by Dwyer, Jim
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.
For her part, Beverly followed with equal diligence the high-profile inquiries, like the 9/11 Commission, and the barely visible ones, like a special panel assigned to look into the handling of weapons of mass destruction. Long after the television lights had been switched off, she would fly across the country for meetings where she and others would ask how many recommendations from these studies had been put into effect.
Only after Congress passed the first wave of intelligence reforms recommended by the 9/11 Commission did the day begin to loosen its grip on her life. “Somehow,” she wrote early in 2005, “I feel more at peace with Sean’s death, having had the opportunity to help change our government—hopefully, for the better.” She met an avid sailor, Shawn Monks, on a visit to Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. They became a couple. Aboard a catamaran called “Never Land,” they sailed from Florida to Connecticut, and she used e-mails to keep family and friends updated on the journey. At one point, her thoughts turned to her husband and to the man who had ordered his death, Osama bin Laden. That July, she wrote:
As we entered NY Harbor, we passed the Statue of Liberty and then the section of Manhattan where the World Trade Center towers once stood. Sean is always with me in spirit, and he felt especially near at that moment.
It’s always painful to be at Ground Zero, but sailing past the location of the attacks while standing on the deck of my own boat, knowing that in contrast, bin Laden was hiding in a cave, made me feel something of a sense of triumph over terrorism.
After parts of New Orleans were crushed by Hurricane Katrina, she and Shawn volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, helping to build houses. In 2008, she began working as a tutor in the school system near her home in Connecticut.
This quieter, private life was not a return to slumber after a political awakening. She remain keenly interested in seeing those accused of plotting the attacks brought to justice, particularly Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who faced charges of mass murder as a key organizer. He had given detailed confessions to a long list of crimes against civilians in the United States and around the world. It also emerged that he had been waterboarded 183 times during interrogations. Months passed, then years, as the courts, the executive branch, and Congress wrestled over the appropriate administration of justice for Mohammed and people like him, all classified as enemy combatants. Should they be tried before military commissions or in the civilian courts? Most of them were being held in a military detention center at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. During Barack Obama’s campaign for president in 2008, he promised to bring them quickly to trial in American civilian courts, and he said he would close the Guantánamo facility, the subject of intense criticism at home and abroad. It would be a symbol of change, a point of unmistakable departure, from the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush. He also declared that he would make it a priority to find Osama bin Laden. And on his second day in office, President Obama suspended the military tribunal process and announced that Guantánamo would be closed within a year. At the president’s invitation, Beverly and other 9/11 family members met with President Obama on February 6, 2009, to hear his plans for the detainees, and to let him know what they thought; Beverly believed that criminal trials were long overdue, but just as with the two wars, there were many views among the family members on the wisdom of closing Guantánamo and shifting away from military tribunals.
By then, Beverly was no stranger to speaking truth to power. That didn’t mean she was jaded about going to the White House. Leaving the meeting, she picked up a souvenir: a paper napkin embossed with the presidential seal that had been under President Obama’s water bottle.
That same week, Sean’s birthday was rolling around again. It would have been his fifty-eighth. Beverly planned to join his family in Buffalo, New York, and to present a scholarship at his alma mater, Canisius High School, the Jesuit boys school he was attending when they met at a dance in a gym as sixteen-year-olds. She flew from Newark aboard Continental Flight 3407; about five miles from the airport, the jet lost speed. An investigation would find that the overtired pilot did not use the right procedures to fly out of a stall. All forty-nine people on board were killed, as well as one person on the ground. In the months afterward, Beverly’s sisters helped to organize the families of that calamity to lobby Congress and the Federal
Aviation Administration for a range of safety reforms.
Later that year, in November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to implement the president’s orders to close Guantánamo and to begin civilian trials for as many detainees as practical. The administration would bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other high-level Al Qaeda detainees to trial at the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. The whole effort quickly became a contentious political issue.
Although New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, initially hailed the courthouse as a “fitting” venue for the cases, his administration later maintained that the trials would incur security costs of as much as a billion dollars, and would paralyze lower Manhattan. Congressional opposition from Republicans and Democrats was considerable as well, and continued through 2010. Near the end of the year, Congress passed a military spending bill that included a provision barring the use of funds to transport Guantánamo detainees anywhere in the United States. President Obama reluctantly signed it, effectively reversing his decision to close the detention center. On April 4, 2011, as the tenth anniversary of the attacks approached without a single person accused of direct involvement having faced charges in any forum, the attorney general announced that the Justice Department was dropping plans for criminal trials. Mohammed, the highest ranking Al Qaeda figure in captivity, would be presented as an enemy combatant to a panel of military officers who would decide his fate. Guantánamo would remain open indefinitely.
May 1, 2011, was a pleasant spring Sunday in Washington, D.C., and reporters assigned to weekend duty covering the White House were glad to hear that the “lid” had been put on at 2 P.M.—meaning that the president was home for the day, and they didn’t have to hang around for any kind of public appearance. That meant they could grab a few extra hours of personal time away from their hectic beat. It also cleared the White House of people who might notice that the building was humming at a strikingly high pitch for a Sunday afternoon. The secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was there. So were senior counterterrorism and military officials. And, of course, the president himself. He may not have left the house that day, but he was busy. Near 10 P.M., reporters got an e-mail from the White House with a simple message: Get back to work.
At 11:30 P.M., President Obama appeared on television. “Tonight,” he began, “I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
After months of surveillance on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a team of U.S. commandos raided the house and killed bin Laden. “The American people did not choose this fight,” the president said. “It came to our shores and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.”
A few days later, President Obama visited a firehouse in midtown Manhattan that had lost fifteen members on 9/11, among them Chief Ed Geraghty, who had worked his way up the south tower behind Chief Orio Palmer. He had been one of the voices crackling across the radio that morning, all business, facing all chaos. “What floor should we try to get up to, Orio?” Chief Geraghty had asked.
The president’s session in the firehouse included handshakes all around, a meal from the kitchen, and a short speech about the death of bin Laden and the unspent force of memory. “When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say,” he said.
By the time Josephine Harris died, in 2011, the new skyscraper at the trade center site, the Freedom Tower, had risen 50-some stories, en route to its final height of 104. No one can recall that Harris ever ventured back to the trade center site after 9/11. But for the men who had rescued her, seeing her was among the many triggers that could close the distance from the day. The deafening sound, the impenetrable dust, the furious wind, the wait in the dark crevices to be dug out.
“I can close my eyes and re-create the collapse,” Jay Jonas said.
The men of Ladder 6 had given Harris a shiny green baseball jacket that read “Our Guardian Angel,” and they hung it in the vestibule of the church during the funeral service. An image of an angel was embroidered into the lining of her casket, holding hands with a firefighter.
The funeral arrangements were paid for by Peter DeLuca, the owner of the Greenwich Village Funeral Home, a local businessman who felt a special affection for firefighters. In 1987 they had worked feverishly to save his thirteen-month-old son, Peter Jr., who died when the family’s Manhattan townhouse collapsed.
Cardinal Edward Egan, the retired archbishop of New York, celebrated the funeral Mass with Monsignor John Delendick, the Fire Department chaplain who ten years earlier had given everyone general absolution as they ran from the towers. In his homily, Monsignor Delendick spoke of how the firefighters had been saved, not by speed but by compassion, by their belief in a set of values that did not waver even as the walls did.
“Interesting,” he told the church about Harris and the firefighters, “how both groups accuse each other of saving the other. I think that’s the best part.”
After the service, Harris’s neighbors from Brooklyn climbed into a Fire Department van, and the procession rode off behind the hearse to Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Harris’s husband, Frederick, had been buried in 1993.
There had been a storm the night before, and the snow was still fresh on the ground near the gravesite. Friends and relatives gathered around the casket. The firefighters saluted.
“Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,” said Monsignor Delendick, as he prayed for Josephine and all the dead who had gone before her.
And let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace.
May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed,
Through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.
Lost
Among the 2,753 who died in the attacks on New York, 131 in this account did not survive:
In the north tower: Peter Alderman, Ezra Aviles, Ed Beyea, Ivhan Carpio, Stephen Cherry, Caleb Arron Dack, Carlos DeCosta, Frank De Martini, Brendan Dolan, Doris Eng, Garth Feeney, James Gartenberg, John Griffin, Christopher Hanley, Emeric Harvey, Charles Heeran, Patrick Hoey, Joe Holland, Steve Jacobson, Howard Kane, William Kelly, Stuart Lee, Neil Levin, Jan Maciejewski, Peter Mardikian, Patricia Massari, Tom McGinnis, Damian Meehan, Pete Negron, Jeffrey Nussbaum, Christine Olender, Pablo Ortiz, Jim Paul, Patricia Puma, Judith Reese, Andrew Rosenblum, Tony Savas, Tony Segarra, Stephen Tompsett, Martin Wortley, Elkin Yuen, Abe Zelmanowitz.
In the south tower: J. J. Aguiar, Jack Andreacchio, Brett Bailey, Joseph Berry, Shimmy Biegeleisen, Ed Calderon, Roko Camaj, Bobby Coll, Kevin Cosgrove, Frank Doyle, Eric Eisenberg, Ed Emery, Bradley Fetchet, Tamitha Freeman, Richard Gabrielle, Alayne Gentul, Dianne Gladstone, Manny Gomez, Karen Hagerty, Phil Hayes, Ron Hoerner, Howard Kestenbaum, Ed Mardovich, Jose Marrero, Robert Gabriel Martinez, Bob Mattson, Ann McHugh, Ed McNally, Greg Milanowycz, Stephen Mulderry, Vijay Paramsothy, Rick Rescorla, Francis Riccardelli, Paul Rizza, Sean Rooney, Esmerlin Salcedo, Herman Sandler, Thomas Sparacio, Michael Stabile, Keiji Takahashi, Yeshavant Tembe, Brian Thompson, Rick Thorpe, Doris Torres, Diane Urban, Brad Vadas, Sankara Velamuri, Dave Vera, Kevin York.
In the Marriott Hotel: Joe Keller, Abdu A. Malahi.
From the Fire Department of New York: Chief of Department Peter Ganci; Deputy Chief Donald Burns; Battalion Chiefs Ed Geraghty, Orio J. Palmer, and John Paolillo; Fire Marshal Ron Bucca; Captains William Burke Jr. and Fred Ill; Lieutenants John Fischer, Joseph Leavey, Bob Nagel, Kevin Pfeifer, and Mike Warchola; Reverend Mychal Judge; Firefighters David Arce, Michael Boyle, Robert Evans, Tom Kelly, Robert King Jr., Scott Kopytko, Scott Larsen, Joseph Maffeo, Keithroy Maynard, Douglas Oelschlager, Michael Otten, Christian Regenhard, Danny Suhr, David Weiss.
From the New York Police Department: Sergeant Michael Curtin; Officers John D’Allara, John Pe
rry, Moira Smith.
From the Port Authority Police Department: Inspector James Romito; Officers Christopher Amoroso, Dominick Pezzulo, Antonio Rodriguez.
From New York City Emergency Medical Services: Paramedic Carlos Lillo.
Notes
Portions of 102 Minutes draw on interviews conducted by the authors for this book, for a 1994 book on the World Trade Center, and for several articles that appeared in The New York Times; the citations include interviews for those articles by New York Times reporters Ford Fessenden, James Glanz, and Eric Lipton.
Authors’ Note
North tower hit first: The times here are those established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (hereafter NIST).
Beyond the hijackers’ designs: Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, said in a taped interview that was discovered a few weeks after the hijacking that they had not expected the entire buildings to collapse, only that there would be localized collapses.
2,753 people died: The official count of people identified as dead by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City as of May 2011.
Estimation of the dead: An analysis by NIST in July 2004 is the source for the numbers of passengers and the number of first responders who died; the estimate of 600 people on the floors where the planes hit is by the authors, using the span of impact as described by NIST, and the number of people who worked on those floors and did not escape.
