‘It’s still very raw in our minds and hearts’
/ Denver Post
After the Twin Towers collapsed — mangled steel cascading down, clouds of dust billowing across Lower Manhattan — a business card fluttered onto the 17thfloor window sill outside Peter Wells’ apartment.
He opened the window, pulled the card in, blew the dust off.
“It was a guy who didn’t make it,” Wells recalls now, 20 years later. “He was at work that day.”
The Denver resident still has the card, a tangible token of the morning he was jolted awake in his bed two blocks from the World Trade Center by the opening salvo of what would become the deadliest terror attacks ever carried out on American soil.
A wide-body airliner hijacked by al-qaida terrorists slammed into several high floors of the north
tower, setting off a massive blast seen and heard for miles. Wells, 60, is still haunted by what he witnessed while standing on his building's rooftop on a day that would end with nearly 3,000 people dead at three sites.
His visceral memories are part of Americans' collective experience of a tragedy that is slowly fading from the national consciousness as the years, and now decades, tick by.
Each anniversary sees a subtle shift, with a growing share of the population too young to remember the events of Sept. 11, 2001, firsthand. Family members of several victims from Colorado who award scholarships in their honor each year now select between high school students all born after the attacks — teens who learned about it as a defining episode in modern American history, but didn't experience it.
Colorado was touched by tragedy at nearly every step of what unfolded. More than two dozen people who died had documented Colorado ties: They were aboard the hijacked planes that hit each of the towers and they were at work inside both buildings. They died on a third plane that hit the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., as well as inside it.
In the days and weeks that followed that day, dozens of Colorado first responders traveled to ground zero in New York, digging through rubble initially to find survivors and then, aided by dogs, to recover human remains.
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Sept. 11 does feel like history now to Peter Wells — horrific history that he watched unfold from his close vantage point in New York, just two blocks away.
He compared that day to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the United States into World War II. He considers himself a student of that war, and he grew up hearing his parents talk about what it felt like to be alive in 1941 and to live through that national shock, long before live TV or the internet.
Only after living through 9/11, he said, could he truly imagine what that was like.
“Unless you're there ... unless you were alive, it's just one of the things that you can't impart how dramatic it really was for the world, for individuals — and nothing can really prepare you,” Wells said.
A day after witnessing the destruction of the World Trade Center, Wells, then 40, chronicled what he saw, heard and felt in a detailed account that he sent by email to friends and family, many of whom had reached out to him. That email and others he wrote in the ensuing months spread widely, and he credits talking about what he saw with helping him to process its effect on him.
After the first plane's impact woke him, he wrote in 2001, he stood atop his old 18-story building, unsure what exactly was happening. Building debris and body parts were on the roof. As he looked up at the smoke plume rising from the north tower, he heard another Boeing 767 approach low — and then watched it burst into the south tower.
He sought cover as shards of glass flew toward him.
Later, Wells watched as people who were trapped above the north tower's impact point, facing a growing inferno, jumped to their deaths. He was back inside packing a bag when the first collapse shook the ground and sent a thick cloud of smoke and dust racing past his window.
Hours later, he trudged through several inches of dust and debris on the streets to evacuate Lower Manhattan, crossing the Hudson River to New Jersey on a large tugboat.
The Denver native had moved to New York City in 1999 for his job with Cisco, a technology company. After 9/11, he spent four months living with his sister's family in New Jersey until residents were allowed back into his building.
But he wasn't long for New York, which was deeply changed by 9/11. He sought a job transfer to Denver, moving back in early 2003, and he said what he experienced had bred a desire to return home.
Wells views the fading memory of 9/11 as part of a historical cycle that helps people cope. Younger generations may face their own shock, he said.
“Historically, we look at the wars that we've gone through, we look at the sudden JFK assassination —
something will happen in their lifetime that will knock them for a loop,” he said. “And then I think they can understand what 9/11 was all about.”
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The sprawling Faughnan family has adopted Broomfield's 9/11 memorial ceremony as their home base each year to remember Christopher. He was 37 when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the north tower.
He worked near the top as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald Securities, which lost 658 workers in the attack, the most of any employer. Back in Colorado,
worried family members had gathered at the home of Chris' parents, Tom and Joan, in Arvada. Cramped in a room together, they watched, shocked, as the building fell to the ground.
Chris' widow, Cathy Faughnan, moved their three young children from suburban New Jersey to Colorado, where both had grown up, to raise them.
“Chris was a fantastic dad,” recalled Faughnan, now 57, who lives in Lafayette. “And at the moment he was lost, he was probably the happiest he had ever been, because he really found himself in having three kids. I just remember how much joy the kids brought him.”
She said it was the needs of their daughters and son that propelled her forward. And in 2006, she remarried, to David Green, with whom she shared a kind of kinship: He had lost his girlfriend in a fire several years earlier. Both are close to Chris Faughnan's family, and Cathy still speaks in memory of her first husband at 9/11 events.
She appears in a new documentary called “Finding Daylight,” about how the Faughnans and another 9/11 family grieved their losses. Before a recent phone interview, Cathy had spent the morning at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York with her daughter and one of Chris' sisters.
She finds the museum's exhibits meaningful, she said, but she steered clear of the section recreating the attacks and the aftermath.
“It's almost too painful,” she said. “We spend time remembering Chris instead of that terrible day.”
Chris' younger brother, Michael, who lives in Denver, considered him one of the greatest influences on his life. They were close in age in a family with eight children and stayed tight into adulthood.
He echoed family members of other Colorado victims in hoping for a return to the national unity that prevailed after the attacks, if only fleetingly.
“We are divided on many things,” he said. “We face this pandemic with 600,000 people lost, and we're divided on should we wear masks, and should we get vaccinated. Once again, there's a devastating challenge, and we're divided. Going back to 9/11, what was so special about the immediate days and weeks that followed was that we became united on how we come together to get through this horrific act that was really brought against our country.”
Twenty years on, both Cathy and Michael, now 56, say grieving in the glare of a national tragedy has been tough. But it also has provided comfort.
“When the whole country understands, you're able to keep his spirit alive,” Michael Faughnan said.
Cathy Faughnan says she often thinks, “If I had a choice, I'd rather have this — rather than someone passing away from an accident or from cancer, and you're all by yourself on a birthday or an anniversary. … When a collective community grieves with you, I think it lightens the burden.”