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Fired Half-Blind 1 WTC Guard Agrees He Should Have Been Fired
By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 26, 2014
Modified Mar 26, 2014
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Mar 26, 2014
Modified Mar 26, 2014
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On his way all the way to the spire of 1 WTC last week, 16-year-old Justin Casquejo told officials he snuck past a sleeping security guard. After Casquejo's arrest, that security guard was fired. Now it turns out he wasn't the only guard fired: According the Post, "A shocking cellphone photo obtained by The Post shows Abdul Basher, 65, stretched out nearly horizontal in his chair in the skyscraper’s south lobby, where he was the only guard assigned to protect the ground floor of the top US terror target."
Basher, who was canned from his gig, now tells the Post that he is relieved that he has been fired due to his partial-blindness: "Sometimes I cannot recognize people, stairs," the Queens resident told them. "That post was so hard to cover for me. It was very, very stressful. I could barely see half of the lobby."
Basher suffers from a nerve condition and can’t open his left eye, while he describes the vision in his right as “hazy." Basher disputes that he was sleeping in the cellphone photo: "To my knowledge, actually I was not sleeping. I was mistaken to be sleeping. I was exercising my eyes," he said.
A spokesman for the Durst Organization, which supplies the guards for the area, confirmed that Basher “was terminated on the spot after he was found sleeping on the job,” Basher—who was named “Security Officer of the Year” for 2013 by his union, 32BJ union—also said he was “just getting ready to go on disability.”
The Post seems to take some glee in all this, bashing the union and bringing up President Obama's out-of-context "nuclear weapons in Manhattan" comments before other major security breaches at WTC, like the BASE jumpers.
And a construction worker "fumed" when the Post showed him the photo of Basher you can see above: "They play Candy Crush, they even have the Hulu to keep themselves entertained. It’s f-king ridiculous." Construction workers, on the other hand, have other interests.
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1WTC
one world trade center
ring of steel
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teenagers
world trade center
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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