Add The New York Post on Google In the haze of confusion and fear on September 11, 2001, Frank Siller felt certain of one thing.
“I turned to my mother-in-law and said, ‘I think I just lost my brother.’ I was sick to my stomach,” he told me of that fateful morning.
His brother, Stephen Siller, had just gotten off duty as an FDNY firefighter and was driving home from Park Slope to Staten Island when he heard the North Tower of the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. He turned his truck around, donned 60 pounds of equipment and ran through the closed Brooklyn Battery Tunnel toward the horror unfolding in Manhattan.
Frank would later receive confirmation from his brother’s friend and fellow firefighter Richie Obermeyer, who phoned him from Ground Zero with the grim news.
In his new book, “Let Us Do Good,” Siller recounted Obermeyer’s chilling words. “No one is coming home, Frank,” Obermeyer told him. “No one.”
Stephen, a married father of five, never returned. But his heroic final acts would become one of the defining and enduring stories from the terror attacks.
“It was brutal, but that’s when our faith kicked in,” said Frank, a devout Catholic. His family faced an agonizing choice. “Are we going to let that define everything — or are we going to take what Stephen did and thank him for his sacrifice?”
The six remaining Siller siblings launched the Tunnel to Towers foundation, which was originally intended to help children who had lost parents in the attacks. In 2002, they held a 5k run retracing Stephen’s route through the tunnel. It drew 1,500 participants; this year, they’ll have 30,000.
And the charity itself has grown to meet the needs of first responders, veterans and their families. They build smart homes for injured veterans, provide housing for homeless vets, pay off mortgages for Gold Star families and provide scholarships for children of the fallen.
The mission, Frank said, was inspired by their brother’s selfless action — as well as St. Francis of Assisi, who said, “While we are here, let us do good” and stressed simplicity and service.
His book is really about his and Stephen’s family.
“I wanted to introduce people to my mom and dad,” he said of his parents, George and Mae Siller, who raised seven children in a raucous Staten Island home full of faith.
While they had very little, he said, “We had each other, and we had great friends.”
While Frank’s own childhood was “glorious,” Stephen’s took a dark turn when the “larger than life” boy” — a rabid fan of the Knicks and Kansas City Royals legend George Brett — was just 10 years old.
First their father, George, passed from a heart embolism, then a year-and-a-half later their mother, Mae, died as well. Stephen’s much older siblings took him in, ensuring he was raised in the Siller way.
Frank, who is 14 years older than Stephen, recalled taking his brother to a park when as a boy, he broke down crying, saying he wished he had never been born.
“I know God put you on this Earth for a reason,” Frank told him. “And I know someday you are going to do something very special.”
But Stephen had an eerie feeling about the future.
“Stephen admitted to [his wife Sally] that his need to make the most out of every day stemmed from a deeply held premonition that he was going to die young,” he writes.
“I’d rather have him back, in a very selfish way. That’s hard to say,” Frank admits. “I wish I was helping somebody else’s foundation and he was still here.”
But he also seems ordained for this role. By the end of 2026, Tunnel to Towers will have delivered over 2,000 mortgage-free homes.
Numerous celebrities have lent their time and names to help raise money, including Sylvester Stallone, Mark Wahlberg and Dave Portnoy.
But for every boldfacer in his book, there are far more stories of veterans and surviving family members of first responders.
“I have sat with these families in the raw aftermath of their losses, when the shock is still fresh and the reality hasn’t set in,” he writes.
Even with all their complicated initiatives, they are still working to ensure people “never forget.”
After a quarter of a century and public figures like leftist streamer Hasan Piker saying “America deserved 9/11,” it’s a heavier lift.
Siller doesn’t like to get political but said, “Somebody that says America deserved 9/11? It’s the greatest country in the world… It’s not true.”
He said that 25-year-old Frank would punch Piker in the face, but 73-year-old version knows “it’s not going to settle anything.”
“It’s disturbing these naive kids that have been brainwashed.”
Meanwhile, Siller would like to focus on the mission. And he still replays his brother’s last day in his mind, wondering what he thought as he raced toward danger.
“I’m sure he was torn,” he said, thinking of his wife and kids. “That’s a hero.”
