The sky was beautiful both times.
That is what I remember about September 11, 2001, and September 10, 2025 – the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
Clear skies. Bright sunshine. Ordinary September beauty suspended above scenes of almost unimaginable horror.
I remember the weather on the days we gathered to pray, too. Those days were beautiful as well.
And on both occasions, twenty-four years apart, I went to the same place: the old Bell Tower on Virginia’s Capitol Square.
In 2001, I was press secretary to Mark Earley, Sr. who had stepped down as Virginia’s attorney general to run for governor. I had served as his press secretary in the attorney general’s office and followed him onto the campaign trail.
The day before the attacks, Mark and then-Governor Jim Gilmore had been fundraising in New York City. Rudy Giuliani hosted an event for Mark at the 21 Club, and that evening they planned to attend a Yankees game and stay at the Marriott World Trade Center.
A thunderstorm changed their plans. After debating whether to remain in New York, they took a late flight home, reaching Richmond around 3:30AM the next morning.
Only hours later, Mark and Jonathan Martin – now of Politico, were driving to a campaign meeting at what was then a Hyatt or Sheraton Hotel on West Broad Street. They were listening to Don Imus on the radio, when the first plane struck the World Trade Center.
At the hotel, Mark asked that televisions be brought into the meeting. Together, we watched the second plane hit the South Tower. Then came the attack on the Pentagon in Arlington and news that another plane had gone down in Pennsylvania.
We disbanded the meeting.
Nearly 3,000 innocent people had left home that morning and would never return. The towers fell. The Pentagon burned. Ordinary life stopped.
Mark Earley and Mark Warner suspended their campaigns. Planned political events were canceled. President George W. Bush concluded that there was no place for partisan politics in that moment.
Politics, which had seemed so important only hours earlier, suddenly seemed very small.
In the days that followed, I joined other Virginians at the Bell Tower for a prayer vigil. We gathered beneath another beautiful September sky carrying grief, fear and disbelief.
We prayed for those who had been killed, for families awaiting news, for first responders running toward danger, and for a country struggling to comprehend what had happened.
I couldn’t have imagined twenty-four years later, I would return to that exact place following another act of violence that stunned America.
On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was speaking on a college campus in Utah. He was doing what he had done countless times: entering the public square, stating his beliefs and inviting students who disagreed to question him.
Then a coward’s bullet brutally ended his life.
Eight days later, I again stood beside the Bell Tower. Among those present was Mark Earley Jr., who had followed his father into elected office and was then serving in the Virginia House of Delegates.
When I came to that place in 2001, I was working for his father. Nearly a quarter-century later, I was with the son.
Once again, the weather was beautiful.
And once again, we prayed.
The scale of September 11 and the assassination of one man cannot be equated. Their circumstances and human toll were vastly different.
But on their 25th and first anniversaries, they converge in my mind at that Bell Tower.
Both reveal what happens when hatred persuades people human life is expendable. Both left families whose lives were divided forever into a before and an after. Both confronted America with the question of how we respond when violence attempts to frighten, silence or destroy.
After September 11, Americans reached for one another. Churches filled. Flags appeared on front porches. Political differences briefly yielded to our shared identity.
After Charlie’s assassination, millions recoiled from the violence – including many who strongly disagreed with him. But others celebrated his death, as though holding the wrong political beliefs had stripped a husband and father of his humanity.
That reaction revealed something deeply broken in our country.
When contempt is cultivated long enough, an opponent becomes an enemy. The enemy becomes less than human. Eventually, violence becomes something to excuse – or even applaud.
Charlie believed ideas should be argued openly and vigorously. Disagreement is answered with more speech, not a bullet. If political violence becomes acceptable whenever its victim holds beliefs we dislike, no speaker, no cause and no citizen is ultimately safe.
Yet my strongest memory of those two gatherings is not anger.
It is prayer – and the sunlight.
Beautiful weather is not evidence of God’s favor, just as suffering is not evidence of His absence. Faith does not promise us cloudless skies.
But those clear September skies remind us that God is ever-present through the good and the bad. He was present in our grief after September 11. He was present in our grief after Charlie’s assassination. He remains present even when what happens beneath His sky seems impossibly dark.
Prayer does not erase grief or excuse us from our responsibilities. It places our sorrow, anger and fear before an authority greater than ourselves. It asks God to comfort the afflicted, strengthen the fearful, and guard our own hearts against hatred.
I hope that none of us will ever again have reason to stand at the Bell Tower following a national tragedy.
But if the wounds of our nation are ever to heal, we will need what we sought there after both of these tragedies: humility, humanity and prayer.
Today, we remember those taken from us on September 11. We remember Charlie Kirk. We remember the families who still carry their absence.
The sky above us is still beautiful.
God is still present.
And once again, we pray for America.
