Shortly before midnight on September 11, 2001, Henryk Siwiak (1955–2001), a Polish immigrant, was fatally shot on a street in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York,[1] where he had mistakenly gone in order to start a new job.

The homicide remains unsolved; Siwiak has been described as "the last person killed in New York on 9/11", although he was not a victim of the terror attacks earlier that day.

[2] The initial investigation into the crime may have been hampered, police believe, by the diversion of law enforcement resources in the city in the wake of that day's terrorist attacks, which ultimately killed almost 3,000 people.

Since Siwiak was not robbed, wore camouflage clothing and spoke poor English with a heavy accent, detectives have speculated that his killer may have thought he had something to do with the attacks.

A native of Kraków, Henryk Siwiak had worked as an inspector for the Polish State Railways and its successor private entities.

After he was laid off around 2000, Siwiak went to New York City to visit his sister Lucyna, who had been living in Far Rockaway, Queens, for six years.

Siwiak could not afford to wait until work resumed, so after walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, he took the subway back to his sister's home.

After looking through the classified ads in the Polish-language newspaper Nowy Dziennik,[5] he found one with a cleaning service at a Pathmark supermarket in the Farragut section of Brooklyn.

There he called his wife, Ewa, in Poland to tell her he was safe; he had witnessed one of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.

[2] A woman living on nearby Decatur Street, who was taking care of her sick mother, said she heard the argument but was too afraid to look out the window.

A resident of that building told police that she had heard the doorbell, but like her neighbor, she was too fearful to answer the door in the wake of the gunfire that had preceded it.

[2] The NYPD could not bring its full investigative resources to the crime scene since so many other officers were needed elsewhere due to the attacks.

Normally, in the case of a homicide, its Crime Scene Unit would secure the area and collect forensic evidence, but its members were not available.

And where as many as nine detectives might canvass the neighborhood, talking to potential witnesses and looking for evidence away from the scene, the NYPD could only spare three at most.

His camouflage outfit made him appear military; the first police officers to respond to the scene thought he might have been one of the many National Guardsmen deployed to the city in the wake of the attacks.

That, combined with his dark hair and imperfect, heavily accented English, may have led people to believe he was Arab.

[9] Siwiak's murder received little of the media attention that might have led witnesses to come forward because of the attacks and their aftermath; what coverage there was came at least a month later.