The 9/11 attacks claimed 2,977 lives, leaving lasting impacts on families and the nation 25 years later
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NEED TO KNOW
- PEOPLE is looking back on the emotional final phone calls to loved ones as the buildings filled with smoke
- Many shared messages of love, sought escape plans, or described the chaos unfolding around them, according to a 2002 New York Times report
- The 9/11 attacks claimed 2,977 lives, leaving lasting impacts on families and the nation 25 years later
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, hundreds of people filed into the World Trade Center to prepare for the workday.
Liz Thompson, the executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, was sitting down for a breakfast meeting with Geoffrey Wharton, a real estate executive. About two dozen brokers for Carr Futures had been called in for a special 8 a.m. meeting with the brokerage firm’s parent company. An assistant in the lobby had accidentally boarded the wrong elevator and had to go back down to wait for another one.
By 8:46 a.m. local time, a jet hijacked by terrorists hit the top floors of the 110-story North Tower building. 17 minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower.
About 2,753 people were killed in New York City that day, and many of the victims made a final phone call to their family members and loved ones before the towers fell, at 10:28 a.m. and 9:59 a.m. respectively.
In May 2002, the New York Times published an account of many of these phone calls, recounted by families of the deceased and recollected by survivors, with some timestamps provided by 911 records and phone bills.
“The farther from the impact, the more calls people made,” the outlet reported at the time. “In the north tower, pockets of near-silence extended four floors above and one floor below the impact zone. Yet remarkably, in both towers, even on floors squarely hit by the jets, a few people lived long enough to make calls.”
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One of these phone calls came from Edgar Emery, who had climbed seven floors from his own office to the 97th floor of the South Tower with a colleague at Fiduciary Trust, Alayne Gentul, so that they could help other Fiduciary employees who worked on that floor.
As the hot room filled with smoke, Emery searched for a stairwell to exit the building when he called his wife, Elizabeth. She shared that the last thing she heard before she lost the connection was Gentul screaming somewhere near her husband, “Where’s the stairs? Where’s the stairs?”
Close by, Edmund McNally, a director of technology for Fiduciary, was also on the phone with his wife, Liz. As the floor began to buckle, he quickly attempted to recount the details of his insurance policy to Liz.
“He said that I meant the world to him and he loved me,” Liz recounted to the Times, sharing that she believed for a moment that they had exchanged their final goodbyes. But a moment later, her phone rang again. It was Edmund calling to tell her that he had booked them a vacation to Rome for her 40th birthday.
“He said, ‘Liz, you have to cancel that,’” she shared.
Four floors away, 25-year-old Gregory Milanowycz, an insurance broker for Aon Corp., was trapped after urging others to leave.
“Why did I listen to them — I shouldn’t have,” he told his father, Joseph Milanowycz, over the phone.
Gregory asked his father to ask the Fire Department what he and 30 other people nearby trapped should do. Joseph told the Times that a dispatcher told him to tell his son that they should stay low, and that firefighters were working their way up.
Soon after, Joseph heard his son telling the others trapped on the 93rd floor: “They are coming! My Dad’s on the phone with them. They are coming. Everyone’s got to get to the ground.”
Gregory was later killed when the building collapsed.
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A further few floors down, Eric Thorpe and about 19 colleagues from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods were hiding out in a conference room. Thorpe managed to make a phone call to his wife, Linda Perry Thorpe, who was waiting at a neighbor’s house for his call.
The phone call was silent, Linda shared.
“I hear everything in the background,” Thorpe recalled, sharing that she heard gasping on the other end of the line. “Someone asks, ‘Where is the fire extinguisher?’ Someone else says, ‘It already got thrown out the window.’ I heard a voice asking, ‘Is anybody unconscious?’ Some of them sounded calm.”
“One man went berserk, screaming. I couldn’t understand that he was saying anything. He just lost it,” she continued. “I heard another person soothing him, saying, ‘It’s okay, it’ll be okay.’ ”
Frank Doyle, also of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, called his wife, Kimmy Chedell. She shared that he told her that he loved her and their children. She recalls he also said: “I’ve gone up to the roof and the rooftop doors are locked. You need to call 911 and tell them we’re trapped.”
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Sean Rooney, 50, had called Beverly Eckert, his high school sweetheart. He had made his way to the roof, but unbeknownst to him, no rooftop rescues would be conducted that day.
Trying to come up with an alternate escape plan, Rooney asked Eckert to help him plot a way out. She described the fire’s location to him using pictures shown on TV. She shared that he couldn’t understand why the door to the roof was locked, and she urged him to call 911. When he called back, he told her that he was still at the roof, banging on the locked door.
“He was worried about the flames,” Eckert recalled. “I kept telling him they weren’t anywhere near him. He said, but the windows were hot. His breathing was becoming more labored.”
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As the room filled with smoke, Eckert shared that they said their goodbyes, just moments before the other tower went down.
“He was telling me he loved me,” she recounted to the Times. “Then you could hear the loud explosion.”
Tom McGinnis, one of the Carr brokers who had been called to the 8 a.m. meeting, called his wife Iliana McGinnis at 10:18.
“This looks really, really bad,” he told her.
“I know,” Iliana replied. “This is bad for the country; it looks like World War III.”
When his response alarmed her, Iliana asked again: “Are you O.K., yes or no?”
“We’re on the 92nd floor in a room we can’t get out of,” McGinnis told his wife, sharing that he was with three friends, Joey Holland, Brendan Dolan and Elkin Yuen.
“I love you,” McGinnis continued. “Take care of Caitlin.”
According to Iliana, she wasn’t ready to say goodbye, and continued talking.
“Don’t lose your cool,” she told her husband. “You guys are so tough, you’re resourceful. You guys are going to get out of there.”
“You don’t understand,” McGinnis responded again. By then, it was 10:25 a.m., and the 92nd floor was quickly catching fire. “There are people jumping from the floors above us.”
“Don’t hang up,” Iliana pleaded, as McGinnis told her again that he loved her and their daughter.
“I got to get down on the floor,” he added, before the phone connection was lost.
The attacks that day killed 2,977 people and injured thousands at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Somerset County, Penn.
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