Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, San Joaquin County Supervisor Mario Gardea asked a Stockton crowd to picture the scale of the loss closer to home.
Gardea asked the crowd to imagine every firefighter in Stockton, Modesto and Tracy entering a building “and none of them returning.”
It was how Gardea, a retired Stockton firefighter, tried to put into perspective the deaths of 343 members of the New York City Fire Department on Sept. 11, 2001…