SEPT. 11, 2001
CONNECTICUT REFLECTS 20 YEARS AFTER THE TRAGIC ATTACKS ‘I had many chances to die’
DARIEN — If all had gone according to plan, Brian Moss would have been at the top of the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Then a 33-year-old running the hedge fund business for risk-management firm Risk Metrics Group and living in Manhattan, he had a meeting scheduled at the beginning of the day on the 94th floor of the South Tower with executives of investment and wealth management firm Fiduciary Trust.
But a couple of days before the gathering’s original date, he received a call informing him that it would be postponed to Sept. 13. In an unrelated turn of events shortly before the meeting, a paperwork problem resulted in Risk Metrics missing a deadline to participate in an industry conference that it had attended annually at the World Trade Center.
As it turned out, Moss started work
that day around 8 a.m., at the Risk Metrics offices, a few blocks away at 44 Wall St.
“The day was the most picture-perfect day you could ever imagine,” said Moss, who now lives in Darien. “The sky was as blue as could be. The air was so crisp, no humidity. It always stuck out in my mind what a beautiful day it was.”
But the idyll was shattered when hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers at 8:46 a.m. and 9:03 a.m. Moss survived, but the horrors he witnessed that day in lower Manhattan still move him.
“It’s always a very emotional day for me. I had many chances to die on 9/11 — either being in the building or being outside,” Moss said in a recent interview. “There were all these strange coincidences where I could have or should have been in the building on floors where many people died. It changed my perspective on life.”
After learning on TV that terrorists had attacked, he left his offices with a colleague to see the damage. While he watched the towers burn from the nearby Chase Plaza, Moss initially thought he was safe because he did not expect the skyscrapers to collapse.
“Then I saw the South Tower start to fall. I thought that was it, and I wasn’t going to make it,” Moss said. “The building tipped. I didn’t wait to see it fall straight down like it did. I just assumed it was going to come straight down on me.”
The massive debris storm unleashed by the tower’s collapse enveloped Moss in ash. He took refuge in the Chase building at 28 Liberty St., and then in a nearby deli, where he bought water to clear his airways.
While he was in the deli, the North Tower collapsed — prompting Moss and the others in the establishment to take shelter in its basement.
Between 30 minutes and an hour after they took cover in the basement, police cleared the group to leave the subterranean space.
Moss then walked back to his apartment a few miles north in midtown Manhattan. He was accompanied by two women visiting Manhattan from Westchester County, who also took shelter in the basement. He assisted them because they were unsure where to go and could not immediately go back home, he said.
The Westchester women stayed at his apartment for a couple of hours, until the resumption of train service, which allowed them to go home.
Moss spent the rest of the day at home. He said he was rocked by what he had witnessed. He also reflected on the likelihood that he would not have survived had his meeting at the Fiduciary Trust offices gone ahead on its originally scheduled date. Fiduciary Trust and parent company Franklin Templeton had 87 employees die in the attacks.
He also cast his mind back about a year earlier to the job he did not take at financialservices firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which had offices on the 101st through 105th floors of the North Tower. The firm lost 658 employees on 9/11.
“I remember essentially lying on the couch in my apartment, shocked, trying to process what the hell had just happened,” Moss said.
After the temporary closure of lower Manhattan, Moss returned to his offices the following week. But he said he knew that he would never again feel like he did on Sept. 10, 2001.
“I had been really focused on my career and Wall Street,” Moss said. “After that, I lived my life differently.”
The ensuing changes included small ones — like buying a Kawasaki ZX-6R motorcycle — and much more significant ones — he and his wife got married in 2004. A few years later, their daughter and son were born. The children are now, respectively, 14 and 12 years old. In 2010, Moss and his family moved from Manhattan to Darien.
After 30 years on Wall Street, Moss last year launched a private wealth management firm.
He will pause on Saturday. He does not have formal rituals for the anniversary of the attacks, but he has attended local remembrance ceremonies in previous years.
“It’s a day of reflection for me,” Moss said. “It’s a reminder that life is fleeting.”