Walk is cleansing process after loss of brother-in-law
Sean O'Leary - Chronicle Staff Writer

MARLBOROUGH — Dan Jones spent the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, in a Bronx, N.Y., high school, speaking with his wife, Colleen Kelly, a fellow high school teacher, about the tragedy that unfolded in front of their eyes. “She asked where her brother Billy was, because she knew he worked downtown,” said Jones. “She had a gut feeling as soon as it happened that he was in trouble.” Kelly’s premonition became sobering reality shortly after 11 a.m. that morning, when she received a phone call from her sister. “Her sister told her that her brother was at a breakfast meeting at the Windows on the World restaurant,” said Jones, as he stood silent for a moment. “That’s how we found out.”

With that phone call, Jones and Kelly had to cope with the grief that Bill Kelly Jr. was one of the thousands to lose their lives that day. They would join thousands of families who had to bear the loss of a family member on one of our nation’s gravest days. “Right away, me and my wife were worried that this would lead to violence worldwide,” said Jones. “After the president’s address that Thursday (Sept. 13), it was clear that the plan was to go with a military solution.” “We desperately did not want people in another country, a poor one, to go through what went through and have so much grief,” said Jones. Kelly wrote a letter to a Detroit bishop to “come up with an alternative to war,” said Jones, and eventually that letter was read at the United States Conference of Bishops in the fall of 2001 and portions were excerpted in the Washington Post as well. “Some other people had been posting stuff against the war on the Internet, though we weren’t really doing anything besides writing letters,” said Jones. “Around Thanksgiving, there was a walk from the Pentagon to the World Trade Center, where we met up with the walk.” The walkers had all lost family members during the terrorist attacks and, following the completion of that journey, a group of families got together and met at a Greenwich Village bar, said Jones.