These are real experiences, actual detailed events that happened.
This is the biggest murder that we had ever caught.
Thousands of people were killed in this attack.
We weren't prepared.
We weren't prepared as human beings, not even talking about professions.
I didn't feel in control like I was when I was doing an investigation.
I felt more like I was just trying to survive the day.
You find out what you're really made of.
You find out what it is to be a team player.
You find out who your partner is.
You find out how important life is.
I think half the city knew somebody or had a relative
who died in the Trade Center.
But time has gone by.
Some people now haven't experienced something like that.
They haven't seen what it's like when tragedy really hits.
And the whole city came together.
It didn't matter what background, nationality you were.
We were all humans that day.
Twenty-five years later,
that will always be the date that divides my life.
The world that existed on September 10th, that's gone.
It led into 20 years of warfare.
My whole world was changed.
The whole world was changed.
Our job is to make sure you can go home and sleep at night.
It's so important for a family to know who murdered their relative.
Compassion for the victims, that's the most important thing.
I've always liked the peek behind the curtain.
What really happened?
You want to find out the truth.
That's what detectives do.
Your instinct is to help people.
In New York City, the NYPD…
this is it.
It was the most amazing thing, looking at the towers from below.
You know, especially as a kid, you'd just go like this.
And it just keeps going and going, like a stairway to heaven.
My Aunt JoAnn, she worked in the World Trade Center.
She worked in the North Tower, 103rd floor,
and then also the 105th floor.
She was working for Cantor Fitzgerald, a brokerage firm.
She started working there when she was 18.
She ended up becoming vice president, partner.
So JoAnn, she was my aunt, but she was more like my sister.
Always took care of me, made sure I wasn't getting into trouble.
She was only 13 years older than me.
When she first started working there,
she brought me to the Trade Center for the first time.
As a five-year-old, you know,
you get excited about things that you've never seen before.
And here I am getting on the elevator, and it was like a rocket ship.
You're up there in a couple of minutes, a hundred-somewhat stories.
Your ears are popping. You get out.
And once you stepped up near the windows, it was actually kind of like, "Ooh."
It was a long way down.
A hundred and ten floors in each tower.
It could be upwards of 50,000 people on any given day.
The buildings had their own zip code.
That's something that-- Just think that--
Wherever you live in the United States, there's an area that has a zip code.
These two buildings had their own zip code.
They had designed it to withstand high winds, storms,
lightning strikes, planes hitting it.
It was perceived to be somewhat indestructible.
A bomb killed five and injured more than 1,000 others
in the blast that rocked the World Trade Center
and sent Lower Manhattan into a state of complete chaos.
February 1993, there was a terrorist attack.
International terrorists put explosives into a van
and parked it into a, you know, subterranean garage.
It blew up, but the damage was so minimal.
Someone near me was saying, "Man, these towers are amazing."
"They can withstand this huge blast. I can't believe it."
I never really thought that the Twin Towers were a target
of international terrorists until that day.
And then I realized that they were a symbol of strength.
They were a symbol of pride.
Something that, you know, when you flew across the Atlantic Ocean,
you could see the Twin Towers.
The following year, they put up cement guards
so that nobody could get close
with a truck or a car filled with any kind of explosive device.
Then you felt like, "Okay, this won't happen again."
It was a Tuesday.
Beautiful weather.
I don't remember seeing a cloud in the sky.
And I had to go to court.
I was in the Anti-Crime Unit.
I was going to trial for a pickpocket case.
So I would travel in by ferry.
I get off the boat on the Manhattan side.
I started walking towards the train station.
As I'm walking, only steps away from the ferry,
I hear a bunch of explosions.
Sounded like…
And I actually said, "What the fuck was that?"
But I continue to walk.
I get on to the subway towards the courthouses.
I had to be there at nine o'clock.
I woke up in the detective's dorm
in the 13th Precinct.
In the police department,
sometimes you don't go home for a couple of days.
I signed in, and I remember it was… ABC News was on.
And I saw that the Twin Towers had been struck by a plane.
It sounded like a missile, not an airplane.
Then there was a loud explosion.
Dispatcher called me, and says there's a small Cessna
that just crashed into the World Trade Center.
And I can see from the West Side Highway that
that was not a small Cessna.
That was a big-ass jet.
Holy shit!
I went into my police mode.
I knew, with something like that,
it was gonna be a mass-casualty incident.
I had just dropped my kids off at PS 116, my two boys,
when I heard it come over the radio.
A major disaster is occurring in New York City this morning.
Being a detective commander in Manhattan,
probably the only one in the NYPD that lived in Manhattan,
I knew I'd be expected to respond.
So I went home and changed, probably one of the few people
that put a suit on to respond to the World Trade Center,
because I got in trouble in May
responding to a triple homicide not wearing a suit.
I'm in the 19th Precinct in the patrol borough of Manhattan North.
This one was off the charts.
So they will mobilize people across New York City
to respond to the Trade Center.
I was a police officer in the 19th with Pete Panuccio.
The desk is calling for the first one-in-eight mobilization,
eight officers with a sergeant.
We're heading down towards One World Trade Center.
Joanne Dowd was with the first group of cops in the 19th Precinct
that left in a van.
All of us were supposed to meet at Church and Vesey.
I was there with the lieutenant. I says, "Let's just grab a car."
"We'll go down there."
I'm on the train.
I get off at the municipal building, which you always see on Law & Order.
And as I'm walking towards those iconic pillars,
everybody's just, like, looking up.
My eyes go to what they're looking at.
And I see that big, gaping hole in the North Tower.
Those towers were huge.
Tens of thousands of people in each building every day.
I know so many people there.
Immediately, I call 212-938-5029.
It's JoAnn's office number.
And I hear beep, beep, beep. It wasn't the typical busy sound.
It's like an "out-of-service" type of beep tone.
It's nine o'clock. She should be at work.
Now I'm like, "Oh shit."
We gotta get over there.
And all of a sudden…
that first sound that I thought I heard echoing,
I hear it without the echo.
Just a big explosion.
Boom!
Then I literally hit the pavement.
It was a second fucking plane.
We're on the 78th floor of the South Tower.
The only reason I'm here now is because we were standing
on the other side of the building from where the plane came in.
I wound up face down on the floor. And I had no idea why.
Everything went dark.
There's people crying and screaming.
The woman next to me, who I knew…
Pushed her a little bit and I said, "Are you okay?"
I didn't get any response, so I knew she was gone.
There's dead people laying all over the place.
It was a very ugly, chaotic scene, and nobody knew what was going on.
The homicide squad, along with everybody else,
was involved in an emergency mobilization down to that area.
Two of my partners and I, we were driving, lights and sirens, from the 13th Precinct.
The next thing we knew, there was smoke billowing out of the South Tower.
Then you realize that something hit the other tower.
-Oh my goodness. Another one. -Oh God.
-Oh my God. -My goodness.
We all looked at each other in the car and said,
"This is no fucking accident."
First thing that popped into my head is my wife.
She was working for a company called Salomon Smith Barney.
I knew she was in the city.
I also knew that she had a client core
that was in one of the Trade Center buildings.
And I knew that she often spent time there.
So I was consumed by that.
I had a cell phone, like an old fucking flip phone,
like a StarTAC or whatever they were called.
And I remembered trying to call her at work,
trying to call her cell phone, and, um, I couldn't get through.
It was just dead air.
There was just, like, no signal, no nothing.
It was mayhem in the city.
People are abandoning their vehicles in the middle of intersections.
Forget about the damn car! Let's go!
We are now trying to get to where we're supposed to be,
which is Church and Vesey.
And we got to the middle of Maiden Lane,
and we couldn't move.
We left the van and we got out.
And we start running towards the World Trade Center.
And as we're approaching the towers, we look up.
And people are hanging out on the girders.
And black smoke is billowing out.
People are sending notes down.
"Help me. I'm on this floor or that floor."
It's…
You're like…
Just beyond belief.
And your sergeant is going, "Let's go. Keep moving. Let's just keep moving."
"We have to get to where we have to go."
"And they will tell us what we have to do."
The fire that was happening on the 78th floor was unbelievable.
You could hear this cracking noise, and you didn't know what was going on,
but the fire just kept getting worse.
Something from the ceiling came down next to my head.
And you're like, "You gotta be kidding me. I gotta get out of here."
I'm thinking, "I'm on the 78th floor of a building that's on fire,
and I don't know how to get out."
Your instinct is to help these people who are running at you.
So I went to go,
and my sergeant grabbed me by the nape of the neck
and pulled me back.
And somebody jumped…
and landed in front of me.
And killed somebody in front of me.
It was brutal.
Brutal to watch.
There was nothing we could do.
It's not the image as much as it is the sound.
I'm sorry.
When a body falls…
from that great height,
it sounds like broken glass.
And it is brutalized.
I'm a New York City homicide detective, so I've seen death,
horrific murder scenes,
violence, things like that.
One of the most disturbing things that always stayed with me, stuck with me,
is just the fact that these poor people would rather jump to their death
than burn alive.
Not much of an option.
When I was on the 78th floor, I thought to myself,
"I have two boys who need me, but I don't know how to get out of here."
There's just too much debris, and you definitely feel the heat.
I ran into two women, and these two guys came over,
and we found an empty stairwell.
We got to about the 75th floor,
and there was two New York City firemen who were coming up the stairs.
They both had big tanks on their back. They were laden with all this equipment.
We said, "You gotta get up to 78, because it's really bad."
I remember these guys saying to us,
"Don't worry about us. Just worry about yourselves."
"Get out. We'll take care of what's going on on 78."
And it was really kind of an eye-opener into how people think,
and how first responders really respond to situations like that.
Let's go!
The Lower Manhattan precincts were already in the buildings removing people.
All the Upper Manhattan precincts were with us.
We moved to Park Place,
about a half a block up from the World Trade Center.
And they start to assign four to a floor to assist in the evacuation.
Going down, we did encounter some debris
that we managed to climb over to get to the 40th floor.
And there was a police officer in that elevator, saying,
"Get in here. I'll get you out."
We got down to the first floor.
The first floor was nothing but dust and stuff all over the place.
It was amazing. You could hardly see anything in front of you.
We walked out the door.
I really didn't understand what was going on.
The best word to describe any of this was "chaotic."
From a triage standpoint, I guess I looked as bad as anybody,
so an officer came along and grabbed me.
I didn't know her. I didn't know anything about her.
All I know is that somebody was helping me out.
Then somebody was taking my photograph.
The police officer took me to sit me down on the sidewalk.
That's when they took me to the ambulance.
Then she just went back into the building.
I drive down to the World Trade Center.
When I first show up at the scene,
there's a plane engine in the middle of the street.
And I thought I'd try to pull a serial number off it,
help identify the airplane.
Frankly, under the stress,
I flipped into detective mode when I should have flipped into boss mode.
I kind of had to snap myself out of the situation.
And I walk over to a temporary headquarters
that is across the street from the South Tower
to make a call to my higher headquarters.
I'm almost to the World Trade Center.
I'm standing there by myself. I'm like, "What do I do?"
We never trained for this in the police academy.
They never taught us this.
I'm 27 years old.
Or 28, one of the two.
I was still relatively a young kid at the time.
What do I do? I'm like, "How the fuck am--"
"How am I getting up there to get her out of there?"
Since I was young, JoAnn was always there.
She was proud of my career.
She was there when I graduated the police academy.
When I bought my first house, she lent me 3,000 bucks.
I could always count on her.
Now, how the hell am I gonna help her?
You know, I was looking for that guidance.
Eventually, I ran into my lieutenant at the time.
We're walking south, so we're in front of the Verizon Building.
I'm hearing this rumbling.
The cell phones are not working.
I'm talking on a landline.
The phone starts shaking and going across the table.
I'm thinking it's the subway system.
I felt the ground move.
The rumble got bigger.
We thought it was an explosion. It was that loud.
But it was like rolling… like a rolling, loud sound.
It was like…
And all I see, from like the 30th floor down…
Oh my God! Oh my God!
-Get down! -Get over there!
A couple blocks from the Trade Center,
I just saw white smoke billowing from where the South Tower was.
Oh my God! Oh my God!
And it was coming right towards my partner and I
at a rapid pace.
Two of us instinctively just looked at each other and started,
as we call it, "assholes and elbows."
And we were hightailing it to safety inside Syms department store.
And my lieutenant at that very moment says,
"Fucking run!"
Get out of here!
-Go, go, go! -Come on!
And then all of the cops who were with me
lining up to assist in the evacuation
were coming at me like a herd of bulls.
And I face-planted into the sidewalk,
and they proceeded to run on me.
And, I mean, you can't blame them, I guess.
Although I was pissed.
I heard my knee pop, my back pop.
I was in pain immediately.
And I was literally crucified to the sidewalk.
I couldn't move.
And two guys from the 23rd Precinct,
who I never got their names,
same thing happened to them.
They were like, "Can you walk?" I was like, "I can run. Let's go."
Come on, come on!
We tried to get ahead of the debris,
but we couldn't.
So we just whipped onto Broadway,
and knelt down,
and tried to cover as best we could.
We're trying to get into 7 World Trade,
which is directly north of the actual Twin Towers themselves.
That looked like the safest shelter we could find.
The doors were locked.
I was actually gonna pull my gun out and start shooting the glass.
I did not want to be caught on the street.
Somebody pushes the door open from inside, screaming,
"Get in here! Get in here!"
We ran in.
You're in basically a glass atrium, two, three stories high.
The glass is breaking inside, you know, the front lobby,
and the place just instantly fills with dirt and dust.
That really was truly the most terrifying moment of my life.
And I've been in some…
couple of hairy things over the course of my career.
But all of a sudden you get this realization that…
"I'm gonna die here."
It seems like some things slow down while other things speed up.
It's amazing what the brain can process.
I'm not an overly religious person.
But if you think you're gonna die, better square your shit away real fast.
And that's what I'm like…
I said, "God…"
I was 14 years sober at that time.
The thing that popped in my head was,
"You know what, God? Thank you for the last 14 years."
"Take care of my family."
And I'm like, "This is it. You gotta ride this out."
The building I'm in starts filling up
with what I think is smoke.
And I remember
from early on in elementary school that when dealing with smoke,
you're supposed to get on your knees and crawl.
Except this smoke is loaded on the lower end
and thinner on the high end.
And it has me very confused and questioning everything I learned
from Sister Elizabeth at Our Lady of Snows in 1968.
It's gone! The whole tower!
It's gone!
Holy crap!
In 7 World Trade,
we didn't get hit with anything, no major debris.
You're not dead.
Get to work. Be useful.
You can barely see inside this building.
I have some crappy little flashlight with me,
and I hear people yelling up the escalator,
so I go up there.
I'm the only guy in uniform there.
This guy, he's a building…
I don't know if he was a fire marshal or security guard.
He goes, "Oh, thank God, the cops are here."
I'm like…
"Yeah, the cavalry's arrived, and it's me, and that's not much."
South Tower's collapsed.
Now we gotta regroup.
We start walking towards the North Tower.
I see the firemen.
They're pouring water into their eyes.
They're crying.
There's regular civilians who happened to escape the building.
One guy, I remember, I grabbed him. I gave him a big hug.
Grown-ass man, much older than me, probably in his forties…
And he's crying, and, uh…
Again, shock.
I'm… I'm in it.
I said, "It's gonna be all right."
The dust settled.
And we went to what is now known as "Ground Zero"
to help expedite any kind of evacuation.
And when we got there, it was just not there.
There was a shard of the building in the middle of Church and Vesey.
The South Tower, even though it's hit second,
comes down first, 'cause it was hit at a lower level,
which compromised the strength of the building more.
After the '93 bombing of the World Trade Center,
we received training that a plane could not knock down the tower
from the sheer force.
But now I'm willing to change my thought process.
Get out of the area. The second tower is coming down.
-Did they tell you-- -Yes, it's about to come down.
We lined up a bunch of police officers
to keep everybody further away from the building,
'cause it was obvious the second building was gonna come down.
-Get the fuck out of here! -We're going!
I see a bunch of EMS. I'm like, "Dude, what are you doing?"
He goes, "We're gonna go back into the building."
I'm like, "You're crazy."
He goes, "No, there's people in there that need to be removed. "
And I felt like a coward…
that I was gonna walk away.
So I was like, "Okay, fuck it."
"I'm not gonna have a fireman embarrass me, so I'm gonna stay."
Move it! Come on!
The North Tower had the antenna on top,
and it started to tilt.
We started to hear noises.
I know I did.
It was, like, creaking.
And we're two blocks away.
You hear the rumbling.
And then that's when the tower… I start seeing it fucking drop.
The tower's coming down!
Get away from it! Get away from it!
When that building was coming down,
I remember seeing my two boys…
…edging me on
to run as fast as I could.
Uh… And to hit the deck.
Get over here.
And I go hide in a curb.
All 250 pounds of my fat ass
squeezed into six inches of sidewalk to survive this.
Remembering my military training, I put my feet towards the explosion.
There was, like, hurricane winds.
I look to my right, and there's a truck on its side.
And then it becomes very dark.
I can't see.
And everything's extremely quiet.
I'm wondering if I'm dead.
I'm not feeling any pain.
And then, all of a sudden, I could not breathe at all.
And I have to take my hands, and physically go in my mouth,
and rake out chunks of cement.
And I'm coughing, and I'm on my knees.
A woman grabbed me.
She took me over to a fire hydrant to clean my eyes out.
She gives me some water.
I can still see her face.
Frankly, it's one of the more pleasant moments of the day.
It's somebody coming to help me when I was in need.
I was hopeful that JoAnn made it out.
I was hopeful that the people that she worked with made it out.
I was hoping most people made it out.
In a state of shock like that,
you're not gonna comprehend the magnitude of what you're witnessing.
We're in Syms.
The people that had been in there shopping had looks of panic on their face.
"We gotta get these people out. We gotta do something."
Whatever was in that smoke, like my eyes were burning.
So we took men's pocket squares that were on a display rack,
wet them, start handing them out.
Everybody, the employees, and the people in there,
we told them to cover their faces with the pocket squares,
and try and avoid breathing in whatever it was.
We got everybody, single file, to walk south towards the water.
Okay, start going on. Come on.
There were ferries set up, and people with private boats.
They were taking people to get them off Manhattan.
Myself and my partners had no intention of leaving.
We were like, "What do we do now?"
I couldn't help but think about my wife again
and whether she was safe.
And I decided to try her again on my cell phone,
and, you know, still there was no luck.
I couldn't get through to anybody. I had no signal.
Just could not make a call.
There was no communications.
One tower had the antenna that did most of the broadcasting,
most of the cell phones, TV, radio.
So we had no communications with other agencies.
We do have a point-to-point communication with the police department.
So you can hear transmissions from each other.
The command post is north of Vesey Street.
10-4.
But nothing else.
And it is extremely quiet.
All you can hear is the firemen's alarms
for their oxygen that they wear on their back going off.
And it's ever so quiet, but yet deafening
in the canyon of what that area of Manhattan is.
One of the things I experienced that day,
in looking back on it in retrospect, was loneliness.
Being separated from the people I work with.
For a cop, that stinks.
In a scene of such calamity,
it really became
like almost an overpowering sense, 'cause you're just disconnected.
I says, "Let me go see if I can find who I'm supposed to be with."
I walk past a bar.
And it's weird.
A thought popped in my head.
Nobody would begrudge you if you walked behind the bar and…
grabbed that bottle of Johnnie Walker and poured yourself a shot.
With the disease of alcoholism,
it's just sitting back there saying,
"Hmm, a little toot right here wouldn't bother you."
These are the conversations going inside my crazy skull.
And I'm like…
"Not today. I got work to do."
And…
I'm still sober today. I'm coming up on 38 years.
I was a one-star chief in charge of Bronx detectives.
We go rushing into the city.
We got to Trinity and Liberty
when the North Tower collapsed.
Now, at Trinity and Liberty, I realize there's a Burger King on the corner.
So I just took the opportunity
to make the Burger King a temporary headquarters.
I just started giving out assignments,
and we moved out throughout the day.
Cops just ran into the city from Brooklyn, from Upper Manhattan.
It was the only time in my entire career where I didn't want to go to work.
I wanted to be home for my family.
That was my priority, but unfortunately I had to put that aside
and rush from Queens into Manhattan.
I was coming from the Bronx.
My car was not working that day,
and it was crazy 'cause everything was closed.
The trains were stopped.
Everybody was walking back from Manhattan.
I tried to hitchhike into the city, but I couldn't get a ride.
So I took a bus on Lexington Avenue that was packed.
And I remember getting off on 21st Street and walking to my precinct.
So many people that I knew were missing.
No one knew where anyone was.
NYPD started doing missing person work.
Civilians, first responders…
Many of us went on a list of everyone that's missing.
Stay off the air for a second.
I got a female down. Officer down. Stand by.
We're listening for people who are stuck in the building.
Female officer, where are you? What was your last location?
I crawled in and out of caverns trying to get to whoever it may be,
to the point where my shoes were burned and my arms were burned.
There was a concern about,
"How do we manage the amount of people that are missing?"
"How do we verify whether they're missing?"
"How do we know that they're still in the building?"
I leave the 13th Precinct
and head south to the World Trade Center area.
I went to go see if I could find my neighbor Bill McGinn
and see if he's okay.
Before I left my apartment that day,
Bill's wife had knocked on my door.
She said Bill was working.
She was calling him. There was no response.
I said, "When I get downtown, I'll see if I find him."
We looked around a bit.
I kept asking everybody, "Anybody see Bill McGinn?"
"He worked in the firehouse on 10th Street and Greenwich."
"Has anybody seen that company?"
At one point, I asked one fireman, he went…
Like, "That company is gone."
I felt so bad.
His daughter Cordelia was about six years old,
and she had come to my house that morning.
She was playing with my son, and at some point, she says,
"Oh my God, I lost my tooth!" She lost her first tooth.
She says, "I can't wait till my father comes home so I can show him!"
Knowing she wanted to show her father,
and knowing that most likely he wasn't gonna come home,
it really kinda, like, made me feel really sad.
We ended up off the FDR Drive by the Manhattan Bridge somehow.
I remember seeing someone yelling, "Get back! Get back!"
"There's a van on the bridge! They're gonna blow the Manhattan Bridge!"
Panic overcomes everybody, myself, my two partners, all the people.
I think to myself, "What the fuck are we running for?"
Bomb squad went up, and there was no explosives,
nothing wrong with the van.
It just had been abandoned.
But, uh, initially, it made sense,
because I kept thinking to myself, "What next?"
We were panicked.
There were rumors flying left and right.
There were something like eight planes missing,
still unaccounted for.
Rumors, but then some of these weren't rumors.
We found out that the Pentagon got hit.
We found out about the plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
With all of these attacks happening in multiple places,
we didn't know what these terrorists had planned.
We didn't know if they were gonna hit the Empire State Building next.
We didn't know if the subways were gonna be hit.
We just knew today was the day, and it was happening in multiple places.
As we're proceeding and continuing to help and assist people,
I still had not spoken to my wife.
I make another attempt to call her.
Eventually, I'm able to get through to the person who we hired for child care.
I asked her had she heard from my wife, and…
She said, "Yes, she's on her way. She's in New Jersey."
She was okay, so…
that allowed me to focus a little more, to help render aid,
and hopefully rescue people that had been caught up inside those towers.
At this point, I'm in shock.
I am dehydrated, and I was wandering around alone.
I walk up to the Woolworth Building,
and I happen to see Pete Panuccio,
my sergeant from the 19th,
who I used to work with on the midnights,
and I'm like, "Somebody I know!"
And he's like, "Oh, my God, Joanne, where have you been?"
To be reunited with a cop in the 19th Precinct was a huge relief.
She's alive.
And we were maybe just a block or two away almost the entire time.
That's how chaotic the scene was.
He goes, "You look like hell."
And I was like, "You don't look so hot yourself."
Joanne was limping badly.
When I saw her knee, I'm like, "Uh…"
I probably would have been on the floor howling and crying,
and she was like,
"We're good. Let's do what we need to do. I'll go to the hospital when we all go."
Some boss comes by, and he says,
"We need people on the street leading down to 7 World Trade."
This thing was in flames.
To me, it gave out a death groan.
We ran.
There was this gigantic cloud of dust
that just blew straight out across Broadway.
And you're like, "When does this day end?"
When I finally got home,
I couldn't believe that I was home.
My daughter hugged the stuffing out of me…
and literally said, "I knew you were okay."
And I literally sat in a bathtub,
and my ten-year-old bathed me.
She was like, "I have you."
"I'm so lucky you came home."
My wife and I were both very emotional, and we were kissing my daughter.
She slept in the bed with us that night.
Such a, like, feeling of almost like a dread or something
that had just kind of…
I shed it at that time, just being home,
being in bed, being with my family.
It was just such a relief.
I only slept for about maybe an hour.
Took a shower, fresh clothes, turned around, and went back to work.
They told us to be back at 4:00 a.m.
As the department organized, everyone got specific instructions.
Every detective was utilized somehow, someway
in connection with the World Trade Center.
I was working at the Pile.
A couple of days in, my commanding officer says to us,
"All the crime guys, go back to the office, get changed,
put on your civilian clothes."
"You're gonna go out there and look for looters."
And I shook my head no to him.
I said, "No."
I was crying. I was in hysterics.
I said, "I need to get the fuck back in there."
"All right? I'm not going out and look for looters. I don't care."
"I'm going in there. I'm looking for JoAnn. I'm going in there."
And then I see my commanding officer, and he says,
"You just go back into the Pile."
"Go there for however long you need, however many days."
He goes, "Just keep in touch. Let us know you're all right."
When they tallied and whittled down that "unaccounted for" list,
we learned that 2,976 civilians,
37 Port Authority police officers,
343 New York City firefighters,
and 23 NYPD police officers
in and around those towers had died.
For me, unfortunately, I knew quite a few of them,
one being Moira Smith.
And I had just saw her in front of the 13th Precinct desk that morning.
It just hit home, because she was a girl from my old neighborhood.
And Moira was the only female police officer that had perished inside.
She was a police officer that worked in my precinct.
I'm like, "What?" I know Moira, and she had a little girl.
At times, I would see her daughter in the locker room,
in the police dorm, the female dorm.
She was really cute with little red cheeks.
It was very, very hard.
We saw a photo in one of the newspapers of Moira rescuing a survivor,
bringing him out of the building.
I've never seen a timeframe of when I got admitted to the hospital,
and when I got downstairs,
but it was, I guess, around the time the tower collapsed,
so I don't think I had a lot of time before I wouldn't have been around.
And Officer Smith…
I don't know how many people she helped out of the Trade Center
before she helped me.
She was true-blue to her task as a police officer.
She went back into the danger and tried to rescue more people.
As time went along, my family,
you know, they all realized that JoAnn wasn't coming home.
Pretty much lost hope.
Reality started to kick in.
So they made arrangements with the funeral home.
The day that they made these arrangements, I got home from work.
The phone is ringing.
"Brian, your Uncle Mike's on the phone."
And I could hear it in his voice. He's a big, burly guy.
All choked up.
He's like, "Yeah."
He goes, "Anybody call you?"
I'm like, "No. Why?"
He was like, "They found JoAnn."
"Oh fuck."
Now she's found.
And…
And it still hurts to this day.
This was at least…
knowing.
Knowing for sure.
Unfortunately, a lot of people haven't found anybody.
And maybe never will.
We were lucky enough, if you call it that,
to be able to get that in the first couple weeks.
Right through here, need a bucket line. Pass it back.
The last rescue was 27 hours after the collapse.
After that, no one.
And the rescue mission quickly turned into a recovery mission.
At the medical examiner's office, we continued the process of identifying,
labeling, doing anything we could
to get these people back to their families.
Bereavement center was very sad.
I remember one particular family asking me all kinds of questions
as I'm doing paperwork, and taking the toothbrush or hairbrush,
and processing it so we can get DNA off of it.
That was very heart-wrenching,
to see the fear in their face and the sadness.
2,976 civilians were murdered that morning.
Twenty-five years later, 60% have been identified.
40% of the families have nothing to bury.
And without answers, you go crazy.
One thing about 9/11,
it helped me get used to the smell of death.
Working in the morgue, I saw so much death.
In the beginning, I couldn't even take it. I was gagging.
But then after a while, the smell didn't bother me anymore.
We had 11 or 12 refrigerated trucks in an empty lot.
Some women's group came in and started bringing in flowers,
major wreaths to put in front of the trucks
to honor the people inside.
We covered that whole area in a huge white tent,
and that became Memorial Park.
People wrote things on the wall.
They pinned up pictures.
And one such picture…
It was obviously a kid had scrawled something,
and it said at the top, "Mommy."
And that was a reminder of who we were looking for.
A few months after the attack, they did find my neighbor Bill McGinn.
His wife had told me, "They recovered him last night."
I was at the morgue that day. I remember they brought two firemen in.
I didn't know he was one of the people recovered.
I found that out later on.
One thing I always noticed, when it rained,
he always left his shoes out of his apartment.
It was Bill's shoes, Cordelia's shoes, and Liam's shoes.
The kids' shoes were always out.
And then one day after 9/11, I came home, and it was raining.
I see Liam's shoes and Cordelia's shoes, but Bill's shoes aren't there.
And then it hit me.
I was saying, "I can't believe that he's gone."
Any time a first responder was found, everything would stop.
An American flag would be placed over it,
and we would all get up and salute
as that person would be brought out of Ground Zero.
It, um… It was…
Brings tears into your eyes.
The full recovery effort after 9/11 lasted about nine months.
It went on until, I believe, May 2002.
I had a tough time.
I spend time at work where I can't function.
I am, like, crying, and…
like, in the fetal position.
Because I'm trying to recount what I did, and different things, and…
Like, that's truly when I became scared.
Finally started thinking about the shit that happened, I guess. I don't know.
Murder kept going on, right?
People kept dying outside the World Trade Center.
So we had to maintain a full investigative staff on the streets.
It brought back a little bit of normalcy to your everyday routine, but…
we were not excused from the recovery efforts.
At one tour or another, somebody from our squad
was assigned to the medical examiner's office,
and sometimes two of us were at the recovery efforts
at the landfill in Staten Island.
Fresh Kills was a retired New York City dump in Staten Island,
and they would remove the debris over to there.
So that was the detectives' bureau's responsibility,
to go through this debris and try to recover body parts
or items that belonged to individuals.
First, they gave you a rake and said, "Go through it."
"If you come up with any ID or what you think is a bone,
put it in these buckets."
I volunteered to work there,
and that was tremendously satisfying
because you're hopefully giving some information
to some family member somewhere along the line.
After a while, they got wise.
They started issuing Tyvek suits,
boots, gloves, and masks as you went through the debris.
Unfortunately, that's probably where I get my cancer.
I've been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
I'm very fortunate. They caught it in the early stages.
The majority of the people that worked down there
end up with some related 9/11 illness.
Back in 2021, I got a message on my fucking phone that I had cancer.
It was a urological cancer, very rare.
One in four million men get it.
I felt sorry for myself for about, you know, maybe ten minutes,
and I went from feeling a little bit like a victim
to feeling like, "I'm ready. Let's go."
"Let's do this. Get this shit out of me."
And that was it.
I got skin cancer on my face.
When I found out, I was scared.
To date now, more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses
than actually died on the day of the attack,
which is… extremely alarming.
I think that the terrorists wanted initially to take out those towers
because of what they symbolized.
And I think they got more bang for their buck
because the tragedy just keeps going on.
We're going 25 years.
I have buried at least 50 friends.
Friends! Not even…
people I don't know.
There's more than that.
-Here's all the boys. -What's going on here?
-Good to see you, brother. -You look great.
Thanks! So do you, bro!
-How you doing? -Roger.
Every single one of us…
should just talk.
Me and Pete talk. Every year, we would talk about it.
Hello, darling.
Relive the hurt.
-How are you? -I'm okay.
It's so good to see you. You look so good.
And it helped.
It helped until it didn't.
And I needed to seek counseling.
Look at Manhattan.
Yeah.
How are you feeling up here?
Yeah, I know.
-It's a little weird. -Yeah.
The new building is nice, though.
It's the first time I've been in the new buildings.
Really?
MacLeod, that fucking hick.
-Leave my brother alone. -Why?
Calm down, champion.
Yeah, man.
I would wake up with these horrific dreams.
That's the worst part.
You go to bed, and you feel like you're being buried alive.
There isn't a cop out there, I'm sure, that doesn't feel the same thing.
And I nearly had a breakdown.
Then the 9/11 Foundation kicked in and said, "We got you."
"We will help you."
I can tell you're a little bit, like, upset.
-Shaken? A little bit. -Shaken, yeah. It's all right.
I was scared, coming.
I'm a big advocate now for guys getting mental health checks.
Just do it. We have the coverage. Do it.
It doesn't hurt to talk.
I don't enjoy…
being here at… at the site.
I don't like it up here. I love that I'm with all of you.
I feel protected because you get it.
We know things that no one else on this earth will ever know
and probably never should.
Never dealt with it, me personally.
My daughter wasn't even two yet.
She just wanted to know where Dad was all of the days that I came to work
to get the fuck away from these memories,
just to not have to relive this shit every fucking day of my life.
My life was never the same.
Just like a lot of other people's.
I didn't have any way
to identify what I was dealing with, 'cause I didn't see it.
I didn't understand it.
It was a horrendous attack on our nation. It's a crime scene.
For many months afterwards, it was a graveyard.
My mind is racing right now,
and I'm seeing photos of Pete and Joanne that day.
I'm seeing photos of Roger in the Pathmark parking lot
pouring water over your head.
It's all coming back,
and it's really, uh, difficult to think about it.
My place to let it out was the shower.
I went in the shower,
and I cried.
And I cried, and I cried, and…
…I never told anybody that.
That was how I got it out.
Yeah.
And when I retired, that's when it hit, bang, so hard.
Suddenly, who am I? I'm not relevant to the world.
-It changes you. -It does.
That's why I stopped drinking. When you retire…
How did we deal with it? We went to the bar.
That's how we dealt with it, and we talked about it with each other.
But now, there's guys that are fucking suffering out there
from 9/11 and PTSD
that they've never dealt with in their careers.
You guys in Homicide, seeing all the dead bodies,
the dead children, and all that shit… And you all have it. All of you have it.
You gotta deal with this shit,
'cause it will fester, and you will change as a person.
Honestly, thank God for this little meeting here.
All those years, I thought I was the only one losing my fucking mind.
And I wasn't. And I know it.
Coming here-- I'm sorry, I got--
I'm not crying! You're crying!
I won't do it for the cameras, but I'll make fun of you later.
-All right. -I love you.
You gotta dry-clean your brain like all of us.
You can't keep it in.
I feel happy now just looking at Brian's face.
From the minute he started to now, it's like a different person.
This is a therapy group today.
-I mean, look at it. -'Cause it's a comfort zone.
It's a comfort zone!
We feel comfortable talking to each other.
We chewed some of the same dirt.
Yeah.
Mental health is just as important as physical health.
And now I understand that.
But it took me about 19 years until I talked to therapists about it.
I had to.
Because, you know, I'm not a… I'm not a superhero.
Part of this is like survivor's remorse. Chief, you were in the Burger King.
Tommy, you were there.
He was there. Everybody was there.
You're saying "Why didn't it happen to me?" a little.
You think about it.
We had 23 NYPD officers,
we had 37 Port Authority police officers,
and we had 343 firemen killed.
God gave us memories for a reason.
And it's to remember them.
Remember what happened.
Never forget.
In the place where the Twin Towers once stood,
we now have, uh, the Freedom Tower.
I've never seen it from, like, this… this level either.
It's so majestic.
And I'm glad, um… I'm glad we put it right up their asses.
-Very happy for that. -Yup.
We're all alive.
We're all surviving in one shape, form, or another.
And I appreciate that they set up the memorial for those memories
of the first responders and the civilians
and all the citizens from other countries that got killed that day.
It is a symbol of strength and resilience
that we got knocked down, but we got up.
As a country, not just a city.
The memorial, it's absolutely stunning.
The imprint of the buildings with the names and the waterfall.
-What a beautiful day, right? -Not unlike the day.
-Really? -Jimmy Riches, right here.
He was a cop, too, before he was a fireman. John Chipura.
You know so many of them from Staten Island, right?
Timmy McSweeney. And then we got Moira.
Terrorism is not just one attack.
It's a constant state of ruining people's lives with fear,
with illness, with mental incapacity.
Counter to the evil, there's… love,
and there's people that really, like, care.
Through that tragedy, the country,
especially here in New York, everyone came together.
It shows me what we're capable of.