SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO/AP) — Anyone following the news 25 years ago likely remembers where they were and what they were doing when the terror attacks of 9/11 unfolded. Most Americans followed the developments from afar, but some were much closer. And almost 3,000 people lost their lives.
Among the survivors that day were three people with South Dakota roots who were 16-year-old Senate pages in the U.S. Capitol on 9/11. South Dakota’s Tom Daschle was Senate majority leader in 2001, and his office selected Joe Kippley, Katie Ruedebusch and Jason Frerichs to be Senate pages in the fall of that year. The students at Brookings, Stevens, and Wilmot High Schools, respectively, were helping the Senate do its work. The three are still friends today.
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Not far from the Senate chamber where the trio worked, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in northern Virginia on Sept. 11. Planes had already hit the World Trade Center earlier in the morning.
“The Capitol Police gathered us all in the cloakroom when they got word that the Pentagon had been hit,” Kippley, who lives in Sioux Falls, said Wednesday…