An 11-year-old from Arlington, Texas has spent his free time drawing comic books that keep alive the memory of the first responders who died on September 11, 2001, a project that began with a single conversation at airport security and eventually carried him all the way to Ground Zero. Benjamin Faundez creates the comics himself, working to honor the bravery of firefighters, police officers and rescue workers for a generation of kids who never lived through that day.
The idea took root after Faundez read Lauren Tarshis's historical fiction book I Survived the Attacks of September 11, 2001, which pushed him to depict the courage of first responders in his own words, according to the Transportation Security Administration. Not long after, Faundez met TSA manager John Passarella during a security screening at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. Passarella, a former school art teacher of 35 years, gave the boy a 9/11 commemorative pin, and the exchange grew into a lasting friendship between the two, per the TSA account.
A Family Trip to Ground Zero
That bond eventually led Faundez to New York City, where he traveled with his mother Paulina, his father Miguel and his younger sister Florencia, who helps him film video projects on her phone, the agency's report notes. As reported by CW39 Houston, the journey to the 9/11 Memorial reinforced for Faundez the importance of remembrance for future generations, tying his comic book project directly to the site it honors.
The Manhattan memorial he visited draws enormous crowds each year. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum's 2025 annual report recorded 11.3 million memorial visitors and 2.4 million museum visitors in a single year, according to Newsday. The attacks that the site commemorates killed 2,977 people across New York City, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, including 343 FDNY firefighters and dozens of law enforcement officers, per the memorial's own figures.
North Texas Ties to 9/11 Run Deep
Faundez's story unfolds in a region with its own physical connections to that history. Just north of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Grapevine, the 9/11 Flight Crew Memorial features 14-foot bronze statues dedicated in July 2008 to honor the 33 flight crew members lost that day, according to North Texas e-News. In neighboring Fort Worth, the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History holds a three-story, full-façade steel panel recovered from floors 101 through 103 of the World Trade Center's North Tower, believed to be the largest physical WTC artifact on display in Texas.
The region also marks the anniversary through organized public events. The DFW 9/11 Heroes Run, part of a national initiative honoring military veterans and first responders, brings a 5K run and ruck event to the area each year, per RunSignup. Those local tributes sit alongside the federal agency that grew directly out of the 2001 attacks: the TSA was created when President George W. Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act into law on November 19, 2001, establishing federal oversight of transportation security just two months after the attacks.
An Agency Built From Tragedy, Still Growing
Today, the TSA operates as an agency of the Department of Homeland Security with more than 58,000 employees, screening passengers at over 450 airports nationwide on an annual budget exceeding $11 billion, according to figures cited on Wikipedia. It's within that vast institutional footprint that a single manager's gesture toward one Arlington boy took root, turning a routine airport encounter into a mentorship that now stretches from a DFW security line to the comic pages Faundez fills with the stories of the fallen.
