GROUND ZERO SPIRIT: 25 Years of Resilience

GROUND

ZERO

SPIRIT 25 YEARS

OF RESILIENCE

Acknowledgments There have been hundreds of staffers from the newsrooms of The Journal News in Westchester, New York, The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, and the Asbury Park Press who have written, photographed, edited and otherwise contributed to coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath over the past 25 years. Some of their names are published in this book along with their work. But there are many, many people who worked behind the scenes who contributed to the coverage. We wanted to make this a book about hope, about the undying spirit of those who persevered, grieved and rebuilt their lives. We thank the following for helping show that 25 years later, through indescribable shock and grief, our spirit perseveres and even thrives. Save for the contributions of the following people, this book would not have reached the finish line: Tanya Breen, Nancy Cutler, Mike Davis, Michael Diamond, Scott Fallon, Joe Farrell, Ed Forbes, Tom Franklin, Phil Freedman, Jessica Gratigny, Seth Harrison, Brian Johnston, Michael Karas, Ilana Keller, Mike Kelly, Susan Lupow, Scott Muller, Tanya Paradine, Eli Pekelny, David Robinson, Frank Scandale, Joe Strupp, Crystal Vander Weit, Kevin Wexler, Carrie Yale, Tom Zambito.

On the Cover FRONT COVER: (Main photo) Ralph Merritt, his wife, Aelwen Wetherby, and their daughter, Saoirse, 5, gaze up at One World

Trade Center as they stand near the South Pool at the World Trade Center Memorial, May 28, 2026. The family was visiting New York City from Omaha, Nebraska. S ETH HARRISON / THE JOURNAL NEWS (Inset top right) Brooklyn firefighters George Johnson, left, of Ladder 157, Dan McWilliams, center, of Ladder 157, and

Billy Eisengrein, right, of Rescue 2, raise a flag at the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

T HOMAS E. FRANKLIN / THE RECORD (Inset bottom right) The Tribute in Light illuminated Lower Manhattan on March 11, 2002, in remembrance of the fallen towers.

FRANK BECERRA JR. / THE JOURNAL NEWS BACK COVER: Brooklyn firefighters George Johnson, left, of Ladder 157, Dan McWilliams, center, of Ladder 157, and Billy Eisengrein, right, of Rescue 2, raise a flag at the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. R ICKY FLORES / THE JOURNAL NEWS

Copyright © 2026 by The Journal News, The Record and Asbury Park Press.

All Rights Reserved • ISBN: 978-1-63846-217-0 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner or the publisher.

Published by Pediment Publishing, a division of The Pediment Group, Inc. www.pediment.com • Printed in Canada.

2 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

Table of Contents Foreword: The world had just changed. Forever.

4

More details about the events of 9/11 are revealed

8

25 years after historic image, photographer revisits scene of hope

26

Karen Cangialosi

38

Peter Bitwinski

41

Stephen Cassidy

44

Naureen Akhter

45

Carlos Garrafa

47

Adam Lisberg

Thousands died in 9/11 attacks, thousands more have died since

87

The woman who kept Shanksville’s memory alive 89 Ground Zero workers still battling the beast

96

Canadian town’s kindness on 9/11 immortalized in 2017 musical ‘Come From Away’

99

9/11 memorial’s designer wanted the unforgettable

101

He was 7 when his dad died on 9/11.

He still sees signs from his father.

105

50

Grieving 9/11 son was unforgettable.

He recalls his mom’s sacrifice

107

James McGlynn

54

Thomas E. Franklin and the famous 9/11 photo

111

George Mironis

56

Charlie Roberto

57

Rutgers professor IDs Ground Zero remains 20 years later

114

The Tietjen family

58

Survivors maintain legacy of Windows on the World

116

Greg Trevor

60

Mussab Ali

62

How did 9/11 hijackers live in plain sight in North Jersey?

121

Tracy Wanamaker and Fireboat McKean

64

Erica Wisniewski

66

9/11’s first casualty Mychal Judge is a legend — can he be a saint?

127

Chuck Daye

67

24 hours at Ground Zero

70

Welles Crowther: The man behind the red bandanna

78

Unlikely allies became driving force behind success of 9/11 Commission

82

What I learned covering 9/11 for 20 years

84

1 family, 3 lost to 9/11: How the Foleys continue to educate about terrorist attacks’ toll 133 She checked in Flight 93’s crew the morning of 9/11. Finally, she’s able to talk about it

136

Sept. 11 by the numbers: Facts from a tragic day in American history

138

We remember those who perished on 9/11

146

Acknowledgments

160

INTRODUCTION • 3

FOREWORD

The world had just changed.

Forever.

BY FRANK SCANDALE IN MY CAR HEADED to Hackensack on Route 4, summer is now in the rearview mirror and my first year as editor of The Record is shaping up as one steep learning curve.

It’s been just a few months since I left the Denver Post to serve as editor of The Record and return to New Jersey, where my career started in Elizabeth on the same day that the Chemical Control Corporation blast rocked the East Coast. While the transition had been bumpy, work and family challenges were falling into place.

The bluest sky imaginable that day, sans the classic New Jersey humidity, promised a Top 10 weather day. It was all looking up.

Then my cell phone rang.

“Vivian just called. She said a plane hit the Twin Towers,” came the voice of my administrative assistant, Liz Arrabito, referring to our executive editor, Vivian Waixel. “She said ‘turn on the radio.’”

Probably a small plane showing tourists around the Big Apple that clipped a wing. Bad, bad accident. The towers were huge, 110 stories each.

As WCBS 880 radio interviews an eyewitness to the first plane hit, Carl 4 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

Tendler, who lives near Washington Square Park, north of the towers, a second plane strikes the south tower, and Tendler’s voice explodes out of the radio.

“I saw this jet coming toward the building, he was low, and he flew about halfway up, and he flew what looks like into the south, the southeast corner of the building. Building number 2 is now burning!” Tendler is barking into the phone.

No accident. Jesus.

The world had just changed. Forever.

And it’s still changing. In considering what to include in a book about the worst attack on American soil by a foreign entity, we talked about how many people were not even born yet when the attacks came.

What follows in this book are accounts and a reconstruction of not just that day, but the subsequent 25 years leading to the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

Approximately 100 million Americans alive today in the United States had not been born when the attacks occurred.

Another 20 million or so were 5 years old or younger. It’s history to them now, not current events.

We asked journalists from USA

TODAY Co., Inc. news outlets in New York and New Jersey to tell this historic and critical story of the day and the quarter-century since. Remarkably, all but one of those recruited were part of the original coverage on Sept. 11, 2001.

We all have pretty good recall about that day and the days and weeks that followed. For me, one of the images seared into my mind are the clouds of smoke and debris that enveloped the towers as they burned 20 miles away, just south of my office windows in The Record’s headquarters in Hackensack.

And while my Sunday editor and I talked about planning the weekend report, we froze as the south tower suddenly collapsed and imploded. The unimaginable and unthinkable had just happened.

The day went from how New York City’s first responders would put out the fire and save as many lives as possible to rearranging your entire concept of what was possible and was impossible in the world.

Since that day, movies have been made, documentaries shared, a play was written, books were penned, while key anniversaries — the first, the fifth, the 10th, and on and on — updated people’s progress toward some kind of understanding and recovery.

The 25-year milestone. How could we make this anniversary different from those that came before it? What was special? What was different?

Resilience.

We called on this seasoned cadre of journalists to capture the enormity of the event, to report how some of those there that day were affected then and how they are coping with life now.

Each of the reporters and photographers who contributed to this book is representative of all the journalists that day who plunged into this odyssey that had never been seen before.

Longtime Record columnist Mike Kelly, who has written extensively about 9/11 since that day, has reconstructed the first day in real time as if it were unfolding in a movie. Kelly attached himself to the story of firefighters in those immediate hours and days after the attacks, among other related assignments.

Asbury Park Press reporters Mike Davis, Michael Diamond, Joe Strupp and Eli Pekelny, Journal News reporters Thomas Zambito and Nancy Cutler, and Record reporter Scott Fallon tracked down survivors from the tristate area to recount their stories and hear their perspectives 25 years later. The stories include the high school teen who lost her father in the south tower, the wife who missed the final phone call from her husband, the reporter who inexplicably stopped going down one street to favor another and survived the debris of the collapsed tower, the man who helped carry his coworker down the tower in a special evacuation chair, the EMT who worked around the clock to treat the injured and now battles cancer, and the Muslim boy who rose to be a political figure but watched his Pakistani parents get shunned after the attacks.

Those tales and more fill these pages.

Photojournalists Tanya Breen of Asbury Park Press and Seth Harrison of The Journal News pored over

thousands of images captured that horrendous day to offer a snapshot of the day’s images and impact, while assigning the staff photographers of all three news outlets to photograph the survivors. They are intimately acquainted with the images, the people in the photos and the anxiety and terror of that day 25 years ago. The images contained in this book are a reflection of their professionalism and memories of that day.

Many photographers that day unleashed a torrent of images that tested the emotional capacity of readers across the world. “Heartbreaking” doesn’t begin to describe those pictures. Pain. Loss. Shock. Armageddon.

Yet one particular image, a picture of hope, emerged at the end of the day.

Three firefighters were seen raising the American flag amid the rubble, looking up at the flag with the vestiges of the towers behind them.

Record photographer Tom Franklin took that particular photo. When it was transmitted into the newsroom’s electronic system, Record photo chief Rich Gigli knew it was a special shot.

We thought it would be instructional on different levels for others to read Franklin’s recollection of that day, his history with the towers and his photographic attachment to them and

Ground Zero, the moniker assigned to the financial center of the world after the attacks.

Franklin revisited the site for this book and shares his raw impressions and thoughts in poignant detail.

Yes, there is a resilience of the land — where death, destruction and desperation once owned that section of Manhattan, life, beauty and reflection have replaced it. A new tower standing taller than its predecessor reminds everyone that America bent but did not break. Americans suffered but endured. Americans showed their resilience this past quarter-century.

Finally, our collective hearts go out to the thousands of survivors of that day, the families and friends of the victims from the towers and the planes that were commandeered into them, and the other attack on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the victims of the unsuccessful fourth planned attack that was thwarted by heroic passengers and ended in a Pennsylvania field instead of another one of the symbolic buildings in Washington.

It is history for many, but it is still a current event for many more.

Frank Scandale, news director of the Asbury Park Press, was executive editor of the Bergen Record from 2001 to 2011.

The Twin Towers, shown in an image from Oct. 10, 1989, were not only among the most recognized buildings in the world,

they stood as a symbol of New York’s and the United States’ economic power. T HOMAS P. COSTELLO / ASBURY PARK PRESS FOREWORD • 5

6 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

PART ONE

GROUND ZERO Looking up from Fulton and Church streets, heavy smoke pours out of both towers shortly after two hijacked planes crashed into the buildings on the morning of 9/11. MELISSA KLEIN / THE JOURNAL NEWS TICK TOCK • 7

TICK TOCK

More details about the events of 9/11 are revealed

BY MIKE KELLY IT’S A DAY AMERICA WOULD LIKE to forget. And yet, it’s a day America will never forget. Sept. 11, 2001 — 9/11 — has been etched into our collective hearts, minds and souls. What follows is an account of what happened that day from those who were there.

5:45 a.m. Portland International Jetport, Maine: Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari, two key members of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network, pass through security at Portland International Jetport and board a commuter flight to Boston in time to board American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles. They are the first of 19 al-Qaeda operatives who will board jetliners today.

6:30 a.m. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Ronald Breitweiser, 39, a senior vice president for Fiduciary Trust who lives with his wife, Kristen, and their 2-year-old daughter, Caroline, in Middletown, New Jersey, steps onto a ferry to take him to Lower Manhattan and his office on the 94th floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

7:15 a.m. 68th floor, north tower, World Trade Center, Manhattan: Greg Trevor, a public information

officer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey who lives in Highland Park, New Jersey, with his wife, Allison, and the couple’s two sons, 4 and 2 years old, arrives at his office after buying a bagel. He’s working an earlier shift today so he can get home to watch the boys while Allison takes an evening class.

7:15 a.m. Manhattan, West Side Highway: NYPD Detective Martin Davin of Nyack, New York, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt — his undercover outfit — crosses the George Washington Bridge and drives south on the West Side Highway to a secret federal and state drug investigative task force office in Lower Manhattan.

7:30 a.m. 70th floor, south tower, World Trade Center: A marketing team for the Morgan Stanley investment firm, led by Jack Kemp of Ridgewood, New Jersey, gathers for a meeting on the 70th floor. An upand-coming marketing analyst and Kemp protégé, Tom Swift of Jersey City, is slated to make a presentation. By the elevators, a substitute security guard, Dereck Lovell, who immigrated to America on a work visa from his native Guyana and is applying for U.S. citizenship, sits by a

podium, monitoring the comings and goings of other workers.

7:59 a.m. Logan International Airport, Boston: American Airlines Flight 11 takes off, heading to Los Angeles, with 76 passengers, 11 crew members and five hijackers, including Atta and al-Omari, who flew in that morning from Maine.

8 a.m. FDNY Hazmat 1 and Squad 288 firehouse, Maspeth, Queens: FDNY firefighter Phil McArdle, of Carmel, New York, gets behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee, which is parked on a street near his firehouse. His shift is not supposed to end for another hour. But McArdle has been asked to deliver a new computer teaching program on hazardous materials to the FDNY’s training academy on Randall’s Island. Another firefighter, Jonathan Hohmann, arrives early from his home on Staten Island to finish McArdle’s shift.

8:14 a.m. Aboard Flight 11: Hijackers breach the cockpit, stab the flight crew, disable the plane’s transponder, and turn the jetliner south toward New York City.

8:14 a.m. Logan International Airport, Boston: United Airlines

OPPOSITE TOP: The Twin Towers are shown from the Half Moon sloop in New York Harbor. It would become their last day standing.

ROBERT SABO / THE JOURNAL NEWS OPPOSITE BOTTOM: Just hours later, smoke pours out of both buildings after each was struck by hijacked passenger planes.

ROBERT SABO / THE JOURNAL NEWS 8 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

TICK TOCK • 9

Flight 175 takes off, heading for Los Angeles, with 51 passengers, nine crew members and five hijackers.

8:15 a.m. 69th floor, north tower: Peter Bitwinski, a 48-year-old manager with the Port Authority’s accounting department, arrives at his office. Except for John Abruzzo, who is disabled from a diving accident years before and uses a motorized wheelchair in his office across the floor, Bitwinski is alone.

8:19 a.m. Aboard Flight 11, over western Massachusetts: Flight attendant Betty Ann Ong calls air traffic control staffers at Boston’s Logan Airport and tells them that a hijacking is taking place.

8:20 a.m. Dulles International Airport, Northern Virginia: American Airlines Flight 77 takes off, heading for Los Angeles, with 53 passengers, six crew members and five hijackers.

8:24 a.m. Aboard Flight 11: Lead hijacker Mohamed Atta is overheard

by Boston air controllers talking over an in-flight intercom and warning passengers not to protest the plane’s takeover. Atta assures everyone they will be safe.

8:30 a.m. 94th floor, south tower: From his office at Fiduciary Trust, Ron Breitweiser, already drinking his second cup of coffee that morning after he arrived at his desk at 7 a.m., telephones his wife, Kristen, at home in Middletown, New Jersey. It’s a

ABOVE RIGHT: As smoke billows from the

towers, numerous acts of bravery and heroism were occurring inside amid unspeakable chaos.

D ANIELLE P. RICHARDS / THE RECORD People watch smoke pour out of the

towers from Liberty State Park in Jersey City, N.J., unaware of what was happening in the buildings.

FRANK BECERRA JR. / THE JOURNAL NEWS 10 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center but has long regretted that she did not escape fast enough, sees the same flash. She immediately heads for the stairs, leaving behind her blazer, briefcase, cell phone, keys and wallet with about $200.

Customers at P.C. Richard in Yonkers, N.Y., watch events unfold on live television.

ATTHEW BROWN / THE JOURNAL NEWS M

friendly call that Ron often makes after he reaches the office. He wishes Kristen well as she prepares to take Caroline to a speech therapist. Kristen glances at a clock. She tells Ron she’s running late and has to go. “I love you, Sweets,” she tells Ron, using a nickname the two share with each other. “I love you, too,” Ron says.

8:30 a.m. The Record newsroom, Hackensack, New Jersey: Thomas Franklin, a photographer for The Record newspaper, who returned a few days earlier from an assignment to cover rising baseball stars in the Dominican Republic, arrives for a special meeting of staff photographers. On the other side of the newsroom, by a window where he can see the World Trade Center’s towers, columnist Mike Kelly sits down at his desk. He listens to an angry voicemail from New Jersey Gov. Donald DiFrancesco, who complains about a recent column, then busies himself answering letters from readers.

8:37 a.m. Logan International Airport, Boston: Air traffic controllers, after overhearing a radio call by Mohamed Atta, notify the U.S. Air Force about the hijacking of Flight 11. Air National Guard jet fighters are mobilized in Massachusetts and New Jersey and ordered to find Flight 11.

8:40 a.m. Jersey City: Carlos Garrafa turns on the water to his shower at his Jersey City home. He is looking forward to a day off from his job as an EMT. About 8:40 a.m. Above the Hudson River: With hijackers at the controls, Flight 11 follows the Hudson River southward, toward Manhattan.

8:42 a.m. Newark International Airport, Newark, New Jersey: United Flight 93 takes off, heading for San Francisco, with 33 passengers, seven crew members and four hijackers.

8:43 a.m. Aboard Flight 175, over Massachusetts: Pilots report a suspicious transmission from Flight 11.

Soon after, hijackers seize control of the Flight 175 cockpit and turn the plane southward, toward Manhattan.

8:46 a.m. North tower: Flight 11 crashes into floors 93 through 99.

8:46 a.m. 70th floor, south tower: From his office on the north side, Morgan Stanley analyst Kevin Perry of Ridgewood, New Jersey, looks up and glimpses a flash of the fuselage of Flight 11 as it strikes the north tower. Seven floors below, Perry’s wife, Susan, another Morgan Stanley staffer, who survived the 1993

8:46 a.m. Weehawken, New Jersey: As he loads cargo near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, Chuck Daye, a Vietnam veteran and now a paving mechanic for the Port Authority, looks across the Hudson River and sees Flight 11 crash into the north tower.

Minutes later, he heads through the tunnel toward Manhattan.

8:46 a.m. Jersey City: Taking a shower, Carlos Garrafa hears a loud crash from across the Hudson River — at least a mile away. He jumps out and turns on the TV to see a massive hole in the north tower. He then calls EMT headquarters at Jersey City Medical Center. His supervisor tells him to head to the ambulance garage.

8:46 a.m. 69th floor, north tower: Peter Bitwinski hears a roar and is knocked forward onto his desk. He hears metal smashing. The building sways back and forth.

8:46 a.m. 68th floor, north tower: Greg Trevor gets off the phone with a colleague and stands up to stretch his lower back. Looking out the window, he notices how blue and cloudless the sky seems and, particularly, how the sunlight reflects off the Statue of Liberty. Seconds later, he hears a loud thud, then an explosion. Trevor is thrown to the floor as the building sways. A ball of flame falls past his window, followed by a blizzard of paper and glass. A phone rings. It’s an NBC news producer. Trevor says he can’t talk. He hangs up and heads for the stairs. Emergency sirens blare.

8:47 a.m. FDNY firehouse, Duane Street, Lower Manhattan: More than a dozen firefighters jump on Ladder Truck 1 and Engine 7 and head to the trade center. They leave behind TICK TOCK • 11

Nancy Kennedy, noticing paper and other debris from the north tower floating by the windows of their meeting room, order an evacuation.

Tom Swift is one of the first to leave.

8:51 a.m. Aboard Flight 77, over southern Ohio: Hijackers seize control of cockpit, push passengers to the back of the aircraft, and turn the plane back toward Washington, D.C.

ABOVE AND OPPOSITE: The Pentagon is seen after one of the hijacked planes

crashed into it on Sept. 11, 2001. T OM NYCZ / THE JOURNAL NEWS

a rookie probationary firefighter, Antonios Benetatos, who has never fought a fire. They tell him to monitor the radio.

8:47 a.m. The Record newsroom: Susan DeSantis, the morning news editor, yells across the mostly empty newsroom to tell columnist Mike Kelly of the plane crash at the north tower. DeSantis then walks to the photography studio looking for Thomas Franklin. Kelly looks out the window to see smoke rising from the north tower, 13 miles away. He suspects that a small plane struck the tower but changes his mind when he turns on a nearby TV and sees a video from a TV news helicopter that shows a massive hole in the tower.

8:48 a.m. 69th floor, north tower: Peter Bitwinski runs to the other side of the floor and finds his friend John Abruzzo in his motorized wheelchair.

8:49 a.m. Hackensack: Record photographer Thomas Franklin and columnist Mike Kelly jump into their cars and head to the trade center.

With traffic congested, both take back streets through Hudson County to reach the Jersey City waterfront, unaware they are heading to the same place.

12 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

8:50 a.m. Middletown, New Jersey: The phone rings at the Breitweiser home. It’s Ron, again calling Kristen from his office on the 94th floor of the south tower. “Sweets, I’m OK. I’m OK. Don’t worry,” he blurts. Kristen has no idea that the north tower has been struck. “What are you talking about?” she says. Ron tells Kristen to turn on a TV. She is shocked. Ron tells her again not to worry. “It’s not my building,” he says. He doesn’t call back. In October, the New York City medical examiner calls Kristen to say it has identified Ron’s left arm and hand with his wedding ring still attached.

About 8:50 a.m. Upper West Side, Manhattan: Adam Lisberg, a 31-yearold Record politics reporter, gets into his maroon Subaru Legacy. He turns on the car radio and hears WCBS helicopter traffic reporter Tom Kaminski reporting smoke coming from the World Trade Center. Lisberg guesses that a transformer has blown or something more benign has happened. He calls news editor Susan DeSantis on his cell phone and tells her he is driving to the trade center.

8:50 a.m. south tower, 70th floor: Jack Kemp and another leader of the Morgan Stanley marketing team,

8:51 a.m. 70th floor, south tower: Across the floor from the meeting with Kemp’s staff, Morgan Stanley worker Kevin Perry stares out his window as debris and bodies fall from the north tower. Moments later, he gets up and heads for the stairs.

8:55 a.m. 69th floor, north tower: Peter Bitwinski finds a special evacuation chair for John Abruzzo that allows disabled people to slide down stairs more easily than using a motorized wheelchair. Bitwinski and nine other men lift Abruzzo off his wheelchair and onto the evacuation chair. Next, they determine that two men will be at the back of the chair and two men at the front. They head for the stairs.

9 a.m. St. Rose High School, Belmar, New Jersey: Erica Wisniewski, 15, is sitting in a geometry class when she hears a PA announcement that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. Her father, Alan, a computer programmer at the Sandler O’Neill investment firm, works on the 104th floor of the south tower.

9 a.m. Jersey City: Carlos Garrafa and other EMTs, with bags of medical equipment loaded in their ambulances, head to the Holland Tunnel and Manhattan.

9 a.m. On the stairs, north tower: Peter Bitwinski and the others, with John Abruzzo in the evacuation chair, find it difficult to lift the chair through landings on the stairwell that will take them to the lobby 69 floors below.

9 a.m. 40th Street and Ninth Avenue: The Record’s Adam Lisberg sees a plainclothes police officer waving a badge and asking for someone to drive him down to the trade center. Lisberg stops his Subaru. The officer gets in, then acts as Lisberg’s navigator through the labyrinth of Lower Manhattan streets, with Lisberg driving in the wrong direction on one-way streets as the officer displays his badge.

9 a.m. 70th floor, south tower: After checking the floor for stragglers, Morgan Stanley’s Jack Kemp steps into his office to call his wife, Kathy, at their beach home in Mantoloking, New Jersey. Nancy Kennedy and four other staffers wait for Kemp in the empty hallway.

9:03 a.m. south tower: Flight 175, banking across New York Harbor and past the Statue of Liberty, crashes into the trade center’s south tower, crashes into floors 77 through 85 of the trade center’s south tower..

9:03 a.m. 59th floor, south tower: Morgan Stanley’s Tom Swift, after stopping at an office to telephone his wife and mother in Jersey City, steps onto an elevator. A fireball, ignited by fuel from the crashed jetliner on the 78th floor, incinerates the elevator shaft as the doors close with Swift inside.

9:03 a.m. 70th floor, south tower: On the phone with his wife, Kathy, Kemp is tossed against a bookcase as the plane strikes the building, seven floors above. He gets up, grabs the phone and tells Kathy that he is okay, then runs into the hallway to meet Nancy Kennedy and the others.

9:10 a.m. Valley Stream, New York: Larry Byrnes, 68, a retired FDNY battalion chief, has just returned from vacation. When he hears that the second tower at the trade center has been struck, Byrnes jumps into his car and heads to his old firehouse on Duane Street in Manhattan.

9:05 a.m. Sarasota, Florida: President George W. Bush, visiting a classroom at Emma E. Booker Elementary School and listening to second-graders read from the book “My Pet Goat,” is told that a second plane has hit the second tower and that America is under attack.

9:15 a.m. Exchange Place, Jersey City waterfront: Carlos Garrafa and his fellow EMS workers set up a triage area. Across the Hudson River, clouds of smoke billow from the trade center.

9:06 a.m. 70th floor, south tower: Jack Kemp, Nancy Kennedy and the four other Morgan Stanley staffers can’t escape. Their staircase is blocked.

9:10 a.m. 70th floor, south tower: After searching for a few minutes in a smoky and darkened hallway, Kemp and the others hear a voice on a bullhorn: “If you hear me, follow me.” It’s the substitute security guard, Dereck Lovell. He has found another escape stairway that is not blocked. As the group heads down the stairs, Lovell turns back to make a final check of the floor for stragglers.

9:15 a.m. Near the World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan: The Record’s Adam Lisberg parks his Subaru a block north of the burning towers. Flames and debris pour from both towers. Lisberg regrets he doesn’t have his camera with him. He often carries a camera in his trunk, but it is being repaired after he dropped it on a recent vacation.

About 9:16 a.m. Lower Manhattan: Chuck Daye of the Port Authority, after passing through the Holland Tunnel, sees helicopters circling the burning Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The image reminds him of the last days of the Vietnam War. “It made me think about being in downtown Saigon,” said Daye, who

9:03 a.m. 78th floor, south tower: Silvion Ramsundar, 31, a broker at Fuji Bank, is still alive but bleeding from his chest, where he was struck by a piece of metal. He looks across the floor and sees dozens of bodies. He gets up and heads for the stairs. His shirt is soaked with blood.

9:03 a.m. An ambulance, near the Holland Tunnel: EMT Carlos Garrafa hears on the radio that another jet has slammed into the south tower. As he is about to enter the Holland Tunnel, his dispatcher orders the ambulance to the Jersey City waterfront to treat injured people escaping across the Hudson River.

TICK TOCK • 13

36 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

PART TWO

THE PEOPLE A lone rose casts a shadow over the name of one of the victims of 9/11 at the National September 11 Memorial in Manhattan. SETH HARRISON / THE JOURNAL NEWS THE PEOPLE • 37

THE MISSED PHONE CALL

Karen Cangialosi

BY JOE STRUPP KAREN CANGIALOSI STILL REMEMbers the call that got away.

She was getting ready to go to work on Sept. 11, 2001, and the phone rang, but she didn’t get to it in time. She later found out it was her husband, Steven, calling their Middletown home from his office at Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center’s north tower.

Soon after, a friend phoned and urged her to turn on the television. She saw the carnage.

“I was just hoping he was alive,” Cangialosi said.

Steven Cangialosi was among those who perished on that day.

Twenty-five years later, Cangialosi’s two sons — who were 7 and 10 at the time — are grown and working. One is a doctor, the other in financial technology, and she has two grandsons she dotes on.

“Life goes on. You still miss him every day,” she said recently. “But it’s sad. I think their dad would be very proud of them, and instead he is missing out. I think they are well adjusted, and very successful. My sons are the image of their father. They are kind, thoughtful, compassionate and intelligent young men. I am very blessed to have them as my sons.”

Karen Cangialosi moved to Florida eight years ago and works as an account representative for Fidelity National.

“You have to be a resilient person, show perseverance,” she said about what got her through the last quarter-century.

ABOVE: Karen Cangialosi, formerly of Middletown, shared a family photo with her late husband, Steven Cangialosi, who was

killed on 9/11, and her two sons, at Victory Park. P ROVIDED BY KAREN CANGIALOSI OPPOSITE: Karen is pictured at Victory Park in Rumson, New Jersey, on June 22, 2026. B RIAN JOHNSTON / ASBURY PARK PRESS 38 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

THE PEOPLE • 39

THE VOLUNTEER

George Mironis

BY SCOTT FALLON

9/11 Memorial employee George Mironis Sr. places a rose in the first letter of the last

name (or sometimes middle name) of the victim whose birthday is today, Aug. 24, 2016. Mironis, a North Bergen resident, says it’s “a great honor” to place the roses, and he does so before every shift. DANIELLE PARHIZKARAN / NORTHJERSEY.COM

WHEN HE WAS WELL INTO HIS 80s, George Mironis would take the bus three days a week from his North Bergen home into New York and then a subway down to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum as a volunteer, to help visitors navigate the exhibits.

Mironis would speak in such vivid detail about 9/11 that visitors soon realized they were being guided by an actual survivor of the attacks.

“It would come up naturally in conversation,” Mironis said. “They were usually surprised. But I was happy to share my story.”

Mironis was an office manager at a Japanese bank on the 48th floor of the north tower when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the building 45 stories above him.

Debris began showering down outside his window. Mironis went to 56 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

a stairwell and began his descent. He soon encountered firefighters with hoses strapped across their shoulders walking up the stairs. One patted Mironis on the shoulder. “Everything is going to be OK,” the firefighter told him.

When Mironis finally made it to the lobby after an hour, the sprinklers were spraying water everywhere.

Broken glass was all over the floor.

He made it out and staggered uptown to a Greek Orthodox church, where he prayed on its stairs. He waited more than three hours to take a ferry back across the Hudson to Weehawken, where thousands of people were evacuated off Manhattan.

About a week later, Mironis returned to Ground Zero. He went to nearby St. Paul’s Chapel, where hundreds of photos of the missing hung.

There he saw a photo of the firefighter

who had reassured him on the stairwell. He broke down and cried.

Years later, Mironis would learn the identity of the firefighter: Thomas Gerard Schoales, 27 years old.

“He was just a kid,” Mironis said.

“And he was the one telling me everything was going to be OK, walking up all those stairs, carrying all that equipment. I’ll never forget him.”

Mironis carries a picture of Schoales in his wallet along with a list of 39 friends and coworkers who died in the attacks. He would often show them to visitors as a reminder of how much loss was suffered that day.

“They were sometimes shocked when I told them,” Mironis said. “It made it real. It wasn’t just history to them anymore. We were there to educate people, and the best education is learning it from someone who lived it.”

In November, after eight years and more than 3,000 hours of volunteer service at the memorial, Mironis “retired” from his role at age 86. But he still visits regularly to help his friends.

What drives him to return?

The memorial is a solemn, sacred place to Mironis. He had little tolerance during his volunteer days for visitors who failed to treat it as such.

Like most victims of large-scale trauma, such as the Holocaust or Pearl Harbor, Mironis wanted to make sure no one forgot about the horror and heroics of the attacks, especially younger generations born after 9/11.

“People need to know,” Mironis said. “Young people. Foreign people.

Everyone needs to know what happened here.”

THE NATURALIST

Charlie Roberto

BY NANCY CUTLER CHARLIE ROBERTO WAS AN FDNY captain stationed at Harlem’s Engine 58 and Ladder 26 — known as “The Fire Factory” — in 2001. On the morning of Sept. 11, he was in the middle of a 24-hour shift, having come off an unusually quiet night for the notoriously busy firehouse.

The longtime nature lover stepped outside the firehouse around 7 a.m. to get some fresh air.

Roberto recalled thinking, “What a gorgeous day it is.”

“Little did we know it was the worst day of our lives,” he said.

Around 8:47, a dispatcher announced multiple alarms at the World Trade Center. Roberto went over to a TV to catch the news. Reporters were speculating that a small plane had crashed into the building, perplexed something like that could happen on such a clear day. Seeing the gaping hole in the north tower, Roberto knew it wasn’t a small plane and it wasn’t an accident.

“I expected to go down, because our companies went down in ‘93,” Roberto said, referring to the 1993 bombing in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center that killed six and injured more than 1,000.

Instead, Roberto, a senior captain on shift, was put in charge of organizing the recall for the 3rd Division, which encompasses Manhattan from about 34th to 125th streets.

The fire department issued a full recall, “the first time in my career,” Roberto said. Firefighters who were on vacation and off shift were expected to report in. Even those on medical leave showed up.

Roberto commandeered Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses to get firefighters to the scene.

“We flagged them down, and they stopped,” he recalled. “No one went past us.” Extra guys jumped on rigs that were heading south.

He had more than 200 firefighters report in. Two chiefs from Roberto’s 12th Battalion were killed; one had just gotten off duty at 9 a.m. but headed down anyway.

By Thursday, two days after the attacks, Roberto said, he was getting “a little buggy” and headed to the smoking remains of the World Trade Center, called “the Pile,” to help search for firefighters and “see what we were dealing with.”

When he saw the wreckage, he knew they were all gone.

Then the funerals began. On Saturday, Sept. 15, he attended the funeral of FDNY Chaplain Father Mychal Judge, the first certified victim of 9/11, at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Midtown.

Over the next few months, Roberto attended more than 100 funerals and

memorial services for firefighters he knew. One morning, he was leaving a funeral at a Long Island church when an FDNY battalion car pulled into the parking lot. Roberto said he realized another firefighter funeral was about to start. He stayed.

He has been connected to nature since he was a kid growing up in Putnam County, New York. He got into birdwatching in the 1980s, an experience he said is “like seeing old friends every year in springtime.”

Just weeks after 9/11, Roberto was slated to lead a birdwatching hike for the Audubon Society. He struggled, he recalled, because people wanted to thank the fireman for his service. He was courteous, but he hoped just to focus on the birds.

Soon, though, Roberto was again finding solace in nature.

In 2004, he helped establish EagleFest, a winter celebration hosted

by Teatown Lake Reservation lauding conservation efforts that restored the bald eagle’s presence in the Hudson River Valley and the United States.

Roberto, who retired from the FDNY in 2019 after 41 years on the job, continues to share his love of nature by leading explorations and giving talks.

“I think nature is good for everybody,” Roberto said. “It gets you out of your head.”

On 9/11, Charlie Roberto, an FDNY captain, was put in charge of determining where the recalled firefighters in the 3rd Division

would go, including to the World Trade Center. He later attended more than 100 funerals and memorial services for firefighters he knew. Roberto, now retired, was photographed June 25, 2026 at Croton Point Park in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where he spends most mornings bird watching. A lifetime naturalist and longtime birder, he has poured himself into teaching about birding, insects and natural surroundings. S ETH HARRISON / THE JOURNAL NEWS THE PEOPLE • 57

9/11 memorial’s designer wanted the unforgettable

BY PETER D. KRAMER | PUBLISHED: SEPT. 2, 2021 THIS IS WRONG, MICHAEL ARAD thought.

It was 2003, Arad was 34, a few years removed from graduate school and working as an architect for New York

City’s housing department when the call went out for designs for a memorial at Ground Zero. An open competition would produce a winning design.

Architect Daniel Libeskind had

The 9/11 Memorial and One World Trade Center in Manhattan, photographed at

night on Aug. 10, 2021. S ETH HARRISON / THE JOURNAL NEWS

charge of the master plan for the site, and had set the design guidelines for the memorial. But Arad bristled at the lines Libeskind had drawn, the lines the designs were expected to stay inside.

Libeskind wanted the entire 8-acre site to be 60 feet below street level, an enormous pit in the middle of the city, Arad calls it.

The young architect was convinced it was the wrong way to go.

STRANGERS, SIDE BY SIDE Arad was living in the East Village on 9/11, when indescribable terror arrived from an impossibly clear blue autumn sky and changed the world forever. He saw the second plane hit the South Tower from the roof of his building.

An Israeli citizen born in London, Arad had lived the peripatetic life of an ambassador’s son, attending high school in Mexico City when his father, Moshe, was posted there. They had lived also in New York briefly.

He went to Dartmouth College, where he met Melanie Fitzpatrick, who was bound for corporate law.

Arad took a break from school to serve his required stint in the Israeli Army, returned to finish up and then moved to Atlanta, where he and Fitzpatrick attended graduate school at Georgia Tech. They married in February 2001 and moved to Manhattan.

What Arad remembered about 9/11 and the frightening days that followed didn’t resemble Libeskind’s idea two years later when the competition was THE LEGACY • 101

announced. Arad’s was a street-level memory, and he was convinced a memorial should capture that.

He would never forget how people poured into Union Square, Times Square, Washington Square, needing to be together, to stand side by side with strangers, bearing individual pain but sharing collective grief.

New York, he says, is one of those cities where you feel like you can skate on top of it all and hold everything at arm’s length. But after the towers fell, that disappeared. He’d never seen New York more united.

Standing in Washington Square late one night, he felt, for the first time, at home in the city, that he belonged.

9/11 made him a New Yorker.

“If the terrorists thought they’d sow fear and division,” he said, “they did not succeed.”

Memorial designs came from everywhere — 5,201 of them — from amateur architects and top design firms. One came from Michael Arad, an entry that would push back on Libeskind’s enormous pit idea,

suggesting a street-level plaza, a public space for the collective and the individual to consider what was lost.

He called it “Reflecting Absence.”

And on Jan. 6, 2004, it was named the winning design.

WHY THE MEMORIAL WORKS It is late June 2021, and Arad, now 52 and a dual Israeli and American citizen, has walked over from his office a few blocks away on lower Broadway.

Trim and tan, with a salt-and-pepper beard, long hair and horn-rimmed glasses, he sits on one of the square blocks around the South Pool, in the shade of one of the hundreds of swamp white oak trees. The canopy of leaves creates a sort of cloister around the pool, a shady respite. He has to speak up to be heard over the sound of falling water 20 feet away.

Anyone stepping onto the 8-acre plaza between Liberty and Fulton streets, from Greenwich to West, arrives with one question: Where were the towers, exactly? The one-acre-square pools answer that

fundamental question in an instant.

The memorial also tells the visitor what was lost. Buildings that once went up, are replaced by a memorial that goes down, albeit not as far as Libeskind first envisioned.

Twenty years after 9/11, and 10 years after it opened to the public, the memorial — the product of an eightyear battle that was at times nasty and political and filled with drama and delays — stitches the site back into the everyday life of the city, Arad says.

After sunset, a bank of lights illuminates the falls in each pool from below, inside the splash zone. The light fades as it rises, brightest at the bottom and carried upward by the water, like a prism. But the center, bottomless void, remains unlit.

Night changes the names on the parapets, courtesy of light fixtures tucked inside each panel. The etched names, hollowed out by day, glow with soft yellow light at night.

Rain adds a whole other element to the memorial at night, as light and water combine to create one continuous surface, whether in the pool or on the plaza.

If the pools draw the eye down, 1 World Trade pulls focus skyward, with its tower lights ever changing.

Starting at dusk on the 20th anniversary, the annual Tribute in Light — powerful blue spotlights shining straight u p from the edge of the plaza — will revive the Twin Towers, in a way, till dawn on the 12th erases them once again.

MEANINGFUL AND ADJACENT Arad likes to talk about the “meaningful adjacencies” of the memorial’s names, how the ribbon of names isn’t just a list, how his team conducted countless interviews to make connections, to put friends side by side on the parapet. He talks about how hard that was to achieve, how they add an extra level of heart to the memorial.

Michael Arad, designer of the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center in Manhattan, reflects on the purpose of memorials,

and how he feels the 9/11 Memorial succeeds in allowing people to mourn both individually and collectively.

S ETH HARRISON / THE JOURNAL NEWS 102 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

Rutgers professor IDs Ground Zero remains 20 years later

BY JERRY CARINO | PUBLISHED: SEPT. 8, 2021 ON SEPT. 11, 2001, MARK DESIRE was working on a Brooklyn homicide case when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers. He was 33 years old and four years into his tenure with New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

Within minutes, he was on the scene at ground zero.

“Our mission was to preserve the evidence,” Desire said. “Our job was to set up a temporary morgue and command post and do our best — and not get killed by falling debris.”

He almost did. His four-man crew was working a stone’s throw from the south tower when it collapsed.

He reported for work the following day. His supervisor, noting his condition, gave him a job he could do sitting down.

“I got assigned to working with the families to make DNA identifications,” Desire said.

Twenty years later, he’s still doing it.

ATTEMPTING TO IDENTIFY REMAINS The High Bridge, Hunterdon County, resident, who also teaches criminal justice courses at Rutgers University, leads the team of forensic biologists identifying human remains found at ground zero. Of the 21,905 remains

collected, one-third (7,155) haven’t been matched with a specific person.

“I get asked all the time, ‘In 20 years, you still haven’t finished this?’”

Desire said. “We have finished it. All those remains have been attempted.

What we do is, we advance the technology and then attempt again.”

Now an assistant director at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, Desire is the last member of the original forensics team still plugging away. Some of his colleagues were in fifth grade when the towers fell.

“I’m very proud to work here,” he said. “That commitment 20 years later is as great as it was back in 2001.

We’re not going to quit. We don’t stop.”

LEARNING FROM FAILURE On the morning of Sept. 12, 2001, Desire started making 20,000 case files.

“That was the initial fatality number we were given,” he said.

Over time the number whittled down to the final count: 2,753.

Desire’s team has identified remains of 1,647 of those victims. That leaves 1,106 victims (40%) without any remains identified.

In some cases, Desire said, “there were hundreds of pieces of one person, very small, the size of Tic Tacs

scattered throughout the blocks where the World Trade Center was.”

In other cases, he said, “I tend to think there were victims where there’s nothing to recover. They were basically cremated.”

DNA testing, which requires samples provided by the victim’s family — from a used toothbrush or razor, for example — has accounted for roughly 90% of successful identifications. At this point, Desire said, his team makes about 100 identifications in a typical year, “and almost all of them are going to be previous identifications, where the families already received something.”

He said the last positive ID for a previously unidentified victim took place in 2019. In 2020, COVIDrelated duties became a priority; all of Desire’s team members have other forensics responsibilities. But an emerging DNA-testing method called “next generation sequencing” might unlock information from samples too degraded to be analyzed in the past.

“The technology today, if you asked me about it back in 2001, I would have said, ‘That sounds like science fiction,’” Desire said.

New York City’s forensic biology department has its own research and development unit. Desire said

OPPOSITE: Mark Desire is the manager of the World Trade Center DNA Identification Team, a unit dedicated to advancing the

science and helping return loved ones to their families. A MY NEWMAN / NORTHJERSEY.COM 114 • GROUND ZERO SPIRIT

advances they’ve made in the quest to identify ground zero remains have changed the entire field, solving cold cases from the 1960s and drug-cartel murders in Mexico.

“If something big and bad happens someplace in the world, New York City is going to get a call to help out, and we share what we know,” Desire said.

“The World Trade Center work has pushed forensics into the future.”

As a professor, Desire said there’s a lesson drawn from this ongoing task that he imparts on students.

“It’s about never giving up,” he said.

“I tell my students, you’re never going to reach your potential if you don’t fail. We’ve had 20 years of failure and we don’t give up. Learn from your failures and use them.”

‘UNHEARD OF IN FORENSIC SCIENCE’ Desire, who grew up in Gloucester Township and graduated RutgersCamden with a biology degree, was trained to keep emotion out of his work.

“That’s the No. 1 rule,” he said. “You certainly don’t meet the families of victims. That holds true, except for the World Trade Center.”

His team’s relationships with families has been a key part of acquiring the necessary DNA samples.

“In our lab we’ll have World Trade Center families come in and tour and meet scientists,” Desire said. “That’s unheard of in forensic science.”

Desire’s team is careful to abide by families’ wishes. Some want to be notified every time remains from their loved one is identified. Others ask to

be updated just once a year. Others don’t want to be contacted at all; those remains are placed into a private repository at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which is located at ground zero.

The times when Desire does make that phone call, especially to a family who had no remains of the person they lost, the gravity of his work is inescapable.

“When you hold a piece of someone in your hand that you’ve just identified — it’s taken 10 times of going back to it (with new technology) — and you’re able to return that loved one to their family, they’re crying, hugging you and thanking you for bringing their little boy home,” he said. “That’s really powerful.”

THE LEGACY • 115