Henryk Siwiak

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.

While Siwiak was able to work, he struggled to learn English.

He took classes and watched television with his sister, but improved only slowly.

That, Lucyna warned him, could put him at risk in New York.

"We told him [the city] was a dangerous place", she recalled later to the Associated Press.

"But he didn't believe it", perhaps, she said, because he liked living there so much.

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 he was not a victim of 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.

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.

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.

At the employment agency, Siwiak comforted the owner, whose husband worked at the World Trade Center and had not contacted her since that morning (she later learned her husband had indeed died in the attack).

He learned he could start late that night, and returned to Far Rockaway.

There he called his wife, Ewa, in Poland to tell her he was safe; he had witnessed one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.

"I told him just in case: don't leave tonight, because it can be dangerous in New York", she recalled later.

Siwiak had never been to the Farragut neighborhood where the Pathmark supermarket was located, so he and his landlady looked over a subway map and decided he should take the A train to the Utica Avenue station, near the north end of Albany Avenue, the street on which the Pathmark is located.

However, the landlady did not ask Siwiak for the store's address, so she did not realize that it was actually located three miles (3 mi) to the south.

Since Siwiak did not know the man from the service he was supposed to meet, he told the agency how he would be dressed.

Before leaving, he put on a jacket in a camouflage pattern, with matching pants and black boots.

He also carried a backpack with different pants and sneakers to change into once he got to the Pathmark.

Before leaving, Siwiak's landlady pleaded with him to reconsider going there, as in her opinion it was a dangerous neighborhood no one should go to at night without a good reason and especially on that night in particular, with the city's population anxious in the wake of the day's events.

She was unable to deter him.

Around 11 p.m., Siwiak got off the subway and exited.

He began to walk west along Fulton Street toward Albany Avenue, several blocks away.

A witness later recalled passing him as he did so.

At the Albany intersection, Siwiak turned right, heading north, instead of south as his directions said.

That area of the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood had long been seen by residents and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) as one of the city's most dangerous.

All the NYPD's available officers were on duty that night, most already on overtime; some had even returned from distant vacations.

Many were needed to provide increased security in the neighborhoods close to Ground Zero or possible targets for a feared follow-up attack; police officials feared that criminals elsewhere in the city would use that distraction to their advantage.

One exception to this was the northernmost block of Albany Avenue.