102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (32 page)

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Authors: Jim Dwyer,Kevin Flynn

BOOK: 102 Minutes: The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
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“People were calling from the elevators, from the floors, pleading with us to get them out,” Roselyn Braud, a member of the staff, recalled. She fell apart, thinking of her children at home. Suddenly, a door opened. Esmerlin Salcedo had arrived.
“He came flying down here, threw his book bag on the ground, and started answering phones,” Braud said. She was too upset to continue. Salcedo said he would escort her upstairs. “We linked arms, and he came up with me,” Braud said. He led her to a door near Church Street.
“He told me to ‘Run, run for your life,’ and that was the last I saw of him.” A moment later, Salcedo was seen helping another security guard shortly before the south tower collapsed.
Off-duty, he was paid nothing; on-duty, his salary was $10.51 an hour, on which he supported his wife and four children.
In September 2005, the case of a belligerent, disrespectful teenager from Atlanta, Georgia, was put before a television judge.
The girl wanted to be adopted by another family; she hated her own parents, she said. The judge fashioned a television solution. She sent the young woman to meet another sixteen-year-old girl in New York City.
They met at Ground Zero—the girl from Atlanta, and the other sixteen-year-old, named Melody Salcedo. She explained who her father was: Esmerlin Salcedo. And she warned the other girl of learning too late the value of loving the people who cared for her.
Postscript
NEW YORK, 2011
 
 
T
he firefighters from Ladder 6 carried Josephine Harris again on a wintry morning in January. They moved slowly, as they had nearly ten years earlier. But this time there was no worry that the walls around them might crumble as they moved Harris’s blue steel casket toward the steps of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village.
The entrance to St. Joseph’s, two miles north of the trade center and six miles from Harris’s Brooklyn apartment, was framed by Doric columns and had a simple, unadorned look, unusual in a Catholic church. The nine pallbearers—eight firefighters and Lieutenant Dennis Lim of the Port Authority Police Department—wore their dress uniforms, the fire officers in white hats. Each rested one hand on the casket, the other on his heart.
Many of them had seen a lot of Harris in the years since the attacks, since the painfully slow walk down stairway B in the north tower’s final minutes, the pleading procession with Harris and her fallen arches that had left them in a precise place when the building fell, the only stub to survive as the tower dissolved around them.
Harris had been to Sal D’Agostino’s wedding and had flown down to Florida with Jay Jonas to speak to retired firefighters. The
men would meet with her several times a year and when Jonas was picked to lead a firefighters parade in upstate New York, Harris rode behind him in a silver convertible, waving to the crowd.
The men of Ladder 6 regarded Harris as a guardian angel, a blessing who had arrived very much in disguise when speed down the stairs had seemed the safer choice. Instead, her halting descent had given them all an opportunity to continue on with their lives.
Most of the men were still on the job.
Jonas had been promoted from captain to deputy chief and was now responsible for a large swath of the Bronx and upper Manhattan.
Billy Butler and Matt Komorowski were now lieutenants, serving in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
Tommy Falco and Mike Meldrum of the company had retired, as had Mickey Kross from Ladder 16, who had been with them in the stairwell.
Lim, the Port Authority K-9 officer, had also been promoted, and his dog, Sirius, a yellow lab who died in the attacks, had been remembered with a monument in Canada and a dog run in lower Manhattan.
Josephine Harris had died nine days earlier, at age sixty-nine, of a heart attack. She called 911 from her apartment at 2:20 a.m. on Wednesday, January 12, 2011, but the Fire Department medics could not revive her. Her life, like those of the others, had not been frozen by the calamity. For all their impact, the attacks were powerless to stop a future that swept forward with fresh moments of joy and achievement, as well as new encounters with panic and sadness and illness, like the heart condition that eventually felled her.
After the attacks, Harris, a widowed bookkeeper for the Port Authority, had briefly returned to work, but she did not follow in 2004 when her job was transferred to Newark. She lived alone, somewhat reclusively, surviving on disability assistance as her financial and health problems mounted. Papers found in her apartment indicated she had recently filed for bankruptcy.
Six months earlier, though, she had been energetic during an interview for a new TV show,
Miracle Detectives,
which recounted the story of the stairwell survivors.
“Somebody was with us,” she said. “Somebody was watching over us.”
 
 
Inevitably, time drained color and details from memories of the day. For many, it became difficult to recall just how shaken, how apocalyptic everything had seemed in the days and weeks after the attacks.
Had there really been a morning when just the sound of an airplane engine could send New Yorkers screaming down the street? Who were those people who hoarded bottled water in their basements, or asked their doctors for radiation sickness pills, or flew American flags from the antennas of their cars?
Needless to say, many people confronted—in some cases embraced—lives that had been completely reshaped by the catastrophe, and searched for ways to make lasting answer to those 102 minutes.
The family of Peter Alderman, the Bloomberg employee who could not escape a breakfast conference at Windows on the World, used funds they received under a federal compensation program to create a foundation that helps the victims of terrorism and mass violence cope emotionally with the trauma. The impulse to build something enduring—gardens, parks, literacy programs, cross-cultural learning opportunities, scholarships funded by golf outings and road races—was a common response by the surviving families.
About a hundred survivors refused compensation grants because they would have had to surrender their right to file civil lawsuits against the public and private parties they believed bore some responsibility for actions, and inactions, that exposed airline passengers, office tower workers, and the country to the attacks. The power of subpoena in a lawsuit could compel answers under oath. Among those filing suits were Monica Gabrielle, whose husband,
Richard, was injured and trapped on the 78th floor in the south tower while waiting for an elevator, and Beverly Eckert, whose husband, Sean Rooney, had found doors locked when he tried to get onto the roof in the same building.
They were part of a determined band of 9/11 family members whose gaze fell on everything from building codes that left the skyscrapers without enough stairways for emergency evacuations, to a system of national intelligence that seemed to have a hard time passing e-mail messages from one agency to another. Their status gave them general—though hardly absolute—immunity from accusations that they were seeking partisan advantage, or that by asking questions about what went wrong they were subverting a president leading a war in one country and preparing for an invasion in a second one. At a meeting in the White House, senior officials explained to the family group that a far-reaching inquiry was too risky for a country at war, as it might lay bare the failures of national defense.
“Are you going to stand here and look me in the eye and tell me we are not going to have an investigation into the death of my husband and the relatives of all the other people in this room?” Beverly Eckert asked.
Well, no, as it turned out. The 9/11 Commission was reluctantly created by Congress and the president, and it would often be hamstrung by delays and evasions at all levels of government. Nevertheless, due in large part to the doggedness of a Family Steering Committee, scholars believe that the 9/11 Commission cut more quickly and deeply into the secrets of two presidential administrations than did earlier commissions that studied national calamities like Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Iran-contra affair. Yet many of those who had fought for the creation of the commission felt that it had left important questions unanswered. They believed that the commission’s declaration that the attacks had not been prevented because of “a failure of imagination” had shielded many senior officials from being held responsible. New systems without true accountability, Monica Gabrielle and others argued, would leave the country as vulnerable as ever. On Christmas Day 2009, a Nigerian man who months earlier had
been identified as a terrorist threat by intelligence agents—and by his own father—was able to board a flight to Detroit and ignite plastic explosives stitched into his underwear. He was subdued by another passenger. The United States was spending $75 billion annually on national security intelligence. None of it had stopped him.
 
 
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the U.S. military had fewer soldiers, sailors, marines, and aviators in its ranks than at any time in the previous sixty years. American governments had been engaged in overt and covert wars almost nonstop since 1941, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century the United States was still enjoying a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War. The 9/11 attacks roused a spirit of service and duty that had been embodied that day by the valor of firefighters, medics, and police officers. Military recruitment surged. Over the next decade, two million members of the U.S. armed forces would be deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Among them was Christian P. Engeldrum. He had already served in the U.S. Army from 1986 to 1991 and completed his obligations as a reservist in the Army National Guard. By 9/11, he was working as a firefighter in New York City. He had responded to the trade center attack and spent days there, experiences that his family said had prompted him to reenlist. In 2004, he was one of thirty New York City firefighters on active duty in the military, and he arrived in Iraq on November 2 of that year. Before the month was out, he and another soldier were killed by a roadside bomb. Firefighter Engeldrum was the first of fifteen emergency responders who survived 9/11 but died in Iraq or Afghanistan. He was thirty-nine years old, the father of two sons, and his wife was expecting their third child at the time of his death. His eldest son, Sean, said in a eulogy, “He was brave and courageous all the time, but able to cry over a sick dog.”
 
 
Sister Cynthia Mahoney, the nun who jumped into the city ambulance to volunteer after the attacks, later developed crippling respiratory
ailments. One of the first civilians to join the rescue workers, she had ridden back to the collapsed towers with Richard Erdey and Soraya O’Donnell, two emergency medical technicians who worked for the Fire Department. Months later, the nun was still there, showing up day after day to comfort families and bless remains as they were pulled from the debris.
Sister Cynthia, a member of the Anglican Order of St. Helena, had moved to New York from South Carolina only a few weeks before the attacks. Her convent was near Bellevue, the hospital where the ambulance crew had taken Danny Suhr, the firefighter who died after being hit by a falling body.
When she approached Erdey and O’Donnell in the hospital parking lot, the crew had been direct with her: the dangers at the trade center could not be minimized.
“Oh, I understand,” Sister Cynthia replied. She had been an emergency medical technician herself in South Carolina before leaving that job to join the religious order.
As it turned out, the threats she faced were never as obvious as fire and falling concrete. Years later, more than 60,000 people who had worked in the buildings or had participated in rescue and recovery efforts would sign up for health monitoring or treatment programs because they feared the lasting effects of the foul soup of dust, ash, and smoke they had inhaled after the collapse. Sister Cynthia, a nonsmoker, developed asthma and lung disease after her work at the site.
She died, at age fifty-four, in November 2006, from respiratory ailments. By that time, the rubble she had worked amid was long gone, but many viewed her death as another casualty of the day.
 
 
Sean Rooney would have turned fifty-two years old on February 15, 2003, and his widow, Beverly Eckert, marked the day by taking the train from Connecticut to New York and joining an ocean of people that stretched for nearly two miles along the east side of Manhattan. It was a bitterly cold Sunday, but hundreds of thousands of people turned out for a rally to protest the invasion of Iraq, which
was then a month away. Another woman who had been speaking against the war was Rita Lasar, whose brother, Abe Zelmanowitz, had died while standing by his wheelchair-bound friend Ed Beyea, on the 27th floor of the north tower. Days before the attacks, Zelmanowitz had gone to a Sabbath lesson where the rabbi spoke about sacrificing oneself for the love of God. “You speak of the great historical heroes, like Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai,” Zelmanowitz asked the rabbi, “but how can a simple Jew like myself show his love of God?” He answered his own question on the morning of 9/11.
Now it was Rita, on a journey born in the embers of that day, who found her way to Afghanistan in early 2002, shortly after American and allied troops arrived. There, she met people who had also lost loved ones. Her trip had been arranged by Global Exchange, an advocacy and human rights organization. Like her brother, she said, the dead Afghan civilians were filed under the category of “collateral damage.”
The war in Afghanistan, launched a month after the 9/11 attacks, had broad support in the United States and internationally. The enemy had a face and a name: Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda, the network of Islamic radicals that had carried out the plans to kill thousands of innocent people. On a videotape of a celebratory meal that was released a few weeks after the attacks, bin Laden—a tall, thin man with flowing beard and robes—laughed and said that they had expected the hijacked planes to destroy only a few floors in each tower. An international coalition joined the United States to hunt down Al Qaeda and to uproot the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamists who controlled Afghanistan and had given sanctuary to bin Laden and his organization. The Taliban were quickly heaved out of power and regrouped as insurgents. Bin Laden, however, eluded the manhunt. Not long after the invasion of Afghanistan, military planners in the United States began preparations to invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, that country’s dictatorial ruler.
As with any issue involving thousands of people, a monolithic “family” view of either war was out of the question. Quite a few
families spoke in favor of one or the other as a necessary act; artifacts of the 9/11 attacks—flags, pictures, bits of steel—were packed off with American troops who were being deployed overseas. Polls showed that the country was uncertain about the Iraq invasion, and the demonstrations of February 15, 2003, with millions of people gathering in cities around the United States and the world, put faces on the numbers. As the wars were prosecuted in three presidential terms, covering the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, support for them waxed and waned. Backers defended them as well-meaning missions to export democratic principles to the Middle East and maintained that they had reduced American vulnerability to terrorism by transferring the theater of battle overseas. Opponents argued that the wars were killing people who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and were fueling violent anti-American sentiment. From whatever perspective, the toll in money and lives had been profound: as of the spring of 2011, the wars had cost more than a trillion dollars, and the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans, as well as soldiers from the international coalition led by the United States.

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