Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of

Because the best way to take an embarrassing story and make it an embarrassing story that stretches out over several news cycles is to have your staff ask memorial organizers to postpone time:

“Rude.” “Disrespectful.” “Insulting.”

Those were words used by various voters to describe Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tardiness at Wednesday’s memorial ceremony for Flight 587.

On Thursday night, one of the victims’ family members told CBS2’s Marcia Kramer a new one — chutzpah.

“They asked us to delay the moment of silence to wait until the mayor got there,” [a family member] said.

It was an explosive charge about the mayor’s failure to show up on time for a memorial service commemorating the 13th anniversary of the crash of the American Airlines flight.

[The family member], who lost five family members in the crash, refused. She rang the bell starting the moment of silence at precisely 9:16 a.m., the exact moment of the crash.

“They kept telling us, ‘Wait, he’s coming. He’s coming,’ and I said, no, we’re not waiting. We’re not going to wait for him for a moment of silence. It happened at a certain time. That’s the time that we have to toll the bells,” [the family member] said.