrong recalled: ‘We were up and running by the end of the first week.

‘We wanted the families of the lost to know that we would always remember, that the passing years would never sweep this under the rug. People donated many millions of dollars to set up the foundation.

66 workers were killed when a passenger jet smashed into the World Trade Center

(Picture: AP Photo)

‘We have no salaries and no expenses except fees to stay extant.

‘Yes, I know most of the children who went to college. You wouldn’t believe some of the letters they have written in appreciation. I think they particularly appreciate that we remember their mom or dad this way. Many of them hardly knew their moms and dads.’

Jimmy Dunne, the Senior Managing Principal of Sandler O’Neill, described the fund as being a way for the firm to ‘survive and flourish’ in the wake of the horrific attacks.

‘We believed that what we did would echo for a hundred years in the families of our people, their kids and their grandkids’, he recalled.

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‘Because how we conducted ourselves in those first few hours and days would define who we really were and what we were about. Because I knew that if we were not honourable, then we stood for nothing.

He added: ‘I remember staring at bin Laden’s smirking face on television, on September 11, and concluding immediately that we would not be intimidated, we would not go out of business, we will come back stronger than ever, and be an example of people who worked and lived with honour.

‘And that meant taking care of our people and their children with respect and reverence. So we did that. We figured what we did and how we did it was our way of fighting idiots like bin Laden. You want us to fall apart? Then we will survive and flourish.’

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