San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘Stay strong, mijo’ still rings true
Reporter remembers covering scene in New York, mother’s encouragement
When I was a rookie reporter covering the police beat for the San Antonio Express-News, my mother used to drive me to crime scenes. I didn’t have a car or a driver’s license, so she served as my wheels, an arrangement we kept secret.
Twenty-five years later, I was reporting in New York for the Los Angeles Times, and I called Ma on my blue Razor cellphone. It was Sept. 11, 2001 — a Tuesday I remember so vividly. Just as she’d helped me early in my career, she encouraged me that day to “stay strong, mijo.”
She died four years ago at age 80. I had returned to San Antonio in 2003, and on every 9/11 anniversary, I’d drop by my childhood home on the South Side for her hug and kiss.
Ma knew 9/11 was a tough day for me.
It’s a tough day for all of us.
The 20th anniversary of the attack on the twin towers at the World Trade Center is a painful milestone. Almost 3,000 people died. Their names are etched around the edges of two 30-foot memorial waterfalls set where the towers once reached for the heavens.
I was a fashion reporter at the time, and I was in New York with a colleague to report on Fashion Week’s spring collections of American designers — Michael Kors, Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta and more — when two planes crashed into the skyscrapers.
That night, I phoned details to my editors about the ravaged landscape of the once hulking towers, now collapsed into concrete and carnage.
We were into the first few days of the bi
annual week of runway shows, perfume launches, wine tastings, and chatting up designers and fashion insiders for style scoops. The night before 9/11, we partied at designer Marc Jacobs’ lavish bash at Pier 54 along the Hudson River, after having front-row seats at his show of 1960s flower-power dresses.
At his Grecian-inspired nighttime celebration, with long tables loaded with finger food and drink, I chatted up Jacobs, supermodel Linda Evangelista, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and actress Hilary Swank. Later, the fashion pack departed with coveted swag bags filled with body lotion.
After sunrise, the world changed — and that very pier had become a command center for first responders recovering bodies.
The biggest news story of my life had me on the streets of Manhattan, doing whatever I could do to help the L.A. Times’ New York City bureau.
By midmorning, I headed for the twin towers but soon was told to get to Bellevue Hospital. There, I interviewed people covered in World Trade Center ash, pulverized concrete that had been reduced to dust.
I slipped into the ER, where people with bits of concrete in their hair, their bodies dusted in gray, were taking in oxygen. Loved ones held their hands in stunned silence.
By late afternoon, I was outside the morgue on First Avenue. Refrigerated trucks, many bearing produce and meat company logos, were parked around the building. Clergy of all denominations showed up to offer prayers and blessings for the dead.
A man who said he was an assistant at the medical examiner’s office showed me photos of bodies in the streets, the remains of people who had jumped from the burning towers.
I returned to Bellevue. For 12 hours, I talked to people who had exited buses, their faces, hands and clothes coated in dust. A window washer who always carried a camera to document New York life told me he was perched on scaffolding at a nearby building and took photos of the first plane that crashed into the north tower.
I asked if he would deliver the film to the Times’ bureau in New York. He agreed. Late that night, my editors told me to head back to the hotel and get some sleep.
But just as the lights went out, an editor from L.A. phoned to send me out on overnight duty at Ground Zero. What if someone was found alive? My colleague and I walked to an empty Times Square, and a bicycle cabbie with a rigged seat got us to Greenwich Village. There, flyers with photos of loved ones who worked at the World Trade Center were posted on tree trunks and coffee shop windows, walls and storefronts. Candles lit many of them; flowers were placed beside others.
By midnight, my colleague and I were on Church Street, amid hulks of ruin and acrid, billowing smoke. Sirens interrupted stretches of silence. Bright streams of dust blinded us.
And then the most striking image appeared before me, one I will never forget, one I have seen in so many photographs since. A vast, spiked section of one of the fallen towers had plowed into the ground and appeared to be clawing its way up from an angry earth.
All around was office paper that had fluttered down like confetti and stuck to everything: tree branches, glass, walls, bicycle racks, crushed vehicles and pavement. It was bright and blinding in the moonlight and made the area look otherworldly.
I walked past a coffee shop, and a still life image emerged: women’s handbags and men’s suit coats hanging on the edges of chairs. Coffee cups half filled. Croissants partly nibbled. Strewn on the street were cellphones, messenger bags, high heels and briefcases. I can’t imagine such a race for life.
The next day, I was inside the Pit, the gouged-out remains of the World Trade Center’s downed towers. Fencing was being erected to keep the area secure for first responders, police, firefighters and volunteers in bucket brigades — and to keep the media and onlookers away. State troopers surrounded the area.
I saw Jason Rodriguez, a construction worker, emerge from the site, where he had been removing debris. He was exhausted. He fell to his knees. He had been in the Pit for 18 hours, pulling out pieces of bodies. I offered him my bottled water. I told him I was a reporter and just wanted to help. He looked up at me and asked if I wanted to go in. I nodded. He drank the water.
He told me that the day before, when the towers were on fire, he was on a job miles away and saw clouds of smoke rising in lower Manhattan. Back in the day, when he was a bicycle messenger, the World Trade Center was a daily stop. He had to be there.
He guided me into the Pit. No questions were asked. He told me he wanted me to report what I saw as we passed ambulances and flattened firetrucks.
I walked through a long, dark, muddy corridor in the World Financial Center, a building next to the towers that was partly destroyed. Dangling bulbs cast an eerie light on men and women wearing masks, goggles and protective jumpsuits. Some had “FBI” inscribed on their jackets. People were moving in every direction.
Suddenly, sunlight. And two escalators to nowhere. Next to them sat an unscathed iron bistro table, with two matching chairs, surrounded by jagged land. The
gouged remains of the World Trade Center came into view, marked by two massive mountains of spiked metal and concrete chunks and an army of people working to remove it piece by piece. They filled pails and handed them to each other.
Rodriguez took me to where he’d found a woman’s remains. “One of her thighs was completely missing,” he told me, according to my notes from that day. “Her other leg had no foot.” He stopped to regain his composure. “Another worker and I started tearing this one area apart, and then a couple of canines were brought over to us because the dogs picked up on a scent. This woman was crushed completely in half.”
In other places, he found an ear, a foot, a scalp with hair intact and what he thought was a black metal rod. It turned out to be a fire-blackened lower half of a leg.
He noticed the back pocket of a pair of jeans. Using his own pocketknife, he cut through the denim and pulled out a wallet. He handed it to investigators.
They put the billfold in a body bag, along with the remains of its owner. Against a wall, near an American Red Cross table with bottled water and food, were stacked boxes labeled “Body Bags.” I counted 40 of them. They were orange — orange in a sea of white soot.
I never stopped moving. My head was on a swivel, taking in everything, scribbling notes, aware of an approaching deadline.
My assignment changed when other reporters and photographers arrived from Los Angeles, including a good friend, photographer Gary Friedman, who died a few years ago. Editors asked for stories about lives interrupted, for vignettes that illustrated that day’s unfinished business — unused tickets to a Broadway show, canceled dinner plans and so on — a scrapbook depicting the singularity of humanity.
On 9/11, William Valcarcel was on the 87th floor in the south tower, where he was a supervisor for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. After work that day, he’d planned to add photos to the refrigerator door, the family’s official gallery.
At 8:46 a.m., a plane struck the north tower. Valcarcel phoned his wife, Mariam, at 9 a.m. “I’m getting out of here,” he told her.
Three minutes later, a plane crashed into the south tower.
Valcarcel’s daughter, Melissa, invited me to the family’s Bronx home. She refused to believe her daddy was dead — he surely would escape because he had overcome so much in his 54 years as a paraplegic who had been stricken with polio at age 5.
He hang glided and swam. He used crutches to get in and out of the white 1989 Pontiac Bonneville he drove to work. Then he’d unload a wheelchair from the trunk and roll himself into an elevator for the ride to his office,
where his desk commanded a view of the Hudson River.
On his wish list were parachuting and whitewater kayaking. But his passion was photography. He documented a full life. He made scrapbooks for his kids, and days before the towers fell, he took a photo of his office staff on selftimer. He sat front row, far right. Everyone smiled.
“He needs to finish that door,” Melissa told me back then, referring to the photo gallery on the fridge. “There’s lots of space at the bottom.”
I also met with Nichole Dingle 20 years ago. She was married to Jeffrey Dingle, 32. A former football tailback and medal-winning sprinter, he was crazy about golfing and crazy about her. On the evening of 9/11, they planned to shop for golf clubs for Nichole. That morning, Jeffrey had an 8 a.m. meeting at Windows on the World, a restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower.
He wore a gray windowpane suit and light blue Oxford shirt. Pressed against his neck was a rope chain with a small crucifix pendant. Jeffrey was so eager to get to the meeting that he and Nichole forgot to pray together before he left, a ritual they observed every morning. On his way out the door, he looked at Nichole: “Nic, don’t worry. I’m going to pray on the subway.”
She never heard from him again. She said someone from his company relayed to her that Jeffrey had been reached via cellphone; he said he was being moved to a safe place. Then the call dropped.
Nichole gave investigators Jeffrey’s toothbrush and razor for DNA testing.
Jeffrey had just started a new job as a financial software sales executive. Nichole had started a new job as a pediatrician. They had just moved into a new highrise apartment in the Bronx. They had two children: Nia, then 3 years old and Jassiem, 9. Nia was set to start dance classes. Jassiem had just played in his first soccer match. A family of firsts.
I remember Nichole’s kindness. Her daughter was in her arms. Her son sat at the table with us, his head bowed.
“Jassiem,” she told me, “means to be strong.”
I’ve always remembered that young boy’s name. I’ve repeated it to myself twice since then, hoping to find my own strength to move on after my mother died in 2017 and six months later, when my husband, Paul, passed away. That was such an unbearable time.
Twenty years ago, I didn’t fully understand what death meant to the living.
Twenty years later, 9/11 reminds me of my own experience with loss and grief. I am also reminded of my own private yearning: Oh, if only I could call Ma today.
Instead, I will do what Ma told me on the cellphone back then: “Stay strong, mijo.”