Voices From 9/11

Thomas Panevino, 11, walked past the Twin Towers every morning on his way to school, which was about three blocks north of the World Trade Center. The seventh-grader was in his first- period Spanish class, in a room with windows facing the North Tower.

“We were in the middle of singing songs in Spanish. . . . And we see this plane kind of just shoot across the sky. I just remember seeing like a flash of silver, and then, you know, obviously it hit the [North] Tower. [Our] whole building shook and this massive fireball just kind of rained down . . . around our school and on the streets below. . . . Everyone was just really unsure what was going on. We still were kind of under the belief that it was an accident, but something just felt wrong.”

Keating Crown worked at a finance company on the 100th floor of the South Tower. From his office, he saw the massive damage to the North Tower. Unsure what might happen next, he got into an elevator that took him down to the 78th floor, where about 200 other people had gathered. Suddenly, the second plane slammed into the South Tower. It impacted the 77th to 85th floors, directly where he was standing. The force knocked everyone to the ground.

“Stone had come off the walls, glass had obviously broken, and you couldn’t see a thing through the black smoke. . . . After crawling around for a little while, . . . I saw a crack of light around a corner and went straight for it. [It turned out to be a stairwell. I] probably got down another 20 floors or so, and I ran into three men on the stairwell, and one . . . stopped me, and was asking if I was okay. That was the first moment where I took account of what I might have looked like. I was bleeding pretty badly. [When I reached the ground floor, a paramedic treated a wound on my head.] That’s when I started to feel some of my other injuries—cuts on my back, cuts on my face, and my leg, which was clearly broken.”

U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Marilyn Wills had been running late to work that morning. She barely had time to kiss her two daughters and husband goodbye. Wills was giving a presentation at the Pentagon in Arlington when a massive fireball suddenly ripped through the conference room, throwing her across the table. A plane had just crashed directly below her second-floor meeting. The lights went out, and the room started to fill with smoke, making it hard to breathe.

“A lady behind me, who was holding on to me, she said, ‘Colonel Wills, I can’t go any further.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, you can. . . . We gotta get out of here!’ And she says, ‘I can’t.’ I’m like, ‘OK. Just get on my back, and I’m going to carry you.’ . . . We finally got to the window, and we start banging . . . but it would not open. [A military specialist tried to break the glass with a printer.] Me and another colonel and this specialist, we just kept pounding on the window. We used our feet, and he threw the printer again and the window popped open. [We lowered everyone down. Outside,] these men had built a human ladder [to reach] that window to get us.”

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed in an enormous cloud of debris. Hundreds of terrified onlookers ran from the destruction. New York City firefighter Adrienne Walsh and her crew sped toward it, arriving at the site minutes later. Born and raised in New York City, Walsh had known since she was a teen that she wanted to be a firefighter. She was gathering gear from her fire truck when she looked up. It was 10:28 a.m., and the North Tower was collapsing.

“I saw what I can only describe as almost like a tornado hurtling at me. Just this cloud of dust that had to be over 100 feet in the air, and it was literally circling, and it was just bearing down. . . . I turned around and I yelled, ‘Run! Run, Cap! Run!’ because the captain was behind me. . . . We all took off down the block, and I thought—I honestly thought in the midst of all that . . . If I beat the cloud, I’ll beat the building. And I [thought] as I turned and started to run, I’m not gonna beat this cloud. It’s just moving too fast.”

Earlier that morning, Port Authority police officer David Lim and his police dog Sirius had been inspecting the basement of the South Tower. When the North Tower was struck, the dad of two left Sirius behind so he could help evacuate the building. Lim was helping a woman named Josephine Harris down the stairs when the North Tower began to crumple around them.

“I got down to about, about the fourth or fifth floor, on the platform, and the building started to collapse. . . . I took Josephine and I put her on the ground, and I covered her up to protect her. It sounded like an onrushing locomotive or a . . . hurricane. I actually could feel the wind of the air being pushed through the building as the floors were collapsing. When the collapse stopped, I remember laying there and I remember coughing. And I also had a thought: Well, dead men don’t cough, so I must still be alive. And I was very grateful for that.”