PEMBROKE PINES, Fla. --
A retired Miami-Dade firefighter has been working for nearly two years on a special memorial to honor the lives of all the men and women who lost their lives on 9/11.
Felix Gonzalez said he was watching television like everyone else the day two hijacked airplanes slammed into the World Trade Center Towers.
"As a former firefighter it really tore me up to see what was happening," Gonzalez said from the abandoned firehouse that serves as his studio off US 27 in Pembroke Pines.
Gonzalez served Miami-Dade for 20 years. He said watching New York's finest rush into the devastation really hit home.
"Just watching them go inside both buildings, they knew what I know...that they were going to die."
In memoriam, Gonzalez started welding steel donated by local salvage crews into a 9/11 scene. So far he has created two beams to represent the destruction of the two towers. One has four wings on the top to symbolize the four hijacked airplanes that crashed.
Gonzalez has also created what he said is the world's first three dimensional steel sculpture of a New York firefighter. Next he will weld a little girl, a woman and a police officer to also go alonside the firefighter that will be put on display.
"I want people to feel it, I want people to be there and never forget what happened to all those people that day and to us as a nation."
Gonzalez's 9/11 memorial will be ready by the 10th anniversary in 2011, he said.
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