On Sept. 11, 2,820 people were murdered in New York City. One case remains unsolved.
Nearly a year after the tragedy that took 2,819 lives in the Twin Towers and the planes that crashed into them, cops continue to be mystified by the death of Henry Siwiak.
The Polish man was gunned down after becoming lost in Bedford-Stuyvesant while heading to a new job in another part of Brooklyn.
Nothing was stolen from him.
“He wanted a job in the United States to bring his family here because life in Poland is very, very hard,” said his sister, Lucyna, who lives in the city.
She said his relatives in Poland, where he’s buried, will mark Sept. 11 by holding a memorial Mass for him. He would have turned 46 in June.
Siwiak’s wife of 20 years, Eva, “was completely, completely, completely in shock” when she heard the news, Lucyna told The Post.
“He called her just a few hours before the death. They did not believe it. I am the same. I thought New York is a safe city.”
She was in Poland last month and said the victim’s son, Adam, 11, kept asking, “Why is it other children have fathers and I don’t?”
Siwiak’s 80-year-old mother, Mieczyslaw, whose parents and siblings died fighting the Nazis in World War II, was devastated.
“Why is it that in America people are shot in the streets?” she asked yesterday. “He was a good man.”
The tragic end to Siwiak’s American dream began when he arranged to meet the manager of a Pathmark store at 1520 Albany Ave. in East Flatbush at midnight to clean the store overnight.
Siwiak had come to the United States several months earlier from Krakow on a visa looking for work after being laid off from his job with the national railroad system.
He had been laid off again from a cleaning job at a construction site in Brooklyn that he found through an employment agency.
According to police, Siwiak told the manager at the Pathmark that he would wear an army fatigue jacket to be easily identifiable.
A neighbor of Siwiak’s in the Rockaways gave him a subway map and instructions to the store, but somehow he found himself further north on Albany Avenue – and was shot dead near Decatur Street.
Detective Lt. Thomas Joyce asked anyone with information to call his office at (718) 636-6655 or (800) 577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential, police said.
Siwiak’s wife, Eva, a biologist forced to teach school because of the tough economy, said, “I’m trying to be brave” for the couple’s two children, Adam and Gabrielea, 19.
“I realize I’m now the rock of the family.
“So I must keep on going, no matter how hard it gets.”
She has no immediate plans to visit New York.
“Even if I could afford to, I’m not sure I would come,” she said. “Someday in the future, the children would like to come and see where their father lived and where he was murdered.
“But right now? No, not right now.”