by Tom Rinaldi
John Ryan, the commander of the Port Authority Police Department’s rescue and recovery operation at ground zero, who covered the pile from that September day all the way through the following spring, knew every inch of the tower lobby down to the tile. He was familiar with the area where the command post had been set up that morning, and the debris field where Burns, Welles, and others were recovered.
“The command post location was selected,” Ryan said, “so that responders coming in from the street would be able to go to it with relative ease.”
He understood what that meant for the families of those recovered in or near that spot: they were close to making it out of the building, to the safety of the street, to the rest of their lives.
He estimated the distance to the exits at seventy-five feet.
“People found in that area,” Ryan said, “were seconds away from being clear.”
To be so close to an escape but to remain inside was not coincidence. Likely, it was a choice. Welles made it. He was helping.
He was at work.
• • •
There was now a body, so there would be a service.
Not in the brilliant September sunshine, but on a gray March day, at Hannemann Funeral Home in Nyack, where Welles was being prepared for cremation, and then at Grace Church, where his ashes would later be immured. For now, his family stood beside him, waiting.
Jeff and Alison were there, beside Honor and her boyfriend, Rick, the man she loved and would later marry. Paige was there too, with Amy Rappaport, a lifelong friend. Welles’s remains were wrapped in an American flag, resting in a plain wooden box, humbler, lesser than a coffin. It’s a moment, and a sight, Paige has never forgotten.
“I remember thinking to myself,” she said, “my big brother fits in that small box. The box was too small for him . . .” She paused, crying at the memory. “It was not substantial enough for my big brother and his big personality and his big size. It just seemed like a box that a four-foot child could fit in . . .”
The Reverend Richard Gressle, who had presided over the memorial service at Grace Church back in the fall, joined the family, along with the funeral director and staff. They were there to receive Welles, pray over him, and send him onward. Not the thousand mourners who gathered back in September, not the public farewell. He lay now in the close grip of family.
Neither Jeff nor Alison had seen Welles without covering since he was found. Jeff asked the director of the funeral home about the condition of the body, and whether he should see him. The answer was short and definitive.
“Jeff, no,” he was told. “You don’t want that.”
He understood.
As the group prepared to take Welles to the crematorium, there was a point when Alison stood next to her son’s remains, looking down upon the flag, the box open. She had carried the water from Lourdes with her in a bottle. She reached toward the flag’s edge. Jeff and the funeral director saw her and both reacted quickly, to keep her from lifting its edge any higher, to block her from seeing what lay beneath. But that wasn’t her intent. She had no desire for such an image to supplant the ones she carried with her. She reached for the flag with one hand, and with the other she lifted the bottle and poured the water out gently, the fabric darkening as it absorbed the drops. She watched as the dampness seeped into the form beneath.
“I poured it all over him,” she said, thinking back to the moment, “in the hopes of somehow bringing him back to life again. And I knew in my heart, a part of me knew that it wouldn’t be possible really. But I just had to do that.
“And sure enough, he did come back to life, when his story came out.”
• • •
On Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, 2002, the New York Times landed on the Crowthers’ doorstep in the morning, as it always did.
There was an understanding in the Crowther house that Jeff read the paper first. He liked to go through the Sunday Times in a certain order.
In the months since September, newspaper stories about the terrorist attacks remained a staple, but they came with less frequency now. The city was trying to find its way through recovery, even as the hole in Lower Manhattan remained a gaping wound. Alison was still gripped by every story, but Jeff had a different reaction. For the most part, he turned the page, the reminder painful and unwelcome. The sadness was challenge enough without the news adding to it.
Jeff opened the paper that morning and saw a feature piece on the front page with the large headline FIGHTING TO LIVE AS THE TOWERS DIED.
The story, written by Times reporters Jim Dwyer, Eric Lipton, Kevin Flynn, James Glanz, and Ford Fessenden, was several thousand words long. It would become the basis for the seminal book 102 Minutes, written by Dwyer and Flynn, a comprehensive and masterful chronicle of reporting and writing documenting the space of time between the first plane strike and the second tower’s collapse, filled with direct accounts from survivors as well as dispatches from the families, colleagues, and friends of those lost. The book would become the definitive account of the fight for survival as the buildings burned and then fell.
As much respect as Jeff had for the Times and its deep connections to his father, he knew right away that he wouldn’t read the piece. By this point, more than eight months after Welles’s death, his reaction was nearly reflexive. He also knew that Alison would want to scan every word.
“Alison,” he called to her. “There’s an article in the paper here. You may want to see this.”
She saw the headline, took the front section of the paper, and went to their bedroom. Atop the bed, she sat up and began reading through the minute-by-minute account of what was happening in the towers as the attacks unfolded. For all the information she’d digested already, all the reports she’d consumed in print and on air, she’d never read anything like this. The detail was breathtaking, heartbreaking. The piece placed her inside the buildings, side by side with survivors and victims.
She began to read the accounts of those on the 78th floor of the South Tower, the sky lobby, where Flight 175’s lower wing exploded into the building, slashing through the crowd waiting for the elevators. She read of the obliterating intensity of the impact, of the instant wave of death, but also of several who somehow survived the plane’s strike. Her mind stopped for a moment, going back to the phone message Welles left her. The time. With the chronology provided so clearly in the article, laid out for her more plainly than she’d ever seen before, she reconsidered the timing of Welles’s day.
He’d left the message for her after the plane hit the South Tower, as lives vanished and catastrophe deepened. Alison knew that his remains had been found in the ruins of the ground-floor lobby. She began to imagine his path down from the 104th floor on the stairs, and likely his coming upon the distress and terror of the sky lobby. She believed that if he saw any part of it, any of the devastation depicted so vividly in the article, there would be no way for him to pass by. He’d respond. That was his training. That was her son.
And that’s when she read it. Two thirds of the way through the long piece. In the 128th paragraph of the story. She stopped, staring at the two sentences:
A mysterious man appeared at one point, his mouth and nose covered with a red handkerchief. He was looking for a fire extinguisher.
She was gripped by the three simple words, the five syllables, black type on off-white paper, looming before her.
A red handkerchief.
Jeff was in the kitchen, deprived of the front section of the paper and taking refuge in the Sunday crossword, when he heard Alison shout.
“Jeff! Jeff! Get in here!”
He came rushing to the bedroom, where Alison had the paper open in front of her.
“I found Welles,” she said, and then repeated it, so it might sink into them both. She read aloud the portion of the article, and pointed to the description of the mysterious man in the
ruins and fires of the 78th-floor sky lobby, his face covered with the red cloth.
Jeff tried to be measured, calm, in the face of Alison’s excitement. Before he could answer, she broke in.
“That has to be Welles,” she said. “That’s where he would’ve been, the 78th floor, that sky lobby. With the bandanna.”
“No,” Jeff replied, as evenly as he could. “We don’t know that. We don’t know that’s him. It could’ve been anyone else there.”
“Maybe,” Alison acknowledged. “I know we don’t know if it’s him. But I know. I know it’s him.”
Thanks to the Times’s reporting, she also knew the names of two survivors who mentioned seeing the mysterious man and his red handkerchief, a man they saw trying to lead others to safety. The survivors were among the eighteen in or above the plane’s impact zone who miraculously made it out. Their names were completely foreign to Alison in the moment, but the introduction was there, in stark print. Ling Young and Judy Wein.
Alison was going to find them.
• • •
Not finding a clear lead for Ling Young in the Times article, Alison focused initially on Judy Wein, listed in the piece as working for Aon Corporation, on the 103rd floor of the South Tower. She called Aon first.
“Judy isn’t here,” came the reply.
Alison tried to explain the nature of her inquiry, but how? The company lost scores of its employees in the attacks, every victim with a family who wanted to know about those final hours, about where he was, how she fought, what they felt. How could she press into that wound for her own answers?
Alison mentioned what she’d read in the Times, and asked if there was any way the office might pass on her contact information. She told the receptionist she might know who helped to save Judy Wein, and she needed to talk to her. The receptionist took down her information and the call ended.
Later that day, Wein called back. In the aftermath of her escape, she’d shared every detail with her husband, Gerry Sussman, from her hospital bed. From then forward, Gerry became an integral part of telling her story. While Judy spoke to the Times’s Eric Lipton, giving her account of survival directly to the reporter, the interview was in fact a rarity. Despite the onslaught of media requests and inquiries that came asking her to share her story, Judy rarely granted interviews. Gerry handled nearly all the requests, and when Judy agreed to cooperate, primarily it was Gerry who served as the intermediary, as the voice for Judy’s experience, speaking for her in interviews. In nearly all cases, that was the arrangement. According to Gerry, Judy had a deep, personal motivation for giving the Times interview directly.
“She was hoping that they would uncover the man with the red handkerchief.” The Times story set the search in motion.
Judy listened as Alison described some of the simplest facts about Welles. She was trying not to overload Judy or pressure her into any kind of confirmation. She could hear Jeff’s voice in her head, urging caution and the proper dose of uncertainty. She told herself she was prepared to hear what she hoped not to: that it wasn’t him. But she needed to know one way or the other. Not to pursue an answer, an identification, would be a different kind of abandonment. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try.
Would Judy say the man was African American, or in his forties or fifties, or heavy, or had a visible tattoo or scar . . . no to each one. The possibility was still alive with each answer. As Judy remembered, the man was white, young, fit, as best she could tell. Alison felt herself getting closer to the answer, but was not there yet.
“I think it may have been my son who saved you,” Alison said on the phone. “He was always carrying a red bandanna with him, even in his business suit. He was a trained firefighter. From what I read, I just . . . I believe it was him.”
The red bandanna was fixed in Judy’s mind and vision. She wanted to know the man’s identity too, of course, to know who had emerged from the smoke to lead her to safety. Though if this was the man, the identification would also carry a sad truth.
She could never thank him.
On the call, Judy told Alison there was an e-mail chain connecting a group of South Tower survivors, the few who’d made it out from the 78th-floor sky lobby or above. She and Gerry would send the inquiry down the line, to see who might have seen the man, if anyone else spotted a red bandanna. Then Alison asked a simple question:
“Can I send you a picture of my son?”
Alison got the address, looked for a recent photo, and sent it out overnight. As soon as the envelope left her hand, the wait began.
• • •
Judy Wein looked at the photo that spilled from the envelope, a picture of Welles from his Boston College graduation, taken in the spring of 1999, a little more than two years before September 11. He was smiling, proud, facing into the future.
Gerry recalled his wife’s reaction, and her response.
“Although it was dark and smoky and hard to see very clearly in the sky lobby,” Gerry said, “Judy did get a clear picture of Welles after he brought her into the well-lit stairwell. He wasn’t wearing the red handkerchief then. And there she saw him. She remembered what he looked like.
“And she identified him,” Gerry said. His wife was clear, without doubt, certain. She knew.
“Yes,” she told her husband, “that was the man.”
Gerry paused a moment in his recollection.
“It was very sad,” he said. “Until that time we really didn’t know if he’d survived.”
• • •
To be certain, Judy and Gerry sent the photo of Welles out through the survivors’ group e-mail chain. Was there anyone else who escaped the building who remembered seeing this man in the picture and could identify him as the one who led the way out of the sky lobby, into Stairway A, and down?
Judy knew two others, Gigi Singer and Ed Nicholls, both injured in the impact, who were close behind her as she made her way to the stairwell and began the descent. She didn’t know who else had been guided to the stairs by the man with the red bandanna. She knew Singer and Nicholls might not have seen the man, but both followed her after she heard the man’s instructions. Likely, none of them would’ve found the way without his guiding them. That’s what she told her husband.
“The people who went down with Judy,” he said, “were actually saved by Welles, although they may not realize that. I don’t know how they actually got into the stairwell, but certainly Judy was the first one in and then these people followed, and they went down the stairs with Judy.”
After the photo went out, a reply came quickly, not from a survivor but from one of her children. Richard Young, Ling Young’s son, saw the e-mail and wondered if this was the man his mother had told him about from the beginning, the man who walked with her down the stairs.
Since making it down, Ling had been consumed by the struggle to recover. The mental trauma endured, playing out in scenes that couldn’t be blocked, images from the sky lobby in its first moments after the plane struck. Her physical recovery was a different trial, the inferno living on inside her in the excruciating pain of her wounds and the endless hospital visits. The second- and third-degree burns covered more than a quarter of her body. For the first five weeks after the attacks, she never stepped foot from the hospital.
“I was not just burned,” Ling said. “They were thermal burns, which means . . . I was cooked.” She looked down at the scars on her arm. “I had a lot of complications, lot of infections. No matter what they did, my skin grafts didn’t work.”
By June, she’d already endured six surgeries—each its own torment, and all exhausting. With every procedure she saw her recovery time expanding, a road with no apparent end. Still, when Ling’s mind flashed back to the furnace of the 78th floor, to the scores of dead and dying surrounding her, she also couldn’t help but wonder about the man who emerged from the flames, who spoke with su
ch authority, who steered her way and guided her down. She’d never seen him again. Did he make it out? How did he know what to do? Would they ever meet? What would she say to thank him?
Richard asked his mother the question: “Doesn’t this sound like the man who took you down?”
It did, but she wasn’t sure. Judy’s story was different from hers. Judy stressed the sight of the handkerchief, the red bandanna, across the rescuer’s face. It was the most significant image of her rescuer, at least as Ling read it. Ling had seen the man’s face too, plainly, in the clear air of the stairwell when they reached the 61st floor. She looked directly at him before he left for the climb back up. That’s what she remembered. She thought he might’ve had a red bandanna, but it wasn’t covering his face as they descended the stairs, as he encouraged her to keep going, not to separate from him. She believed he might have had a handkerchief pulled down below his chin, wrapped around his neck, but she wasn’t sure. She needed to see his face again to be certain.
Richard showed his mother the attached photo in the message. Ling looked at it, the question hanging in the air.
Both understood how crucial the answer was. To say yes without absolute certainty would be wrong for all involved. They wanted to help Alison, a grieving mother desperate to understand her son’s final hour, but they needed to be sure.
Ling couldn’t say with certitude. The graduation photo was somehow too formal, the young man in cap and gown too put together, too well groomed. In the escape from the lobby’s flames and devastation, the man she remembered reflected the chaos—his short hair matted with sweat, his face flushed. He’d stripped down to his T-shirt. She needed to get a different look at the man to compare with the image trapped in her head.