Baltimore County to Remember 9/11 Victims at Candlelight Vigil

Baltimore County will remember Sept. 11 on Thursday with remembrances including a bell ringing and candlelight vigil.

At 8:46 a.m. on Thursday, the Baltimore County Fire Department will ring a remembrance bell 415 times, according to a statement from event organizer Chuck Ritz, founder of The Hope and Peace Foundation. The bell ringing will take place at the Parkville fire station at 2325 Putty Hill Avenue.

At 7 p.m., there will be a candlelight vigil at the Putty Hill Shopping Center at 2531 Putty Hill Avenue in Parkville.

The VFW Honor Guard will be in attendanc at the ceremony, which will include a bell ringing, reading of the names of the 68 Marylanders killed in 9/11 and stories of unsung heroes including Cpl. Chris Coffland, a Timonium native who graduated from Gilman before going to Afghanistan, where he was killed by a roadside bomb on Nov. 13, 2009; and Elizabeth Wainio, the Catonsville resident and Towson University grad who was killed when terrorists crashed Flight 93 into a field in Shanksville, PA, on Sept. 11, 2001, according to Ritz.

Last week, Ritz and other volunteers planted 2,977 flags in the ground along a stretch of Putty Hill Avenue from Harford Road to Old Harford Road.

“When you start to ride by or ... walk past each one, you realize,” Ritz told ABC 2 News, “this was a life that was that lost—each one of those represents a life.”

Photo Credit: Screenshot from ABC 2 News/YouTube. Nearly 3,000 American flags line Putty Hill Avenue for Sept. 11.