There were some who didn't get over it this week:

New York Daily News
Kills self at Ground Zero in protest

Sunday, November 7th, 2004

A Georgia man fatally shot himself at Ground Zero, and friends believe the tragic suicide was a political protest against President Bush's reelection and the war in Iraq. The body of Andrew Veal, 25, a university research worker who was engaged to be married, was found on the hallowed ground of the World Trade Center site yesterday morning.

Veal didn't leave a note, but those who knew the sensitive young man said he sent a grim message by choosing to end his life where almost 3,000 people perished on Sept. 11, 2001. "I'm absolutely sure it's a protest," said Mary Anne Mauney, Veal's supervisor at the University of Georgia survey research lab. "I don't know what made him commit suicide, but where he did it was symbolic."

"I see it as a political statement," agreed co-worker Stacey Sutherland. "He was so opposed to the war."

When Veal failed to show up at work on Wednesday, his pals assumed he was upset that Bush had beaten John Kerry in the race for the White House and was taking a few days off. "We figured he was just devastated," Mauney said. But fears for his safety grew when he didn't returns calls from his mother and his fiancée, an Iowa college student who was supposed to meet him in Seattle this weekend for a family wedding. "We've been trying to reach Andy for a few days, leaving voicemails and messages, but we couldn't get him," said his mother, Sharon Veal. "We were very worried about him."

Late in the week, there was some suggestion Veal might have headed to New York. He called a friend looking for the number of an acquaintance who lives in the city, and told someone else who reached him by phone that he was here, friends said. "When we heard that, we felt hopeful that he was just off someplace, working out whatever he had to," Mauney said.

But hope turned to heartache yesterday around 8 a.m., when a worker at the Millenium Hotel, across from Ground Zero, spotted a figure behind the fence that rings the 16 acres. The hotel alerted Port Authority police, who secure Ground Zero, that someone might be sleeping in the off-limits site, PA spokesman Steve Coleman said. PA investigators were not sure how Veal entered the restricted area, and the incident has prompted the agency to review its security procedures, Coleman said.

Veal's body was found near the Church St. perimeter atop the structure enclosing the 1/9 subway line in The Pit. He had a head wound and cops recovered a shotgun nearby. "Andy was so anti-violence, I can't even see him holding a gun," Sutherland said.

Mauney said that other than the war and the election, she didn't know what might have been troubling Veal. "I told his mother there are some people so sensitive and intelligent and passionate they don't belong in the world the way it is today," she said. "And if this was something he had to do, it was heroic that he chose the World Trade Center."

Not everyone felt the same way.

"Enough people died in here," said Neil Thomas, 56, a visitor from Michigan. "Nobody else needed to die here."