The five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was commemorated Monday night at GW and across the District.

On campus, a few hundred students gathered in University Yard Monday night at a candlelight vigil where University President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg and Student Association President Lamar Thorpe, a senior, spoke.

The vigil opened with the GW Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps Color Guard carrying the American flag as the national anthem played. Thorpe welcomed the crowd while students lit nine candles, each representing one of the GW alumni who died in the attacks.

“To see the congregation here tonight is a source of pride and satisfaction,” Trachtenberg said. “You are here to memorialize the GW graduates, but it’s a grander thing we mark tonight.”

Sophomore Ashley Mergen was one of many students who attended the vigil.

“My parents are worried about me living in Washington, but we need to continue our normal lives; we can’t live in fear,” she said.

The GW community also observed a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., marked by bells tolling in Kogan Plaza in remembrance of the nine GW alumni and others who lost their lives that day.

Across the District many events marked the anniversary of the attacks. A walk took place Sunday from the Northwest Ghandhi Memorial Statue to the Washington Hebrew congregation.

Also on Sunday, the Heart of America Quilt was displayed on the National Mall. A tribute to the lives lost in the terrorist attacks, the one-half acre quilt is in the shape and colors of an American flag.

On Sunday night 184 beams of light were shot into the air at the Pentagon to commemorate the lives lost at the site where a plane flew into the Defense Department’s building in Virginia.