A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  She was just thirty-eight. No one is going to know that she had a young child. No one is even going to put together that she had a life, and that she was content and happy and loved living. It just doesn’t say that on a plaque, and it’s not going to say that on the memorial wall. It isn’t going to say that she was on Sixteenth Street and Third Avenue when the [first] plane hit, and she went there with all speed to help people. The committee that was making the decisions about the memorial worked so hard to not have any sort of special recognition. They wanted to be socialist, that everybody was equal. But I don’t believe that. Like I said, my heart goes out to the man who was sitting in his World Trade Center office having a cup of coffee, you know, for his family, but his death and Moira’s death are two different things, and I think that should always be recognized. Moira was not just courageous. She was a hero.

  Dan D’Allara

  Dan D’Allara is the twin brother of John, who was an Emergency Service Unit (ESU) detective. John was assigned to Truck 2 and his first call that fateful morning was an order to respond to the World Trade Center.

  In remembering my brother John, every question I am asked about his life begets another question. I have often asked myself, Why did John do this or that? The why is always answered for me by the first line of the medal the New York City Police Department gave to our family, the NYPD Medal of Honor, which reads: IN RECOGNITION OF AN INDIVIDUAL ACT OF EXTRAORDINARY BRAVERY PERFORMED IN THE LINE OF DUTY AT IMMINENT PERSONAL DANGER TO LIFE AND SAFETY. It is the “extraordinary bravery” that explains him.

  John, my fraternal twin, was five minutes older. We were born in New York Hospital and grew up in the Bronx, on Allerton Avenue. We attended St. Lucy’s School in the Bronx and Christopher Columbus High School on Pelham Parkway. We’re twin brothers but exactly the opposite: John was more driven academically, I was more driven to get out in the world, play my guitar with different bands. John was at Lehman College and studied phys ed. He had a minor in biology. He also did some work at a Colorado university. He became a teacher, though he always wanted to be a cop. He had taken a few police exams and finally got called by the NYPD.

  I was in the city working at a quarter to nine on September 11, 2001, in the decorator building on Fifty-ninth Street. Someone said a plane hit the World Trade Center. The first thing I did was pick the telephone up and call Truck 2; no answer. I knew they had already left quarters because my mother was listening to the police radio and she heard them leave. We’re a police family; the day after the first Trade Center bombing, in 1993, I bought a police radio and have it going all the time. It’s the best source of real-time information you can get. My brother likened my mother listening to it to the old tenement days when people would peek through the blinds. This radio was a big electronic window, and it wasn’t unusual for me to call my mother and say, You got your ears on, Mom? What’s going on here? What’s going on there?

  At that minute we became ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Though I’m a fraternal twin, my twin experience on the morning of September 11 gave me such a strong feeling that John was there. Maybe it sounds too dramatic, but that really happened. I just knew that my brother John was down there. But I didn’t know what was going on, what exactly he was doing. I called my wife, who was down on Forty-second Street and who was concerned about her brother-in-law, who was working down on Wall Street. I called Truck 2; John wasn’t there. I called my sister-in-law, Carol, and asked, Where’s John? At work, she told me. We were concerned about everybody downtown, as even uptown we could see the smoke.

  I went into the Barney’s store on Fifty-ninth Street and sat down just as the radio antenna of the North Tower was collapsing. I jumped out of my chair with a burst of anxiety. Holy shit—John. Holy shit, holy shit. I went back to my office and was confronted by my manager, who asked, “Where are you going?” I said, “My brother just got killed, I got to get out of here.” And he says, Go back to your desk—you don’t know that for certain.

  I walked around a little, and then remembered a conversation we had had at my house. My brother had trained in antiterrorism [response]. He had just been in the subway, doing a test with a remote-controlled robot. Because of the sarin gas attack in Tokyo, the Police Department was looking at ways to disarm dangerous devices. John had said to me, “If anything happens in the city, get Angela, and get out as soon as you can, as fast as you can. They are going to shut it down.” So I ran down to Forty-second Street, where my wife, Angela, works, and on the way there found myself on Lexington Avenue looking up at the Citicorp building. They then thought there was another plane inbound, and I said to myself, Oh, my God. I’ve got to get away from this building. Madison Avenue looked like a Godzilla movie: Traffic was jammed, as everybody was coming uptown. I got Angela, but she couldn’t run for her life in heels, so we stopped to buy sneakers. My plan was to get to the FDR Drive, walk up the drive over the Willis Avenue Bridge, and get a gypsy cab to our home on City Island.

  While all this was going on downtown, I saw people uptown doing their nails, like life was normal. A cab stopped in front of a building at Seventyninth Street, and a well-dressed woman got out, saying, “It’s terrible, it’s terrible.” I asked if the cab driver would take us to City Island. “Yes, yes,” he said, with an Indian accent. He was hysterical, and said he had been downtown, and the woman had begged him while people were trying to get in the cab. On the Bruckner Expressway I looked over my shoulder and could see the smoke. This cab driver was saying, “Who would do such a thing? I have only been driving a cab for three days here in New York. This is terrible. This is terrible.”

  We reached the City Island circle, where there’s a turnoff to the NYPD firing range. The circle was filled with cars; the police had mobilized everybody, a level-five mobilization. The cab driver turned into the range instead of turning into City Island, and there I saw two cops with machine guns—AK-14s, just like my brother’s. They pointed the weapons right into the windshield of the cab. I jumped over my wife and screamed at the driver, “You made the wrong turn. They are gonna turn us into Swiss cheese!” We backed out, and after stopping at a store on City Island I gave the guy a hundred-dollar bill and told him, “There’s a lot of bad people in this world. You’re not one of them.”

  I called my mother, and she said, “We lost John”—mother’s intuition.

  I knew John would be right in the middle of it; what I didn’t know was that at that exact moment, when I felt that big rush of anxiety in Barney’s, he was being crushed to death in the North Tower. At eleven o’clock a policeman from Truck 2 by the name of Steve Alter called and said, “John’s missing, and we’re sending a car for you.” And they came and got me, my wife, my mother, and my father to take us to police headquarters. My mother later told me she thought we were going to the morgue to identify his body.

  During that day I had called Father Peter Colapietro, pastor of Holy Cross Church, the oldest building on Forty-second Street. Father Pete had been a friend of our family’s, and he married Angela and me on City Island. I left a message telling him that I didn’t know what was going on, and that John was missing—maybe gone. When I walked into 1 Police Plaza [NYPD headquarters] on that night, Father Pete was right there, walking the hallways with the Police Department families.

  My personal experience with 9/11 comes on three levels: I’m a 9/11 family member, a New York City Police Department line-of-duty surviving family member, and one of the fifty-plus twins affected that day. In a matter of 102 minutes I got clobbered, and, looking back, I didn’t realize it at the time, but each of those experiences are different—particularly being one of the New York City Police Department line-of-duty survivors. As such we are used to the tragedy of line-of-duty deaths, and we remember every one of them. At the Police Department that night, many of those affected families were materializing right in front of me.

  They had cots set up for us, and that night my mother and father and I slept at police headquarters.
I left the next morning and returned that afternoon. Carol, John’s wife, came down, but his children were much too young—they really didn’t come to a lot of things, because they were too young.

  Not only did I lose my brother, but the neighbors behind us, the Rizza family, lost their son, Paul. The people next to us lost somebody. In my neighborhood in the Bronx, you couldn’t go too far without seeing someone who was connected to a 9/11 death. I lost friends. My brother John lost twenty-two coworkers, fourteen ESU cops, with whom I had become friendly through his relationships. All the ESU cops know each other and have a special closeness. There are only three hundred of them in the whole Police Department, and they all receive the same training out at Floyd Bennett Field [in Brooklyn]. My brother was at the stage in his career where he was a training officer. He had been on Truck 2 for fourteen years, on a lot of high-profile jobs on the Upper West Side, and had been at it so long I knew the people he talked about—people who trained him and whom he trained. So after 9/11 I started to put the names together with the faces on the list. The average Trade Center first responder was a young person. My brother John was forty-seven years old, and we were lucky we had him for forty-seven years. For some of the other 9/11 family members, who lost someone who was twenty years old, it was a real tragedy. Our situation was no less tragic, but we’re glad we had him for forty-seven years.

  Every family has a hero, but when you have a cop or fireman in your family, that’s your hero. Our families suffered a very steep loss on September 11. Police officers and firemen give a blank check to the city as regards what they will do in the line of service, but it should not be normal for them to lose their lives in the line of duty. The public perception may be that when you have a job like that you have to figure that you may die, but it’s not supposed to happen that way. We had never been worried about my brother’s safety; 9/11, as they say on the job, was all asses and elbows, and they did the best they could under horrendous circumstances. My brother is an American hero for what he did.

  But there’s also the story of what he left behind. My mother was from the World War II generation, and she looked at 9/11 like, well, a lot of boys didn’t come home from the war. That was her way of accepting it. My sister-in-law has her own challenges as a 9/11 widow. I think the two boys are now doing as well as can be expected—children are remarkably resilient. They are in high school: John is about seventeen, Nicholas about thirteen.

  I describe the hurt as a pyramid: At the top are the kids, and then the spouses, and then the parents. Underneath are the siblings. Each category has its own dynamic. In December my company began asking, When is this going to be over? I’m sorry—family first. Basically, the last ten years for me have involved looking after the welfare of my mother and father and filling the void for them that my brother left. They say when you lose your children you lose your past and your future. For me, I lost every link to my childhood. That was taken away from me by al Qaeda, and I remind some of the police families that if those radical Muslims wanted to destroy American families, they did a really good job of it.

  Lee Hong, my brother’s partner, was assigned to me as a family liaison. We were down in the pit one day about two months after the collapse, and, of course, all the ESU guys were there. Soon a whole group of filthy ESU cops came up to me, and one of them said, “You’re John D’Allara’s twin brother?” They couldn’t even look me in the eye, they were so sad. To relieve them I said, “I’m about two months older than him about now.” They all looked at me, smiled, and said, “You’ve got your brother’s sense of humor.” Humor does mask a lot of the tragedy.

  John had a great sense of humor, and I was thinking about this especially when Osama bin Ladin was killed by our brave military. My feeling was that I have an underwhelming sense of satisfaction, because the damage to my family has already been done, and maybe I’ll read the book in twenty years from now. But you know what John would have said? He would have said something along the lines of Why would you bury him at sea when the Space Shuttle was all gassed up and ready to go?

  Later, when I went down to Ground Zero, I was presented with a placement map of where John was. The Police Department knew where their people were, and NYPD Chief Esposito took me personally to show me why they couldn’t get to him. Commissioner Joe Dunne and Chief Esposito—I cannot say enough wonderful things about the brass of the New York City Police Department and the way they handled us after 9/11, and subsequently to this day. When I talked to Joe Dunne it was like he was one of my family. These people have helped me through the worst times of my life—Joe Dunne, George Grasso, Father Romano. I’ve been told that thirty police officers have lost their lives because of post-9/11 illness. I can’t imagine what the Fire Department is going through. I don’t know how the other families got through it, those who didn’t have near the support that we had. Because they often lose people in the line of duty, the Police Department and Fire Department have a system of support in place.

  John was found on April 11, 2002, exactly seven months after the attack. I knew at that point that if we were going to make a recovery, it was going to be very soon. The night before, I saw on TV news a grappler [similar to a backhoe] working down at Ground Zero, and I remember yelling at the TV set, “Get that grappler off my brother.” The next day I got a call from the Police Department to tell me that they were sending a car for me. I didn’t ask for permission to leave work, as I didn’t want to get into an argument with my boss. At Ground Zero I sat in the NYPD holding area, as they had asked us not to come down into the pit. There was a Pelco camera [a well-known high-resolution security camera] right there, so I was able to see exactly what they were doing. They made an identification from John’s gun. As I sat there waiting with Father Romano, God bless him, he was telling me, “You know, they say that heaven is where you can drink all the wine you want and never get drunk, and eat all the spaghetti you want and never get fat,” and he said that there was something really comforting about that. I laughed. Is that what heaven’s like? Is that where John is? It was great.

  They finally called us down to the pit, but we recovered very little. One of the things that my brother always told me was that you didn’t have to lift the sheet up and look underneath: Spare yourself that. Maybe in the future I will go to the medical examiner’s to see the pictures, but I can’t now. We found just a little bit of a leg and a jawbone—there was no whole body—and I was given the flag they covered him with when they made the recovery. My family was honored because Police Commissioner Ray Kelly [see page 16] came down to help carry John out. It was very solemn. There is a story about a family member who went down to identify remains and was given a little box. He left the medical examiner’s with a bag that he sat on his lap as he drove to the funeral home. I can understand that kind of sadness.

  It wasn’t until May 15, 2002, that we were told they had made a positive identification from the mitochondrial DNA, the original DNA cell from my mother. They took many DNA markers [from the family] but they needed something to compare them to. The first week we were all told to give samples to the Police Department—hair and toothbrushes of the victims to get the DNA matches. But we also had the gun found alongside the remains, with a serial number that made it John’s.

  John was at the plaza level. What happened? As near as it can be reconstructed, John was looking for a way out of the building, out of Tower 1. He and another man found a door, and they were able to leave. John then ran across the plaza and went under the overhang of one of the lower buildings, number 5. What I realize is that John was looking up and saw smoke and debris coming out, so he ran across the plaza, waving people coming out of Tower 1 toward him, including a police officer named Jimmy Hall, a Port Authority sergeant. At the memorial at St. Aidan’s, Jimmy Hall came up to me and said, “Mr. D’Allara, I just want you to know I can honestly say that if it weren’t for your brother, I don’t think I’d be standing here talking to you.” At 10:28, when that building came down, it came right dow
n on John. The Police Department reports that there were four ESU officers killed on the street. Joe Esposito, the chief of the NYPD, must be given credit for giving an order holding everybody back, so the number of police killed was held to twenty-three: fourteen ESU cops and nine regular white-shield police officers. I have to believe the police saved a lot of lives—just look at what Moira Smith did.

  We had held a memorial service on November 10 of 2001, and then had a funeral when we found his remains. Five thousand people showed up at the memorial, which was held at St. Aidan’s in Pearl River. About three thousand people came to the funeral at St. Lucy’s, so it was quite a turnout and quite a send-off for John, and I am very proud of the people who came to both. Law enforcement is a true fraternity in this country, and I met police officers from so many states. Contingents from the Boston Police Department and the California Highway Patrol came, and I got the biggest kick out of reading that the Niagara Falls Police Department came—it never occurred to me that Niagara Falls had a police department.

  You know, you can never heal a broken heart, but you can learn to live your life around it. I want to memorialize my brother John as a hero. I don’t know how to run a golf outing or start a foundation, so I did what I could—the street naming, for instance. I worked hard for that. So for the last ten years I tried to memorialize my brother’s life: supporting the 9/11 families and giving effort to better the city of New York, to make it safer. Maybe God put me here on earth for a reason. I’ve done really everything that I possibly can, and it’s all in an effort to heal and get to the next step. I think “closure” is a terrible word to use. Closure is like when your pet canary dies, and you know you’ll get another canary. When you lose a family member there’s never closure. There’s a big something that you learn to live with—the 9/11 monkey on your back, which I don’t like having. I hate 9/11; it just confuses things. I don’t know that people look at you the same. If we don’t stop to commemorate it, that day will be forgotten, but people like me, who live with it all the time, can never forget it. This is why it’s important that I talk about it.