-This just in, you are looking at, obviously, a very disturbing
live shot there.
-A plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here
in New York City.
-We don’t know anything more than that.
We don’t know if it was a commercial aircraft.
-Oh my God.
Another plane has just hit.
It hit another building.
Flew right into the middle of it.
-The building is exploding right now.
You got people running up the street.
-Sean, it’s me and I just wanted to let you know I love you and I’m
stuck in this building in New York.
I just wanted you to know that I love
you always.
-I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that we cannot begin to
imagine at this juncture.
-If a popular novelist sat down and wrote a novel, people wouldn’t buy
this book because it would be so outrageous.
This could never happen.
-I don’t know what to tell young people about that day.
I know when I die, the first thing I want to ask St. Peter
is like, hey, what happened?
How did this happen?
Because I still have questions.
It was my day off.
It was a beautiful day, you know, really
beautiful blue skies.
-It was going to be the morning of the mayoral primaries.
They switched me, uh, to do, uh, election duty
that day.
-Like every other morning, we were sitting around the table just, uh, going
over what was going on with the kids, with the family.
-I was in my bathroom taking a shower and I had a window that
faced south and I heard what I thought was an explosion.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World
Trade Center North Tower, Building 1.
It was one of four planes hijacked by 19 Al Qaeda terrorists that day.
At first, it seemed a tragic accident, an airplane off course.
-As I’m watching this, trying to figure out, do I have to go to work?
The second plane hit and I saw it on TV.
And that was it.
-And all I’d seen was this huge fireball coming out of Tower 2, out
of the South Tower.
And for a second, I, I didn't know what it was.
I thought, maybe just the building blew up.
-I ran downstairs and I’m looking south and both towers are on fire
and it was stunning.
With the second catastrophic strike, it became clear that the country
was under attack.
New York City mounted its largest rescue effort in
history, dispatching more than 2,000 firefighters, medical workers
and police officers to lower Manhattan.
-It was a little hard getting through the streets because there was
debris all over.
Stuff that had come out of the building from the plane
hitting it.
-You got to remember the North Tower is fully engulfed.
It’s, it’s, people are jumping out of the windows.
And you can hear them hitting the deck.
-There was this, these popping sounds going off.
We realized it was people that were either
jumping off the building or were falling out of the building.
-I did not look.
I was not gonna look.
I am very protective of my psyche.
I only need to see what I need to see in situations like this
and, uh, but you couldn’t close your ears.
Rescue workers rushed in to help the more than 16,000 people still
inside, putting their own lives on the line.
Officers Bill Beaury and Mark DeMarco and their team entered
the North Tower, Tower 1.
-We ended up at Stairwell C and we started our climb up.
-We’re running into other people.
I said, just follow the wall down.
When you get outside, just try not to panic, I said, but run.
I said, get away from this site as fast as you can.
And all of a sudden the lights went out, the building went dark,
uh, ceiling panels were falling down.
-It sounded like a freight train, uh, going by.
-And the whole place was shaking like an earthquake.
With this, our radio started getting very active.
At 9:59 a.m., the 110-story South Tower, Tower 2, crashed down in
just ten seconds.
-And that’s when a little bit of shock started setting in.
Because we knew what these buildings looked like.
We knew how, how long it took them to put them up.
And for something like that to come down in
a matter of seconds, it was just mind boggling.
You, you couldn’t wrap your head around it.
And one of the officers, who was outside, he put over the radio, he
said, everybody who is in Tower 1, evacuate it immediately.
Get, get the hell out of there.
DeMarco and Beaury along with Sergeant Michael Curtin
and Officer John D’Allara saved civilians from
certain death, ushering them from the stairway and lobby.
The men then made their way from the North Tower
to the adjacent building, number six.
There they met McNally and his partner, Claude “Danny” Richards.
Then, only moments later…
-One plane colliding with one Twin Tower.
Oh my God.
-Oh my God.
-And we put our heads down and we held onto each other and we
tried to become as small as we possibly could.
-And I just, I just laid there.
And I remember saying goodbye to my
wife and kids.
-I remember seeing all four of my kids, one after another.
-I had time to get out one prayer.
And it was, Dear God, if you’re gonna take me, please make it fast,
you know.
That’s how scared I was.
I was terrified.
-I remember saying to myself, I said, is this death?
Is this what death is?
-And I was waiting for, like, a piece of steel to come through my back
and out my chest or something.
The 110-story North Tower landed on Building Six, blasting a crater
through it, only a few feet from where McNally, Beaury and
DeMarco were huddled.
-You’ve probably seen the large cloud dust.
Well, we were in it.
I had a respirator.
And that became very clogged, very quickly.
And I couldn’t breathe.
And you start really panicking when you can’t breathe.
All of a sudden it was silent.
And you’re like, wow, I survived.
-And I started moving my fingers and my toes.
And then I said, oh, is it, I guess that’s a good sign.
I figured I got my limbs and I figured I
was alive.
-I don’t know how long we were there or how long we were in that
spot, but we ended up getting up, and we all met up.
-Visibility was still, was still horrible.
Uh, little, little patches of fire were breaking out.
And I said to myself, I said, the building collapse didn’t kill me.
I said now, now I'm going to burn to death.
Bill Beaury yells out.
He goes, I think I found a way out.
I think there’s a hole over here.
A hole in the building.
-And we got this conga line and we’re going to try to get out.
It was Mark DeMarco, me and Billy behind me.
You could still see our handprints on the wall as we were
guiding ourselves blindly.
-We were able to climb out the windows, out to the outside
mezzanine level, which was facing West Street.
The bridge was all collapsed.
Everything was dead silent.
No cars.
No birds.
Nothing.
McNally, Beaury, and DeMarco searched in vain for three NYPD
officers who, moments before, had been right there with them, a search
that would continue for months on end.
-They couldn’t find Mike Curtin, John D’Allara or Danny Richards.
And we didn’t find them until the following spring.
They were buried under the sheer weight of the
World Trade Center.
And they couldn’t have been more than 20 feet
behind us when the tower came down.
And that was, that was the focus of the rest of my days there was making
sure that people knew exactly where I thought these guys were,
you know.
So that we could recover their bodies.
-And to this day, I still, I, I don’t understand how, why I’m still here.
There’s a guiltiness about it because, uh, there’s a lot of them that were
more talented, uh.
They’re just better people than me, uh.
And they didn’t make it.
I was able to come home.
I was able to see my family.
Uh, I was able to…
I was able to see my kids grow up.
-I’m fortunate. I’m lucky.
You know, I thank God that I’m still breathing.
But I inhaled a lot of stuff and, you know, sometimes that, I don’t think
about it, but I know that there might be a ticking time bomb in my chest,
you know.
To this day, only 60 percent of the victims have been identified, most
only through traces of DNA, leaving more than 1,000 families without
any remains of their loved ones to bury and mourn.
-I miss my friends.
Even the ones who survived.
They’re not the same.
There’s a lot of guys who are coming down sick
with cancers that are horrific.
-I think about 9/11 every day.
I mean, uh, it’s, it’s not, it doesn’t
consume me where I feel I need to go see a shrink or,
or seek help somewhere.
I just don’t ever want to forget it.
I don’t forget it.
I wear a memorial bracelet with the guys
who perished that day.
-Sergeant John Coughlin, Sergeant Michael Curtin, Sergeant Rodney Gillis,
Detective Joseph Vigiano, Police Officer John D’Allara,
Police Officer Vincent Danz.
-NYPD, ESU, Truck 7, 9/11/01.
And there’s only been one time that this
hasn’t been on my arm.
In 2013, um, I had open heart surgery.
-What I always try to tell people about that day is that there were so
many heroes that day.
So many heroes.
Uh, helping each other down the stairs and out into the lobbies.
It was a, it was a day when we needed heroes and many of
them showed up.
Did we get everything right?
Probably not.
Did we do the best we could?
Yeah.