I was too young to remember 9/11, so I talked to those who lived it
‘Sometimes I get taken right back there, walking down those 78 flights of stairs. It’s like it’s happening right now’
Twenty years ago, four commercial airliners were hijacked midflight and used as weapons. Three found targets. Thousands died. Tens of billions of dollars were lost. Then, endless war. Nearly a million dead, tens of millions displaced. Countless kidnapped, spied on, illegally detained, tortured. Trillions spent.
I was barely four years old on 9/11. I only remember the fallout and, even then, not with acuity. But it created an unnerving orchestral swell that scored my childhood, pieced together from flashes of panic emanating from TVs and adult discussions overheard.
It’s a different world now, we were told.
I’m now a journalist, and while it’s my job to write about world events, I live in the shadow of this one. So to fill in the gaps, I spoke with some of the people who still think about 9/11 every day. Business leaders in the World Trade Center during the attacks. Corporate executives who had to scramble to rebuild their companies and help families of the deceased. Reporters who worked until dawn trying to make sense of it all. Here are their stories.
Investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, headquartered in the top five floors of the north tower, is destroyed by American Airlines Flight 11, which is carrying 92 people and smashes into the tower at 8:46 a.m.
Ari Schonbrun, director of global accounts receivables for Cantor, is 23 floors below, waiting for an elevator.
‘There was an explosion. I thought a bomb had gone off in the elevator. The lights went out, the place filled with smoke, and I was literally thrown off my feet, I was on the floor. There was screaming, somebody yelling, ‘Fire in the elevator!’
“I’m on the ground, I’m looking around, I don’t know where to go. All of a sudden, I see a light in between two banks of large elevators. I figure, that’s an emergency light, it’s probably a good place to go. But there was a lot of smoke. I crawled from where I was to that bank of elevators.
“When the plane hit, the doors of the elevator started to close and then jammed open about a foot. The walls of the elevator collapsed. The ceiling collapsed. There was a cable that snapped and was sparking in the elevator. Jet fuel came down the sides of the elevator, got ignited by the sparks and there was a wall of fire.”
Three people are in the elevator. Two jump through the flames, one suffers severe burns. The third dies inside the elevator.
“This was all in the space of six, eight, 10 seconds. That’s all it was. That was the difference between life and death that day.”
Schonbrun gathers with other survivors. Together, they head down a stairwell. Schonbrun personally guides his co-worker with third-degree burns down the whole way and helps her into an ambulance. Of the 662 Cantor employees on the upper floors of the north tower, only four survive.
“I step out of the ambulance. I turn around and look up at the buildings. There’s a guy standing next to me, I say to him, ‘How did building two get on fire?’ He says, ‘What, are you kidding me? Two jetliners went into the buildings. They’re calling it a terrorist attack.’ I had no idea.
“We had a corporate card program with American Express, and since I was the one who instituted the program, I had to be on the phone with American Express every single day, going through all the cards. What kind of balance is on each card? Who is going to be responsible for paying? The minutia of it was so incredible. And they weren’t just names. They were people. That was so difficult.
“I think about it every single day. Sometimes I see it. I see the buildings coming down. I see the dust. Sometimes I get taken right back there, walking down those 78 flights of stairs. It’s like it’s happening right now. Then there are other days where I think not so much about what happened, but the friends and coworkers that I lost.
“I don’t believe that people know or understand the magnitude. They’ll say it was terrible thing, a terrible day, but then they move on. But you know what? I haven’t moved on. I live with this every day.”
Schonbrun became chief administrative officer at Cantor and retired after 23 years with the company. He is now a motivational speaker and author.
Tim O’Neill, chief economist at the Bank of Montreal, is in New York for a conference. He’s having a breakfast session in the ballroom of the Marriott Hotel, right between the Twin Towers. Suddenly, the room shakes, and the chandeliers start to rattle.
‘Someone said something about a plane flying into one of the towers. It could have been, as far as we knew, some light airplane that had flown in by accident. And then we got outside.
“Clearly this was something far more significant than a small plane glancing off the Twin Towers. You could see that several floors had been hit. There were papers flying out, flames in the building and on the floors that had been hit. We had to get away.
“A couple blocks from the hotel, I heard a plane overhead, looked up and saw it fly into the second tower. We knew then this was not an accident. We moved closer to the harbour in case, quite frankly, we needed to jump in. It was different, feeling the impact of the first plane, not having any idea what it was, and actually watching the second plane fly into the tower. It was the difference between curiosity and fear.
“The day after was quite surreal. We walk into the Times Square area covered in dust, a grey dust over our suits and jackets, and people are just milling about, heading out for lunch.
“What my psychiatrist told me is that something is going to happen that is going to cause you to physically respond before your brain can take over. And that happened to me. Four months later, in the basement of the King Edward, I was in the washroom before giving a presentation, and this rumbling happened. I froze. I realized after a couple of seconds it was the streetcar going by. But it was so reminiscent of the rumbling of the hotel ballroom.”
O’Neill is now retired and lives in P.E.I. He now does public policy consultation and speaks at conferences about economics.
June Drewry, chief information officer for insurance company Aon, which had an office in the south tower, was in London with her IT and technology team. Someone is pulled from the room and returns with horrifying news — the north tower, where Aon’s biggest competitor, Marsh McLennan, is located, has been struck.
‘We all had a lot of acquaintances at Marsh, so it was personal from the start. We dissolved the meeting. We were standing around watching TV when the second plane hit and when the buildings started to fall. We all just turned around and said, “Oh my God, we’re at war at this point.”
The attacks killed 295 Marsh McLennan employees, including one who was a passenger on one of the hijacked planes, and 176 Aon employees.
“The big issue for us was, at Aon, our intellectual capital was generally brought together in New York, the top of the top of the top. It was where we housed the best and the brightest and the smartest in insurance. It was a major hit to the company. You have this guilt. If I hadn’t hired so and so, or if we hadn’t asked them to go to that meeting, they would have survived.
“A lot of my infrastructure guys had been in the Vietnam War. They saw stuff, stuff I would never want to see. I remember calling one up while I was in London and saying, ‘You should talk to one of those psychologist people, if you need to, and go home, if you need to. It’ll be good for you.’
“He said to me, ‘I put what happened in a box and I’m never opening that box, just like Vietnam. It’s going to stay closed forever.’
“To get through those first few days, I had to create a box, and put the events in that box so I could function. I had 50 people I had to worry about getting home. I had to recover the business. I had to create that box and put everything in there.
“Most times it stays closed. But every now and then, it opens up. On the anniversary, when I went to the memorial, when I think of the names of one of my employees, the box opens up. And what surprises me is the depth of hurt. I’ll be there for a little while, and then I’ll close the box. Keep it in a corner where I never have to think about it again.”
Drewry is now the emeritus facilitator for regional leadership forums at the Society for Information Management, a nonprofit network of IT leaders.
Paul Deegan, vice-president of government and public relations at the Bank of Montreal, is in his downtown Toronto office on a conference call when the north tower is struck. A person on the other end of the line gets the news first and says, “Oh my God, oh my God, turn on your TV.”
‘We scrambled really quickly because we were in a tall building, First Canadian Place, 72 storeys. We made the decision, huddled with senior executives, to send people home. Part of that was that we just we didn’t have information about what was going on, but part of it was that people were obviously traumatized by this.”
Deegan’s colleague, David Barkway, managing director of capital markets for BMO Nesbitt Burns, is confirmed to have died while visiting Cantor. His wife, Cindy, who accompanied him to New York but was not in the World Trade Center, is four months pregnant and stranded. U.S. and Canadian airspaces will remain closed for another two days.
“I remember getting the call. He was on a business trip and his wife was with him. It was clear that he was lost in the attack, so the issue then became, ‘How do we get her home?’
“We got a car service to take (Cindy) back. I reached out to foreign affairs in Ottawa and explained the situation. They were terrific. They got her whisked through the border really quickly.
“It was such a surreal experience. You don’t have a lot of information, but you want to try to do the right thing. All these decisions are made in real time. You’re very quickly trying to do the right thing and your staff becomes the main preoccupation in a moment like that. The big thing was to account for people, and there were hundreds and hundreds.”
Deegan left BMO in 2015. Since 2021, he has served as president and CEO of News Media Canada.