Do you believe in coincidences?

I feel the madness resurfacing around this time of year when I remember that President George W. Bush was in our coastal retirement town on Sept. 11, 2001, reading to a classroom of second graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary School, not far from where three of the hijackers lived, trained and partied for a year before the attacks. Or that a wealthy Saudi family, connected to a Saudi prince, lived in the gated community of Prestancia in south Sarasota. The family was frequently called and visited by the hijackers and then fled two weeks before the attacks, leaving dirty diapers in the bathroom, food in the fridge and an open safe in the master bedroom.

These freak occurrences continue to haunt me, especially on the 25th anniversary of the attacks. 

The truth about what happened in Sarasota, leading to the deadliest attacks in American history, killing 2,977 people, is still hidden from us a quarter century later. More than 80,000 documents dealing with Sarasota's connections to 9/11 are sitting in an FBI office in Tampa that no president, Democrat or Republican, has let us see. This is odd, considering that what was discovered in Sarasota has helped to reveal a government cover-up that implicates the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and invalidates the integrity of the nonpartisan 9/11 Commission report in 2004 that investigated the attacks. You have to wonder: What more could they be hiding about the events here? 

We may never connect all the dots, but here’s a map of where the ghosts of 9/11 haunt Sarasota. 

(Keep scrolling—this story continues below the interactive map.)

Until we know the full truth about what happened here, we won’t know the truth about that day. Every year, we’re told to “never forget,” but we never knew in the first place.

This matters because 9/11 changed America. It created a security state with new agencies—the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agency U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It has more than doubled our intelligence budget, eroded Congress’s powers and given us an imperial presidency. 

We don’t want to believe in cover-ups, but just this week, 170,000 records were released, showing that officials knew for decades that the air was toxic around the World Trade Center site. More than 6,000 have died from breathing this air.  

The families of the victims of 9/11 have been fighting the U.S. government in hundreds of lawsuits with thousands of plaintiffs for years to release information about Saudi complicity that day. Last year, a Manhattan U.S. District judge ordered the lawsuits to be consolidated and tried in court. The Saudi government is asking a federal appeals court to overturn that decision. The hearing is set for Oct. 7. Florida Bulldog reporters Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers were the first to uncover the Saudi connection in Sarasota in 2011, and Christensen continues to report on the unanswered questions, including why the FBI 9/11 probe that dealt with Sarasota was hidden, even from Congress, and then why the FBI publicly denied that there was any evidence.

You don’t have to believe in ghosts for a place to be haunted. What haunts a place is what is left unresolved.