9/11 Stories
Eddy Otero
I had come in early that Tuesday September 11th around 8 AM. At about 8:44 I felt a loud boom in my building and ran to the television to see the news. I work on Wall St. which is very close to the World Trade Center. As I’m watching the news with everyone else on my floor. We see the second plane flying and crashing in to the other building, at the same time, once again we felt the explosion. It was very moving to see and feel it and have everyone around you gasping and freaking. In a state of panic I watch the news for about 15 minutes now realizing that the first hit which we thought was an accident was now a terrorist attack. It suddenly hit me that my godfather works in the WTC and so I took the elevator down and ran across Wall St., which at this time was packed withe people crying and looking up at the sky. There was paper flying everywhere and everyone was in a state of panic. For some reason I ran into my godfather who worked on the second tower that got hit. He had a terror stricken face and ash on his head, completely crying. I hugged him and tried to comfort him but it was hard for him to stop. We then tried using our cell phones which at the moment kept signaling busy. We went back to my office and we used my phone which worked. He called his mom and I called mine. We went back downstairs since my godsister was going to meet us down there. We just looked up at the towers in total shock that both were burning and smoking intensely.
After a short time we hear screams “Oh my God, it’s falling” and the large booming and everyone crying and screaming in a state of confusion and panic. We start running because from our angle being right there, it looked like it was going to fall on us.
We then see the smoke and debris entering Wall St. At this point we are running up Wall St. since we didn’t know if there was fire or anything behind the large clouds of smoke. It was pointless trying to escape it and it suddenly caught up to us. Now we really couldn’t see all that well but we kept running towards the South St. Seaport. All I kept hearing was the second one is falling and they crashed into the Pentagon. We didn’t know if we were getting bombed and just kept running north until we walked across the Manhattan Bridge. There were thousands of people walking across just looking back in total amazement.
Eddy Otero
Brooklyn, NYC