08/31/2026
He was 54. A bond broker, vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald. Sixteen years on the job.
His office sat on the 104th floor of the North Tower — high enough that most mornings, the city looked small beneath him.
Coworkers called him "the Rev." It started as a jab.
Al Braca never hid his faith on a trading floor built on ego and money. He talked about Jesus. He skipped the after-work drinks. On a floor full of hard chargers, that made him stand out — and made him an easy target for jokes.
Most of those jokes softened over time. People noticed he never wavered.
Back in February 1993, when a bomb ripped through the World Trade Center's parking garage, Al found himself in a smoke-filled stairwell with hundreds of other evacuees. He didn't just walk down. He prayed with the people around him.
That day, six people lost their lives and more than a thousand were injured. It took over four hours to clear 50,000 people from the towers.
Al remembered it. So did the people who walked down with him.
September 11 was different. There would be no walking down this time.
The first plane struck the North Tower just below the 100th floor — dozens of stories beneath Al's office, but high enough that every stairwell above the impact was gone. Smoke poured up through the building. Phones started dying. People began to understand there was no way out.
Al Braca stood up.
He gathered roughly 50 coworkers into a circle. He climbed onto a desk so everyone could see him.
Then he said the words that would later reach their families secondhand, pieced together from calls made in those final minutes: "I'm going to see Jesus today. Who's coming with me?"
He led them in prayer. Some of them, by their own coworkers' later accounts, put their faith in Christ for the first time in that circle, thirty seconds from the end of everything they knew.
At the same time, Al was trying to reach his own family. He got through to an MCI operator on the outside line.
He couldn't reach his wife Jean directly. So he left the operator with four words: "Tell them I love them."
It took the operator more than a month to track down the Braca family and deliver that message. By then, they already knew Al wasn't coming home.
All 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who were in the North Tower that morning lost their lives. Every single one.
Jean and Al had met on the Staten Island Ferry years earlier — he asked her out, she said no, he called anyway, and a 12-hour phone call changed her mind. That first date turned into 33 years of marriage and four children: David, Deanna, Christina, and Christopher.
Just one month before September 11, Al had walked his daughter Deanna down the aisle at her wedding.
His body was found in the wreckage in the weeks that followed. His family got the one thing so many others never received: a name, a body, a funeral, a place to grieve.
Al Braca is remembered today at the National September 11 Memorial, his name etched in bronze alongside the 2,977 others taken that morning.
He spent sixteen years being teased for who he was. In the end, that's exactly who fifty people needed him to be.
