Five 9/11 victims were from Annandale
As the nation prepares to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday, we found that five of the 2,974 people who lost their lives due to the terrorists attacks that day were living in Annandale at the time.
The following information is from CNN and the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial website.
Army Sgt. First Class Jose Calderon-Olmeda, 44, was one of 125 people working in the Pentagon that day who was killed when terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the building. Originally from Puerto Rico, he received many medals for his service in the Army, including his work in Operation Desert Storm. He left behind a wife and two children, ages 10 and 3.
Deborah A. Ramsaur, 45, a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, was also among the victims killed at the Pentagon. She was the secretary to deputy chief of staff for personnel, Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, who also perished that day. She left behind a husband and two children, ages 5 and 7.
John P. Sammartino, 37, an engineer at XonTech Inc., a company based in Rosslyn, left his Annandale home before dawn to board Flight 77 at Dulles to attend a conference in Los Angeles. He was married and had a 4-year-old daughter.
Robert R. Ploger III, 60, and Zandra F. Ploger, 59, were newlyweds on their way to a two-week honeymoon in Hawaii when they boarded Flight 77 on 9/11.
Robert Ploger had retired from IBM in 1996 with two patents. At the time of his death, he was the director of enterprise engineering for the U.S. Customs and Modernization Program at Lockheed Martin. Zandra Ploger had been a manager with IBM for 20 years. Both of them had grown children from their first marriages. Robert’s daughter, Wendy, shares her memories of the couple on the Pentagon Memorial website.
