PHOTO: Southampton Teacher Still Reels from Loss on 9/11

To this day, teacher Vicki Tureski continuously wears a bracelet bearing her late brother-in-law’s name, Steve Pollicino, and the initials WTC.  “I never take mine off,” she said during a recent interview at her Tuckahoe Woods home. The sterling silver band was a gift from the company he had worked for, Cantor Fitzgerald, where he was a bond broker on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center. He was among 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who perished during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She had known Pollicino for 30 years when he died — she and her twin sister, Jane, who would eventually become his wife, met him in a Nassau Community College biology class when they were 17. “Being twins, he knew we came as a package deal,” Tureski said. Pollicino survived the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, and Tureski said she held out hope on 9/11 that he would walk out of Tower One safely again. On a television in the school principal’s office, she watched the smoke and flames billowing out of the towers and as Tower One fell. That image was the last thing she saw when she went to bed and the first thing she saw when she woke up for more than a year. “The pain is the same as if it happened yesterday,” she said. It’s her children and her students who have kept her going since, she said.