Washington, DC, September 19, 2001

Joyce Brentley had panicked on Tuesday. “My god, that’s where my son is!” she recalled thinking when she heard on the radio that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. Brentley’s son Austin, 22, now lives in SoHo.

“I don’t know geography that well so I didn’t have a clear understanding of how far where lives and where he works are from the World Trade Center,” she confessed. “So I tried to call him on my cell phone. I was dialing, seven or eight times, but the lines were jammed. He finally answered and I asked him if he was ok. ‘Yeah, sure.’ He didn’t know what had happened.”

But that wasn’t the end of anxiety for Brentley, who works in the D.C. suburbs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Her younger son Nick, 17, goes to high school in Washington, D.C. Thinking that D.C. was safe, she went to work. Halfway there, she heard on the radio that a bomb landed on the Pentagon (later the news clarified that it was a plane). “They announced the entire fed government was shutting down and everyone was to leave. Usually they dismiss us in a staggered fashion!” Because she was closer to home than to school, she went back to Silver Springs, called the school, but couldn’t get through. She asked a friend who was a few blocks from St. Albans School to pick up her son. “I saw main thoroughfare from window. It was like a parking lot.”

What was “freaky,” she said, was seeing and hearing fighter jets flying over the city. “I’m used to hearing commercial planes, but these sounds were different from a commercial airliner.” Having lived near D.C. for a long time, she understood that the national capital is a target. “I knew D.C. would be targeted. St. Albans is next to Washington National Cathedral, which is also a monument. My mind starts racing, ‘What if, what if, what if?’ My children will tell you I’m a worry wart.” The friend picked up Nick and stopped at payphone. “Nick said, ‘Oh mom, what are you worried about? I’m fine.’” When her son got home, the two of them hit the grocery store for supplies. They watched TV the rest of the day.

When she saw the magnitude of the destruction in New York, she worried about Austin again. “He’s up there in that big city all by himself. They flew the planes into the Twin Towers, but was anything else going to happen? There was the U.N., the Empire State Building, the stock exchange. How did I know it was going to be over with these two incidents?” So she sent him an e-mail to make sure. He e-mailed back that he was fine. He and his roommate had made it back to the apartment. He’d gone to Beth Israel to give blood, but was turned away and decided to go back tomorrow. They went up to the roof and saw the second tower collapse.

Nick was not even at his school, but at the sister school registering for a class he wanted to take when he found out about the World Trade Center crashes. During this free period, he bumped into a group of girls who asked him if he’d heard.

“I thought these were just regular planes that had scudded themselves. I didn’t initially know it was a terrorist attack. I thought it was just malfunctioning. I asked a few teachers, but they didn’t know. Then I heard the same thing happened at Pentagon and went to third period early to watch the TV footage.”

The headmaster called a fire drill and announced that these were intentional attacks. “I was in disbelief. At that time, because New York and the Pentagon far away from us, I thought the school day might continue. I was worried I would be late for fourth period since I was at the sister school. But then it hit me. Under all of this, how can I continue regular school day, learning about calculus?” He continued to watch TV until he got permission to return to the boys’ school. “I became worried because parents were throwing up their hands, saying, ‘Where’s my child?’ I called Mom at office, but she wasn’t there. I was at the girls’ school so they wouldn’t let me leave. I finally got clearance from the girls’ school’s headmaster to leave and I went to the lunchroom and watched more footage.”

“The main focus is what do we do from here? How are we going to respond? You can simply fire missiles on someone, but that won’t do anything in the long run. People keep comparing this to Pearl Harbor, but we knew that was the Japanese. But in this case we don’t know who it is, though we can see everything. I’m a Democrat, but in this I’m behind the president 100 percent.”

Later that night, he got online and sent e-mail. “My IM buddy list was the longest it’s ever been.”

Washington, DC, September 19, 2001

Twin Towers Job Link Center, Jamaica, Queens, September 19, 2001

St. John the Divine Chapel, Columbia University, September 20, 2001

Story Index

Part one | Monday, October 8, 2001
Part two | Tuesday, October 9, 2001
Part three | Wednesday, October 10, 2001
Part four | Thursday, October 11, 2001
Part five | Friday, October 12, 2001