HOUSTON – The walls of William P. Clements High School in Sugarland are lined with photos of the faces of 400 strangers.
They are people that the students have never met and will never get to know, but their images and their stories have been imprinted on their minds.
Four US History classes at Clements worked on the project to memorialize some of the nearly 3,000 victims that died on September 11th, 15 years after their death.
Junior Claire Craig chose to study 25-year-old Peter Craig Alderman, simply because of the similarities in their names.
"It's crazy to think about it to think that he was only 25 years old and he flew back early from a family vacation in Paris to take a business meeting at the Center,” Craig said.
Alderman was on the 106th floor of the North Tower when the building collapsed.
Each student went through a list of victim’s names, some choosing at random, and went on to study that person’s life—and ultimately, their death - 15 years ago.
The high school juniors were one or two years old on the day four planes were hijacked by terrorists; most of them have no recollection of what happened on that day.
Julia Moacyr says that’s why it was so important to her to work on this class project.
"Pretty soon, there won't be enough people who were there when it happened, so memorials like these really keep it alive and make people remember what happened,” Moacyr said.
This is the second time Clements high schoolers completed the project; they did something similar for the tenth anniversary of September 11th in 2011, and plan to repeat it every five years.