THE WOMAN WHO HIJACKED 9/11
Trapped on the 78th floor as the second plane struck, her story of survival and heartache was one of the Twin Towers’ most haunting tales. But 20 years on, the truth is a staggering story of deceit that’s driven her into hiding
At 8.46am on September 11, 2001, an impact like an earthquake rocked the south tower of the World trade Center (WtC) in Manhattan. In the Merrill Lynch bank’s conference room on the 96th floor, walls shook and windows rattled. the lights flickered off and on. tania Head, 26, a manager on the bank’s fast-track scheme, was chairing a meeting when she heard shrieks from the corridor. She and her colleagues looked up.
through the windows, they saw black smoke billowing from the building opposite — the WtC’s north tower. they watched a ball of flame rolling up from about five floors below them.
People began to scream, to clutch at each other in panic or make for the doors. they grabbed their phones and began calling friends and relatives, begging them to switch on the tV news.
A speck tumbled from a north tower window, and then another. At first, tania took them for pieces of furniture, chairs or desks, flung from the burning building.
then she saw one was a human figure, its arms flapping, trying desperately to fly as it plunged to the sidewalk 100 storeys below.
All that tania could think was: ‘the man I love, more than anything in the world, is in that building.’
As she hurried towards the exit, she tried to work out whether it was his office that she had seen consumed in flames.
Her fiancé — ‘Big Dave’, as he was known to everyone — was a consultant at the financial services company, Deloitte. He worked on the 100th floor, and she had met him in February 1999, soon after she arrived in New York from Barcelona, Spain, where she had grown up. Now they were living together on the Upper East Side with a golden retriever puppy called Elvis and plans for an October wedding.
Pushing down the corridor, jostled by dozens of people also heading for the exit, tania prayed that Dave’s office was above the site of the bomb, or gas blast, or whatever had caused the explosion.
Security men shouted at them to return to their offices and stay calm. No one was listening.
the lift wouldn’t stop at the 96th floor, so tania used the stairs to head for the open ‘sky lobby’ on the 78th. Overweight, she was panting heavily as she reached the doors of the ‘express’ elevator that would take her down to Floor 44 and another lift. Her assistant, Christine, was following her.
the cabin of the lift was already overcrowded. She saw there was no hope of getting in quickly, and that swirling panic was making the situation more dangerous for everyone.
A man in a suit and tie shoved past her, shouting, ‘this isn’t the titanic, ladies, and it is not women and children first!’
Others behaved more calmly, urging queues to form. In moments, the line for the elevators snaked all the way round the lobby.
tania reached for her BlackBerry mobile and tried to call Dave. When they parted that morning, they’d been bickering — an insignificant row, but almost the first of their relationship.
It was so stupid: he wanted to get his mother a token present for her birthday and tania thought they ought to take her to dinner. Now, irrationally, it seemed important to tell him it didn’t matter what they did, that whatever made him happy would be right.
OF ALL the 9/11 survivors’ stories, none seemed more astonishing than tania Head’s horrifying tale.
In the years following the atrocity — which marks its 20th anniversary next month — tania became one of the most visible figures in the movement representing those who had lived through the disaster. Eventually, she became president of the World trade Center Survivors’ Network.
Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks that day, and across America they were regarded as martyrs. the survivors seemed to have less cachet: tania worked hard to counter this, appearing frequently in the media.
By 2005, she was leading tours at the WtC visitors’ centre and, on one occasion, showed New York mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani around the site.
A film and book were even prepared that featured her story — though not for the reasons she might have hoped.
Because as the years went by, careful observers spotted strange inconsistencies in her unforgettable testimony. Eventually, they came to realise, something didn’t add up and tania’s story ended in ignominy and disgrace.
On that fateful day, as she waited for the elevators, tania knew she would never marry Dave if she didn’t get out of that building. She was focusing on her breathing, trying to remember yoga techniques, when a woman at the far end of the sky lobby started screaming: ‘Another plane!’
tania saw the wing of the United Airlines Flight 175 Boeing jet slice like a knife into the building just above her. Glass and debris filled
She was elected president of the survivors’ group
the air like confetti. In the blink of an eye, her assistant Christine was decapitated at her side.
As the walls imploded, tania was hurled back into a marble slab. Her last thought was, ‘I hope I die quickly. Don’t let it hurt.’
She regained consciousness in a hell of twisted metal and flames. A man with a red bandana tied over his face was beating her with a jacket. She screamed at him to stop, and realised in the same breath he was putting out the fire burning her mangled arm.
the man helped her to her feet. With a sort of detached horror, she saw her arm was half-ripped from her torso, hanging on by sinews. With her other hand, she supported it, using her pocket as a makeshift sling.
Clinging to the man in the red bandana, tania struggled through the rubble. A man crawled out of the smoke, holding out a hand towards her. ‘take this,’ he said, and dropped something hot into her hand.
It was a wedding ring. ‘Please give this to my wife,’ he gasped.
‘I’ll find her and I’ll give it to her,’ she promised. Another choking cloud of dust smothered them.
When she could see again, the man was gone.
tania’s rescuer told her that one of the stairwells was still intact. As they neared the exit, more people stumbled past them, badly burned and fighting for breath.
At the top of the stairs, a wave of panic hit her. ‘I’m scared!’ she sobbed.
‘You can do this,’ he said, then went back in to the carnage.
She struggled down more than 50 flights of stairs until, exhausted and weak from blood loss, she passed out again. this time, the figure standing over her when she was revived was a firefighter.
‘We’re leaving here together,’ he told her, and carried her down the last 20 floors. As they emerged into the open, the streets choked with toxic dust and ash, the ground
Tania was too overcome with emotion to speak
shook. A cataclysmic shrieking of concrete and metal tore the air.
People were running in all directions, shouting that the tower was falling. Her rescuer thrust her into the arms of another firefighter, who flung her under a fire truck and shielded her with his body as the skyscraper crashed around them.
Gasping for air in the searing black dust, Tania felt the fireman press his oxygen mask to her face. She gulped air like water. His body was pressed against hers. They were buried alive. After that, she remembered nothing, until she woke up in hospital, swathed in white gauze, with a tube in her mouth. Her first thought was for Dave. She begged nurses to tell her where he was. No one would say. It was not until her parents reached her bedside from Spain that Tania learnt the appalling reality. Her fiancé was dead. She was a widow before she had ever married. Tania’s arm was reattached, but she did not leave hospital until Thanksgiving, in November. She devoted months of research to discovering the identity of the man who entrusted his wedding ring to her. Inside the gold band was the single word: ‘Forever.’
When she finally tracked down his widow, she quietly returned the ring, without fuss or media attention. She never divulged the man’s name.
But there was no lingering mystery about the name of the man in the red bandana who saved her when he found her unconscious in the flames. He was Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter. He died when the south tower collapsed.
Welles’s family were certain their son was the hero of the WTC attacks, as soon as they heard of a man wearing a red bandana over his face. Welles had carried one in his pocket since he was six years old.
At a memorial service for Welles in 2006, Tania was too overcome with emotion to speak. But a friend stood up and read her statement: ‘Even after five years, I still bear the burden of being alive when so many other lives were taken from us... In my family, we have a tradition at Christmas. Each year, we tell the children stories drawn from our lives.
‘The story they want to hear, year after year, is the story of the man in the red bandana, whose courage stood taller than the Twin Towers themselves.’
It had taken Tania a long time to build the confidence to talk in public about her 9/11 experiences. She didn’t tell her whole story until 2003, when a man named Gerry Bogacz invited her to join his group, the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, which met in real life as well as online.
Other members were stunned by what she had suffered. Some of them had been in the Twin Towers that day, others had lost loved ones: but Tania was the only member who belonged to both categories.
Even more, she was one of the 20 or so people who had been on the topmost floors, above the point of the planes’ impact, and survived. As a result, she was treated almost with reverence by some of the others.
In a strange way, Tania became a star survivor — her status confirmed when Bogacz was voted off the group’s board and Tania was elected as its president . . . a new title, created especially for her.
Tania pushed for the network to implement a code of conduct, guarding against scammers who claimed to be 9/11 victims nursing long-term injuries and seeking to con money from well-wishers.
Spending her own money freely, Tania became the group’s driving force — organising meetings, booking speakers, winning nonprofit status for the group.
At the same time, filmmaker Angelo Guglielmo was making a documentary about the survivors. He hoped to make Tania one of the central figures in his programme. Guglielmo discovered she was a difficult subject, though, and not always willing to co-operate. He also couldn’t help noticing that the scars on her arm, though serious, didn’t look as though the
Her arm didn’t look as if it had been reattached
limb had been reattached. But he said nothing, feeling it would be crass to comment.
Meanwhile, some of her fellow survivors wondered about elements of Tania’s story. Little things seemed odd. One was puzzled Tania sometimes called Dave her fiancé, at other times her husband. She explained she had petitioned to have their marriage posthumously ratified.
Tania never shared photos of herself and Dave together, and was reluctant to make his last name public. At last she revealed it, in confidence, to one friend — who checked and saw that indeed Dave had died in the north tower. His obituary, though, made no mention of Tania.
Most significant of all, when friends visited Tania at her apartment, the retriever she had always talked about, Elvis, was never there. He was always being walked by Tania’s maid.
These discrepancies were ignored until September 2006, the fifth anniversary of the attacks. Two reporters at the New York Times, Serge Kovaleski and Dave Dunlap, read about Tania’s story and were puzzled to find that she had not