A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  I said to my sister, “Okay, they are probably going to need me, so I’m going to bring the baby over, and I’m going to go into work early.” I was sure they would be calling people in. The first tower collapsed while I was getting ready, and it was then that I panicked. I raced to my sister’s house—I think Patricia was in just her diaper—threw the baby to her, and drove in at ninety.

  It was a mad scene trying to get onto the Long Island Expressway and into Manhattan. Traffic was closed, and you could see who the cops and the firemen were, trying to race in, beeping their horns and finally getting people to move over. I must have hit twenty cars and the rail a few times, but as I was getting over the ramp toward the Midtown Tunnel, I saw the second tower go down. And God—at this point it was terror.

  I went directly to the Thirteenth Precinct, and as I walked in I saw a friend of mine was the desk officer. I said, “Joey, where’s Moira?” And he said, “She’s okay, we heard from her. Everything’s okay.” So I said, “All right,” and I relaxed. A guy I trusted told me it was okay, so I went in, got dressed, and let them know I was here. They gave me twenty recruits, the biggest guys, and sent me to Bellevue Hospital. I figured we’d be moving bodies, and maybe help at the morgue, which is just next to Bellevue.

  The precinct had set up a command post in the hospital, assuming they were going to be overloaded, which never came to pass. Nobody came in. There were some bomb threats, and we had to secure. My sister would call me and say, I haven’t heard from Moira yet. I told her they told me Moira’s okay, and that the cell phone antennas might be down. And then I’d call the precinct, and they’d say, Someone saw her over here or heard her on the radio over there, and I was okay. But this went on all day. At midnight we were finally relieved at the hospital, and by now I must have called ten times over to the precinct, and my sister had called me a dozen times. I went back to the precinct house and asked, “Do you know what Moira’s doing?” And they said, “She’s down at the pier.” I figured she was going to stay a full tour, so I volunteered for another tour and took a bunch of rookies down to the perimeter at Fourteenth Street, below which everything was blocked off. State troopers were there, and soldiers, so we had some assistance. I made a couple of trips down to the site to deliver supplies, water, masks, and stuff to the cops down there, and then I saw the devastation. It was mind-numbing—completely numbing. At about three in the morning the Thirteenth Precinct car came up to me, and I thought I could see Moira sitting in the backseat. So I figure, Good, Moira’s back. But it turns out it was Mary Young, a sergeant and a friend of mine from college who became good friends with Moira, and who was very similarly built. She came up to me and asked, “Do you know where Moira is?” I said, “You guys have been telling me all day that you knew where she is, and now you’re telling me that you don’t know where she is?” For all intents and purposes, that moment was the last time I was working for NYPD. I went back to the precinct, where I met one of the guys that I had trained as a rookie. He was now a sergeant, and he was just about to leave, in civilian clothes. He said, “What’s going on?” and when I told him they couldn’t find Moira, he got dressed again, and we took one of the cars and headed down Broadway. I found out then that Moira had driven the van, and knowing her, I knew she would have taken Broadway to get downtown.

  We found the van, got in, and found her hat and memo book. And then I start finding other hats and memo books. I said, “How many cops are missing? And how many of these guys are unaccounted for?” We gathered up whatever we could there, and then we just started looking. For the next three to four days it was nonstop: hospitals; walking around the site; checking who was doing what. Who had seen who, and just trying to figure out where she was. The next six or seven days was all talking to people, trying to find out where she was and where she had last been seen. From the beginning I was hoping that she was over in some hospital in New Jersey with a concussion but okay. But it became clear a day or two later that nobody . . . Everybody who had gotten out was out. Anybody else . . . There wasn’t even anything to pick up. The rubble was dust. The first photograph I saw was of a bloodied woman in a wheelchair, with EMS [the Fire Department’s Emergency Medical Services] all around her. But behind her, in the background, was Moira’s butt, and as soon as I looked at it I said, “That’s Moira.” I could tell from the bottle of water in her back pocket, and from the gun—she was one of the few people who still had an old .38. Once we saw that picture of her at the triage area, we had something to go on. We called up a number of the [NYPD] Emergency Service Unit trucks, as we had the truck numbers, and whatever else we got from that picture, to find out who had been where and what had happened to them. We tried to find out what happened to that woman in the wheelchair, to ask if she had seen Moira, and if they had any contact. And then the picture came out in the Daily News of her helping a guy from Aon out of the building. His name was Nicholls, and they didn’t even have her name in that photo. So we had to jump all over the Daily News to try to find out who had taken the picture, and what were the circumstances. Basically, I guess, she had led him out and was photographed at the triage area. And then she went back in. A gentleman who at that time had been coming down the escalators later got in touch with me. He had spoken with her. It had to be early on, because she was directing people out with a flashlight, and he remembered her. He looked in her eyes, and she was like, Keep moving, keep moving, getting them out of the building. So I guess, from that point, the more seriously injured people started coming down, and that’s when she took Mr. Nicholls out. And then she went back in, and what we heard was that there was a woman having an asthma attack on the third floor who couldn’t go any farther. Moira went up to help take her down. That was the last information we had from the different sources.

  And even that took months to find that much out. It was all very chaotic. The first week, when I was down there, it seemed like I couldn’t find anybody in charge. Nobody. It didn’t seem like anybody was doing anything. The frustration was deep. It penetrated deep.

  Moira did not consider herself as special. Medals, for instance, were totally meaningless to her. She got one medal for the train wreck. Somebody had to write her up, as she wouldn’t even put herself in for a medal. That was the kind of person she was. She wasn’t doing it for medals; she did it because it was her job. She was without a doubt the kind of person who was there because she wanted to be a cop. She had always wanted to be a cop. She wanted to do the right thing. I did it because I had college bills to pay, and I needed a job, and this one was staring me in the face. I eventually came to love the job, but I didn’t take it for the altruistic reasons that Moira did. For Moira it was just a simple matter of doing what you had to do. What you were trained to do.

  After Moira was lost there was a rush of hungry media. The Police Department didn’t give out my information but filtered requests; if they thought something was legitimate, they let me know someone wanted to talk to me. But mostly I refused. Joe Dunne, the first deputy commissioner, spent a lot of time with those of us who had 9/11 Police Department losses. Bernie Kerik, the police commissioner, never met with me. The first time I actually met him was at President [George W.] Bush’s second inauguration. I had my daughter with me, and I wanted to go up to him and say, “Hi, I’m Jim Smith, and this is Patricia”—a deliberate introduction. Because every time we were supposed to meet with him after 9/11, while we were still looking for the bodies of our family, he blew us off. He’d be doing something else. He’d be on Oprah or a book tour somewhere, or changing this or doing that. He never even came over to say he was sorry but would send Joe Dunne, so Dunne was the guy who sat there and consoled twenty-three families.

  Dunne is a good man, and I have a lot of respect for him. But his time was split, and I couldn’t spend a lot of time with him. But we had John McArdle, the ESU lieutenant who was basically in charge of the site. I met with John daily at Stuyvesant High School, where he had set up an information post for us, and where the
y were doing the mapping. We’d ask, What are we doing? Where are we at this point? The guy was a straight shooter and didn’t pull any punches.

  We had two services for Moira, the first on her birthday, February 14. I had talked to McArdle, who told me that by this point they should be done—the whole area would have been excavated, and they’d either have found her or they wouldn’t. I then made arrangements. If we hadn’t found Moira by the time we had a ceremony scheduled, I wanted it to be big, for her family, and so I arranged to get Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. The cardinal said the mass. The governor and mayor were there, and President Bush sent a letter. It was huge. About ten thousand cops showed up, a great tribute. I think we had four busloads of family that the PD shuffled around. I can’t say enough about how good the NYPD people were.

  After the memorial service, I drove down to Key West, where I had rented a house, and brought Moira’s sister and my niece. My father came down, just to take a break from everything.

  And then, early on the morning of March 22, I got a phone call from my friend Kevin, a guy I worked with in the Thirteenth Precinct. He told me they had found Moira.

  The department brought my uncle down to the site. He was a detective fifty years ago, and about eighty-six, and they all helped take her out. They drove by the Thirteenth Precinct, which had a formation outside that saluted, and then took her to the morgue. That day we flew back, and I went down and met the officers who had recovered her and thanked them. She was found with a couple of firemen and a Port Authority officer, and they think it’s possible they were all together in the lobby. This time we just had a funeral service at our local church. We had a month to plan it, and people came from all over the world.

  It’s a double-edged sword in a lot of ways. I knew early on that Moira was dead, and that there wasn’t going to be a miracle. I don’t think her family actually believed it until they found her body. A lot of them kept thinking she was going to turn up somewhere with amnesia, or whatever crazy theory they could hang their hat on. I remember calling my cousin, telling her, “We found Moira.” And she said, “So, she really is dead.” And this was six months later.

  But it is nice to have her home. It was good to find her, to know she wasn’t lying out in some field blown apart, or in little bits scattered all over Lower Manhattan. So many other family members didn’t have that, and still don’t have that. So that was important, that finality. There is no miracle. There are no mistakes.

  The Police Department took care of me, treated me like a father would treat a son; 3:00 A.M. on September 12 was the last time I worked. I took a year’s leave of absence, and the next five years they kept me at the academy, where I was assigned to employee relations.

  I didn’t get married for the first time until I was thirty-eight—I wasn’t the commitment type. Since I have retired I remarried, and have a two-and-a-half-year-old son, with another one due. We are living in East Hampton. It was easier the second time, but I had to have been hard to get along with. I was totally distracted, and for a long time I couldn’t even read a book, and I was used to reading two or three books a week. That lasted about four years, and even now I pick up a lot of books, thinking, Oh, this looks good, and some of them I never open. I don’t know if it’s the inability to concentrate or a lack of desire.

  I get a million offers to do things, and try to pick and choose what I think is going to be appropriate, to judge the balance between banging my daughter over the head with all this 9/11-related material and keeping Moira’s name, image, and heroics relevant. I always ask, Am I doing the right thing or am I not doing the right thing? I try to play it how I feel. If I think I’m doing too much, I back off, and if I don’t think I’m doing enough, I consider more. Also, I feel that no one is asking her sister, aunts, uncles, or cousins to do anything. They ask me, and so I do it for them too. I represent Moira for all of us. Not just for me and Patricia.

  When Pope Benedict came, I got to meet him at Ground Zero. Then Patricia was given an award after the fifth anniversary, and her picture was in every paper around the world. When it was picked up in London, the British named her a children’s champion. We were invited to London, and we went to 10 Downing Street and met the prime minister and his wife, who was actually on the charity that gives out the awards. Another time, Patricia met [Secretary of State] Colin Powell, and that’s the kind of thing that I thought was appropriate for her: to travel and meet people, so somewhere down the line she can look back and say, This is what I’ve done. Because of her mother, these are some of the things that we’ve been able to do. This year we’ve been invited down to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, where they are doing a 9/11 memorial float. There won’t be a lot of chances to be invited to the Rose Bowl.

  In thinking about 9/11 and Moira’s death, I don’t think I ever got to the rage stage. I was angry about a lot of things, but I knew I couldn’t make it be about me. It couldn’t be Poor me. It couldn’t be I’m a victim of this tragedy. Rather than mourning Moira, I prefer to celebrate her. To celebrate who she was and what she did rather than commiserate about how she died. A tragedy would have been if she had been coming home from work at 4:00 in the morning and got hit by a drunk driver. The way she charged into those buildings time and again to get people out—that wasn’t a tragedy. That was heroism, the definition of what it is to be a hero. I focused on that.

  I never saw Moira as a victim—nobody did anything to her. She was where she wanted to be at the time she had to be there, and she did what she had to do. That doesn’t mean these people weren’t murdering savages, but she wasn’t a victim. That poor guy having a cup of coffee on the ninety-second floor who got hit by an airplane was a victim.

  Do I want to see these terrorists who planned these things go to their deaths too? Absolutely. Am I infuriated at Barack Obama, the president of the United States, and at Eric Holder, the attorney general? Absolutely. Because justice delayed is justice denied. I never understood the truth in that expression until now. Ten years have passed, and we haven’t even begun the trials at Gitmo.

  Family members started going down to Gitmo for the hearings. I haven’t gotten my chance to go down there yet. They started hearings, and then all of a sudden, Obama wins the election, and the hearings are put on hold. Then they start talking about trying them like they are some sort of liquor store holdup men, up in New York City. They didn’t drag Tojo to criminal court in Hawaii for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Our president Obama wants to reduce the gravity of it, what they did on 9/11 and in other terrorist activities.

  I have a big problem with discussions of Islam being a peaceful religion with just a couple of crazies in it. That’s like saying Germany just had a few Nazis and everybody else was okay. But they still managed to kill a lot of people. Maybe not everybody in the Soviet Union was with the Communists, but they killed forty, fifty million people before it was said and done. And so while maybe not all of Islam is complicit, they allowed a lot of people to be killed without a huge Islamic cry of murder. And if these killers are unchecked, a lot more will die. We have to demand that Muslims stand up and say, This is not us, this is not our religion. The whole idea that we have to be politically correct when we’re talking about some of these issues is so frustrating.

  I’m constantly arguing with my friends—all good-natured arguments about politics. Why are police officers and military people more likely to be more conservative than the average American? I think it has to do with the fact that they see so much more, on a day-to-day basis, of the horror and the misery of people—people at their worst. We see the best people at their worst. You come to realize that not everything can be handled by throwing money at it, or giving people things for free. Sometimes tough love has to work, in foreign affairs too. Soft voice, big stick.

  We need leaders with character that will enable them to be heroes. Is Eli Manning a hero because he took the Giants to a Super Bowl? I love the Giants, I love Eli Manning. I don’t think he’s a hero. He’s a good quarterback
, but we throw that “hero” term around, and it dilutes what a hero is. The Chilean miners who were trapped are lucky to be alive, and they certainly had the fortitude to withstand the sixty-seven days they were down in the mine. But what choice did they have? They didn’t have much other choice but to try to survive. Well, we all survive. It’s what we do every day. But every day cops go out there, and people like Moira, every day she went out there to do the same job, and whether it was the towers or the Fulton Street fire bombing or the tunnel or the Fourteenth Street crash, if Moira was there, she did what she had to do.

  Moira was a woman who was one of the most fun people to be around. She partied with the best of them when she had the opportunity, but she was a person of character and morality who constantly put herself second to the good of others. If everyone walked around with that attitude, what a different place this world would be—if everyone thought about doing the right thing at the right time, not worrying about the consequences to the self. Moira was a person who had a husband and a child at home, her own family life, but she put it behind her to do what she knew to be the right thing. And that’s what I try to tell Patricia. She’s asked me, “Well, why did Mom do that?” I want her to know it was her, who she was, it was in her character. She was a better person than most of the people you’re ever going to meet. Why? Because she didn’t worry about herself. She did what was required of her. She had a sense of honor and loyalty.