Killing of Henryk Siwiak

The NYPD could not bring its full investigative resources to the crime scene since so many other officers were needed elsewhere due to the attacks. Normally, in the case of a homicide, its Crime Scene Unit would secure the area and collect forensic evidence, but its members were not available. Instead an evidence-collection unit, normally used only on nonviolent property crimes such as burglaries, performed those tasks. And where as many as nine detectives might canvass the neighborhood, talking to potential witnesses and looking for evidence away from the scene, the NYPD could only spare three at most. "[Siwiak] wasn't afforded the initial experts in processing the homicide scene", Prate said in 2011. While he hoped the investigators who were able to respond collected all the evidence they could, he could not be sure they had either. "The Police Department gave that investigation what it could do that day."

While Prate allowed in his 2011 interview that it might have been possible, the NYPD has not classified the homicide as a hate crime since so little is known about it. "The problem was that there were no witnesses on that corner", another officer said early in 2002. "We haven't heard anything like that from any people in the community; nobody has indicated that to us", Prate told WNYC a decade later. "There is [sic] no significant targets that a terrorist would target here." Prate does believe that Siwiak's poor English could have led to his death. He likely would not have understood what was happening if someone attempted to rob him.

Prate continued to investigate the crime, which is now considered a cold case, until his retirement in 2011. He talked to suspects arrested for other crimes in the area; none of them have provided any information. No new witnesses have come forward. A $12,000 reward has been offered. In 2018, Prate told ABC News that a botched robbery was still his theory for the most likely cause of the homicide.

Siwiak's murder received little of the media attention that might have led witnesses to come forward because of the attacks and their aftermath; what coverage there was came at least a month later. Neither Siwiak's sister nor his widow believe the case will ever be solved. "I'm afraid this is forever", Ewa Siwiak told the Times in 2011. "I think the police have many, many cases and maybe they'll never call me", Lucyna said a few months later. She still attends the annual memorial services every September 11 at St. Patrick's Cathedral, if it is not too crowded.

Shortly before midnight on September 11, 2001, Henryk Siwiak (1955–2001), a Polish immigrant, was fatally shot on a street in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where he had mistakenly gone in order to start a new job. He was able to make it to the door of a nearby house before he collapsed. The homicide remains unsolved; Siwiak has been described as "the last person killed in New York on 9/11", although his death was unrelated to the terror attacks earlier that day.

The initial investigation into the crime may have been hampered, police believe, by the diversion of law enforcement resources in the city in the wake of that day's terrorist attacks, which ultimately killed almost 3,000 people. Since Siwiak was not robbed, wore camouflage clothing and spoke poor English with a heavy accent, detectives have speculated that his killer may have thought he had something to do with the attacks. Siwiak's homicide is the only one recorded in New York City on September 11, 2001, since the city does not include the deaths from the attacks in its official crime statistics.

Throughout most of 2001, Siwiak had been working at a construction site in Lower Manhattan. On the morning of September 11, following the attacks, the job site closed down as that part of the city was evacuated. Siwiak could not afford to wait until work resumed, so after walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, he took the subway back to his sister's home. After looking through the classified ads in the Polish-language newspaper Nowy Dziennik, he found one with a cleaning service at a Pathmark supermarket in the Farragut section of Brooklyn. To fill out the paperwork, he went to an employment agency in Bay Ridge that served the city's Polish community.

As the deaths from the 9/11 attacks are not included in New York City's official crime statistics for 2001, Siwiak's death is the only homicide recorded in the city on that date. The FBI also did not record the 2,977 deaths from the attacks in their annual violent crime index for 2001, citing the fact that these deaths were statistical outliers and would erroneously skew FBI analyses.

A native of Kraków, Henryk Siwiak had worked as an inspector for the Polish State Railways and its successor private entities. He was married to Ewa Siwiak and had two children, 17-year-old Gabriela and 10-year-old Adam. After he was laid off around 2000, Siwiak went to New York City to visit his sister Lucyna, who had been living in Far Rockaway, Queens, for six years. Despite lacking a work permit, he decided to stay and do what work he could, sending several hundred dollars back to his family in Poland every few months to supplement her earnings as a high school biology teacher. Siwiak hoped that eventually he could return and build a new house.