“Sept. 11 was one of the saddest days of my life,” wrote Peachtree City teen Bilal Duckett in 2002. “... Even now, almost a year later, I will always be on my guard during an airplane ride. I will check my surroundings and pray to God for the safety of me, my family and my fellow passengers before we take off. Even though I am so far away from New York, a huge chunk was taken out of my life — a chunk that may never be repaired or filled again.”
Duckett said last week that he doesn’t remember writing that reflection or submitting it to the newspaper, but on flights he still prays and checks his surroundings.
When asked if that chunk was ever repaired or filled, Duckett said: “I think that’s true, I think that’s probably true for everybody. I still think that it was an event that shook the foundation and I don’t know what it would be like if that day never happened.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke with metro Atlantans about their experiences on Sept. 11, 2001, and how it changed them.
Some rushed to Atlanta fire stations to donate food and boots, others held moments of silence. And though most of us were 800 miles away, some answered the call and traveled to help a city and a nation heal. When asked for their takeaways from their experiences in New York City, every person who spoke to the AJC said they were still moved by how the nation came together to help.
Duckett — who spent all his teenage years and a decade more living in a country at war abroad — was in class at J.C. Booth Middle School in Peachtree City when he heard the terrible news.
The 32-year-old consultant now lives in Washington, D.C., and remembers his teachers trying to keep the truth from students.
Even if they had told him what had just happened, he said he wouldn’t have understood that terrorists mostly from Saudi Arabia hijacked four commercial airplanes with the intent of crashing them into some of America’s most sensitive buildings. About 3,000 in all died and twice as many were physically injured in the attacks.
Duckett first saw a replay of towers collapsing on TV when he got home.
“I tried to kind of escape it,” he said. “I think the only channel that wasn’t playing coverage was the Disney channel.”
Since his Disney escape that day: Duckett started and ended a Major League Soccer career, and tens of thousands of U.S. troops along with hundreds of thousands of civilians died in what many consider a pointless and failed war overseas.
Outside his classroom that day, the grown-ups of metro Atlanta scurried.
All 50 floors of the IBM Tower on West Peachtree Street at 14th Street emptied in about 45 minutes. A woman spent $100 on a 13-inch TV so she could watch coverage from her Marietta real estate office. Just four hours after the first tower was struck, some people waited almost an entire workday to give blood.
The world’s busiest airport closed for the first time in 76 years.
It was so quiet at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that you would have heard crickets chirping outside the main terminal. Officials said there were 30,000 people in the air heading for Atlanta when take-offs halted at 9:25 a.m.
Airport-adjacent residents a couple days later said they were so used to the hum of jets taking off and landing that the lack of noise woke them up.
More than sleepless nights, the attack revealed not only the compassion of Americans but also our capacity for rage and suspicion aimed at our neighbors.
One couple scribbled the message “FIND THEM NUKE THEM” on a gray cardboard sign stuck in the lawn outside a Roswell home following the attacks.
Azka Mahmood, head of communications and outreach for Georgia’s Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter, said there was an initial wave of support for Americans who are Muslim before it receded.
“It tapered off and Muslim Americans began to see an increase in hate crimes and discrimination and then also government abuses in the wake of 9/11,” she said.
Mahmood said that anti-Muslim sentiment increases around contentious elections because Islamophobia “has become such a potent political tool.”
Arriving on a Blackhawk
Grant Moore remembers how jarring it felt to see such a military presence in the heart of New York City.
Now a retired 69-year-old outside Panama City Beach, Florida, Moore was GEMA’s former head of training and the sole GEMA staffer deployed to 9/11. The Air Force veteran arrived via Blackhawk helicopter and was greeted by a Coast Guard gunboat with a “60-cal on the bow.”
One of his missions was to find real estate for sale that was safe so authorities could set up centers where people could search for lost items or even bring DNA to help families identify victims.
Credit: Ben Brasch
Credit: Ben Brasch
Lewis Cooksey remembers hearing over his car radio that the first tower had been hit. He was driving on Ga. 316 by the Gwinnett County Airport at Briscoe Field. Now, 20 years later, he runs the airport as the county’s head of transportation.
The airfield plays a small role in the history of 9/11.
The two hijackers who crashed airliners into the towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, trained at Briscoe. Though most of their training was in Florida, they rented a single-engine four-seat Piper Warrior about eight months before the attacks and flew with flight instructors at the airfield in Lawrenceville. Atta is considered the ringleader of the terrorist plot.
Cooksey said it’d be much more difficult for them to go undetected now that the airport reworked its security plan, meets yearly with federal law enforcement, and has “See Something, Say Something” signs every 100 feet along the airfield’s fence.
‘Am I far enough away?’
American Airlines Flight 11 barreled into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., cutting through floors 93 to 99.
Walton High School alumna Virginia Mewborn was in her office at the New York branch of the Red Cross when a staffer called and said a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers. She figured it must be a small Cessna and headed down there with her assistant director.
“It was chaos, there were firetrucks everywhere, police everywhere,” she said.
She heard a sound, and her staffer told her not to look. But she did. It was the thud of people jumping to their deaths, specifically a man with a red tie holding the hand of a woman.
To this day, the 56-year-old struggles to explain the sound of the landing.
“I want to say a slap, but that doesn’t sound right. It was a very loud thump,” she said. “It was a guttural sound. I wish I could describe it.”
She and her team then found the command center and were walking out to set things up to help when the first tower fell. The force blew the lobby doors open.
As they ran, she dropped her phone. She remembers thinking she would just try to jump in the Hudson River because she was a swimmer in high school.
Then they heard planes. So she told her team to lay down and put their hands over their head. When she rolled over, she saw they were U.S. fighter jets.
“I think at that point, while by the grace of God I stand here today, I don’t think my mind had fully wrapped around it until I saw two fighter jets,” Mewborn said.
Their car was destroyed but they thankfully found another vehicle.
The second tower collapsed as they drove on the Westside Highway. She remembers thinking: “Those buildings are so tall. Am I far enough away?”
Back at the office, her boss put his arm around her such that she could see his watch. “You have 10 minutes and we need to get to work,” she recalls him saying.
During her eight months feeding first responders, she saw a different side of New York City. “Every time you turned around there was grief. The balance of that was the outpouring of love,” she said.
Mewborn now lives in Alpharetta and is the Red Cross disaster division director for the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean.
She spoke to the AJC from New Orleans, where she is helping people affected by Hurricane Ida.
“It was an honor to be able to serve in it,” she said of her time in New York with the sound of trucks reversing in the background, “and what we all want to do is make a difference. We see people in the worst of times, and what we want to do is bring hope to them.”
Jeanne Spears has brought people hope during her 77 deployments with the Red Cross.
A nurse since 1961 who retired in 1995, the Red Cross has been a second act for her.
Mewborn recognized her from description alone. “She is always the one to raise her hand first,” Mewborn said.
Spears remembers seeing the first tower struck on TV while drinking black coffee with her husband. Friends started calling to ask if she was going. She got her answer an hour later.
She left early Sept. 13 on a flight flanked by Air Force fighter jets. Stuck in her mind is flying over the Statue of Liberty and seeing the harbor.
“I guess that the moment that I really saw what was going on was when we came toward the harbor and the harbor was blocked by one of our aircraft carriers. And I found that overwhelming,” she said. “ ... Coming into the harbor, you really realize that we could be at war.”
As she walked to help triage at a hospital, she saw personal items — Coats, shoes, papers, purses — scattered across a church cemetery.
During her nine weeks in New York City, she coordinated teams that went to the homes of victims’ families and helped the families get information or helped authorities find the next of kin.
One story stuck with her: A young lady walking through the door of her office building two blocks away from the World Trade Center was struck by pieces of an engine that tore up her back. Spears said the woman spent months in the hospital but had reconstructive surgery and lived.
Spears doesn’t do anything specific to commemorate the anniversary. She said she’s never been to the memorial at ground zero. But she wants to visit one day.
“An anniversary is like a celebration, and I don’t see it as that. I see it as a memory, that America is resilient and we can come back and we can remember but we can learn. I hope we still can learn from it.”
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