Then? Everything got real quiet. I looked up and saw nothing but smoke and fire, nothing else. I touched myself to make sure. I was okay.
I heard a female co-worker screaming. It was Sergeant Winters; I recognized her voice. I called out, “Sandra! Is that you?”
She was calling me by my last name, “Torres, Torres! Come get me!”
I said, “Sandra, I can’t find you.”
She was like, “Follow my voice!”
So I followed her voice and crawled over to her and picked her up. She’s a pretty big girl, but I picked her up. I said, “Look, we’re gonna have to start walking outta here.” We started toward the Building 5 entrance on Vesey Street. Toward that way, there were thirty or forty people all grouped up, trying to figure out what to do.
One girl was hysterical, screaming. This guy was gonna slap her, but I said, “No, no. Y’all gotta calm down. You’re gonna get us all killed.”
Another co-worker, a good friend of mine, William Fields, was also there. Me and him started talking, and William said, “We gotta get these people outta here.” So we told everyone, “Everybody’s gotta hold hands and walk slowly.”
They were all bunched up because the entrance me and Sandra had been walking toward, the one they were at, was blocked off. So we backtracked to the entrance of 5 World Trade, where the Warner Brothers chain store was. We all held hands, and little by little we started walking over the debris to the escalators. Once we got there, I had the people go up one by one. The last person was my friend William Fields. He said, “Come on, come on.”
But I said, “No, I want to stay and see if there’s any more people.”
I watched William make it to the top of the escalator, and right then two firefighters came up from the area where the E train was.
They said, “Who are you?”
And I said, “I’m security for the building, I just got some people out. I’m trying to look for more.”
One of them told me, “We don’t know our way around here. Can you help us?”
I said, “Sure, I know this place like the back of my hand.”
He gave me a fire extinguisher and we started looking around. A lot of stuff was on fire, burning rocks and debris. We yelled out, “Hey! Hello! Is anybody here?” But we didn’t hear nothing in return.
We got to the part on the concourse where some escalators led down, and one of the firefighters asked, “What’s down there?”
I said, “That’s the PATH train.”
And he said, “You think there’s anybody down there?”
“I don’t know. We can check to make sure.”
We went down to the platform where they had stores. The firemen had two little flashlights, but they weren’t doing a whole lot in the dark, what with the smoke and all. I said, “There’s a parking area between Building 1 and Building 6. Maybe people are over there.”
We kept calling, “Hello? Anybody here?” Still, nobody answered.
It was dark in that parking area; we couldn’t see a thing. Mind you, that place was right next to Building 1, and we weren’t in there but five minutes when that Tower started coming down. We heard the same noise I’d heard the first time: Whhhhhhoooooooooouuuuuuu.
I already knew what it was and I went to dive, not knowing there were doors right in front of me—the underground entrance to Building 1. As I dove forward, the two doors exploded off their hinges. One of them smashed me in the face.
I suddenly had all this stuff on top of me, you know? Debris, the doors, rubble, and dust. The firefighters were a little ways from me, but they didn’t get injured because they had their rough suits on. They called out to me, “Are you okay?”
I said, “Yeah. But I got this door on top of me.”
I threw the door off. I was down on my knees when they hustled over to me. I said, “All right, it’s all right, I’m okay.” But when I stood up, I started bleeding from my forehead. “We gotta get outta here,” I said. Trust me when I say that, at that point, we all just wanted to leave.
I took off my shirt and held it to my head. We looked for the way out. We tried to make it back the way we’d come down, but it was difficult—the escalators were totally mangled. There was rocks and debris and fires all around. Everything was destroyed. So we tried climbing up the piles of debris, twisting and turning ourselves over anything we could climb. We thought we were headed back to the main concourse where the stores were, but it was so dark and smoky that I guess we didn’t really know where we were.
Then we heard a helicopter and looked up. We could see the sky through a big crack in the ceiling. I said, “Wow, we’re either outside or in a building with no roof and if we’re in a building with no roof, that’s dangerous because the building’s gonna collapse and we’re gonna die.” The helicopter kept blowing the smoke around in swirls.
I looked to my left and saw the fountain and the ball they had in the middle of the fountain.
“The Sphere?” I said. “Oh my God, look! That’s the fountain. We’re outside.” The wind started clearing up, and I saw Buildings 5 and 6. That’s when I knew we were in the plaza.
Somehow, we’d managed to climb through a hole and make it outside.
I kept thinking, “I hope these buildings don’t collapse.” That’s all I kept thinking.
We stood there for maybe an hour in the middle of a blasted city block full of twisted metal, cement, rocks, and fire. And we screamed, “Help! Help!”
I had a hole in my leg and didn’t even know it. I must have gotten it when we were down in the concourse, but I guess it didn’t register at that point because I was so pumped up on adrenaline. Now that we were stopped, stuck out there in the middle of nowhere sitting on these rocks, I began to actually feel things. I was holding my shirt to my face to stop the blood, and little by little I began to feel this pain in my right shin.
I said, “Damn. What’s that? What’s going on?”
I looked down and saw a hole in my pants and, through it, a hole in my leg. I could see the bone. So I cut a piece of my undershirt off and wrapped it around my leg to stop the blood.
We were just sitting there, breathing in all this smoke. One of the firefighters gave me a cloth, this thing, like a dickey that he had around his neck. It’s an item I guess the firemen use like a hood to protect themselves from the smoke, and he gave me his.
Then the other firefighter said, “Let me try to find a way out.” And he climbed up on this mountain of debris and went over to the other side. We couldn’t see him anymore, but we kept calling out, “Are you okay?” and he would holler back, “Yeah.” But pretty soon he came back to us, because he saw that there was no way to get out—the debris just kept rolling on and on forever, he said.
As time went by, we heard people moving around in the area, and we yelled, “Help!”
We heard, “Hey! Who’s over there?”
And we saw a firefighter in the distance on top of some debris, so we got real happy. Some firefighters said to stay where we were. They went back underground, back into the concourse; it turns out that a part of it was still good. They worked their way up through another hole and called for us. We kept calling, “Here! Here! We’re over here!”
A firefighter standing on part of the plaza threw us a rope. We had to climb up this metal thing, and he gave us the rope so we didn’t fall. We climbed and he pulled us up. From there, they brought us back down into the concourse through the hole they’d made, and we made our way through the underground again, out through the N/R subway train at Cortlandt Street.
In the station, I remember we had to go down one set of stairs and up the other side, like you would if you were transferring from the downtown to the uptown train. When we finally made it to street level, we came out in front of the Millennium Hotel.
When I got outside and looked around? Unbelievable! Everything was mass destruction. Buildings were on fire, and some were collapsed. People were running back and forth. There was a fire truck and a bus right ther
e, all burned up. The situation was just horrible. I was speechless.
Right then it all hit me, and I laid myself down on the ground. Some people grabbed me and dragged me to the Duane Reade pharmacy store on Broadway, where some medics looked at me. They cut off my pants and wrapped up my leg, my head, and my elbows—I had glass and cuts in my elbows from when I’d been on the ground during the blast, I guess. And the medics said, “Is there anybody we can call for you?”
I said, “Yeah, I need to call my mom. She probably thinks I’m dead.”
One of the guys called my mom and told her, “Ma’am, your son is alive. He’s a little banged up, but he’s alive.”
Then he passed me the phone and I spoke to her, started crying on the phone, actually. I said, “Mom, I’m okay. I’m here. Now I just gotta get out.”
I looked up and asked someone, “How do I get outta here?”
They told me, “There’s no traffic going in or out of Manhattan. None whatsoever. What you need to do is sit right there and take it easy.”
But I said, “Look, I’m not just gonna sit right here, I’ve got to go home to my wife. My son’s at my mom’s place, you understand? I gotta leave.” I was very persistent.
But they were telling me, “Don’t go nowhere.” They thought I was delusional or something. “Stay, stay, stay.”
Being stubborn, I ignored them and walked right out of the building. Mind you, I had a hole in my leg so I was actually limping right out of the building. I had my uniform on—my skin’s all dark from blood and smoke, my face was black from the soot. I walked right out of that whole mess and kept on walking right over the Brooklyn Bridge, ’cause that was the only way for me to get home.
There were very few people on the bridge and the police weren’t letting anybody back and forth; they were very busy handling people. They tried to stop me, too, but they took a good look and said, “Okay, if you want to go, go.”
I was already stressed out. I said, “Fine, I’m going.” And I walked over the bridge, one limp at a time. I must’ve looked like a monster.
As I went over the bridge, there happened to be a reporter from the Daily News, taking pictures of me like I was a movie star or something.
Click, click. “Sir! Sir! Over here! Sir?” Click, click.
That reporter got me really mad because he was so persistent. He came right up to me and said, “Sir, my name is so-and-so and I’m with the Daily News. Are you okay?”
I said, “Yes.” But I kept on walking.
He followed me. “Can you tell me in your own words what happened?”
I looked at him. Right then, I wanted to throw him off the bridge. And using whatever little strength I had left, I started going off on him. I mean, the nerve of this guy. Treating what had just happened to me like it was some kind of circus or something. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it wasn’t too pleasant.
“No, no!” he said. “Please! I didn’t mean it like that.”
I said, “Do me a favor? Get away from me.”
I continued walking to the other side.
They had a lot of police in that area, like I said, not letting anybody go across. When I got to the other side of the bridge, the Brooklyn side, the cops took one look at me and said, “Hey, are you sure you’re okay?”
They sat me down and I went through the whole thing all over again. “Yes, yes,” I said. “I just need to go to the 88th Precinct. My mom works there and I need to see her.”
One of the cops turned around and said, “That young lady over there works for the 88th.”
I looked to where he was looking, at this girl, and I recognized her. She knew me, too. She said, “Oh! You’re Lydia’s son! Jump in the car. I’ll take you to her.”
They drove me to the hospital first and took me into the emergency room right away to check me out and see if I had any broken bones, a concussion, or anything like that. Then they started stitching me up. My mom showed up and called my wife and she came down, too.
I don’t like hospitals in general, so I was freaking out. And my mom—she wasn’t hysterical, but you could see in her face that she was nervous. So I started cracking jokes. Like, my wife said, “Oh, you’re hurt.” But I said, “Don’t worry, baby. The good stuff’s still intact.”
The nurse and the doctors started laughing, and one nurse asked me, “How can you be cracking jokes when you almost died?”
I said, “Well, I’m here now, so I’d better make the best of it.”
For the next few days, a lot of stories about me went around. My little sister thought I was in a coma. She thought that part of my head had been removed and all that was left of me was body parts. Everybody was calling her and she told them, “Yeah, he’s in a coma,” and that got everybody crying. My grandmother in Puerto Rico thought I was dying.
Then there was more confusion because my stepmother—my father’s wife—worked in Building 1 and she didn’t make it. The confusion came from the fact that my stepmother and my wife have the same name: Vivian. So when my stepbrothers and sisters called my aunt and asked, “Did you talk to Gabriel and see if our mom got out?”—well, my aunt called my mom and said, “How’s Vivian?”
My mom, of course, said, “Vivian’s here with him. She’s fine.” Meaning my wife.
My aunt thought she was talking about my stepmother, so she said, “Oh, good, good!” Then she called all my stepmother’s kids back and said, “Don’t worry, your mom’s fine.” And of course they were real happy.
But later on, my aunt called again and said, “Vivian’s not home yet, where is she? Is she still with you at the hospital?”
My mom said, “Yes, she’s still here.” Again, she meant my wife.
My aunt said, “Oh, good! I’ll tell Pauly and John, they were so worried.”
And that’s what gave my mother the clue. She said, “Wait, who are you talking about?”
It was all so confusing. See, my father has the same name as me, too: Gabriel. A long time ago, everybody in the family started calling me by my nickname, which is Pepsi. So to clarify, my mom said, “No, no. You want to know about Vivian. I’m talking about Pepsi’s Vivian. I thought you meant my son’s wife.”
My aunt said, “No, I meant the other one.”
“You mean she’s still missing?”
Now the kids were really depressed. They’d thought their mother was alive, but now they weren’t sure.
Vivian worked for Blue Cross/Blue Shield on the 28th floor of one of the Towers. The people from her office say that she never made it in to work. Judging by the time she left her house on the morning of the eleventh, she should have arrived at the Towers right around when everything started. So I think she was either standing in front of those elevators when they exploded, or she was on one of them. People have said that those elevators fell straight down their shafts like a pea through a straw and smashed down flat to about two inches high. Nobody on them would have had a chance.
It hit me very hard when I found out she was missing. See, when the attack happened, I forgot she worked there. I was running around, trying to help people, thinking about my wife, my son, my mom. So many things.
To this day, I think, if I had remembered, I would have run over to Building 1 to try and help her. But then I probably would have died when the building came down.
It’s like I told my wife: “I know it’s not my fault. But I feel bad. And I don’t want my stepbrothers and stepsisters to hate me because I made it out and their mother didn’t.”
My son was baptized on his birthday, September 16, five days after the attack. We had made plans prior to the World Trade Center coming down. I went to the rehearsal on Friday; the baptism was on Sunday. By then, I was a mass of stitches and I was limping around on a cane.
As I entered the church, the lady who does the rehearsals, Ms. Negron, was addressing the guests, speaking about the people in the World Trade Center. She said, “Let’s take a moment to bow our heads down and offer our condolences for the
people who lost their lives.” I heard this as I was walking closer and closer.
Then Ms. Negron looked up and said, “Oh my. What happened to you?”
I said, “I’m one of the people from the Trade Center.”
She turned to the crowd and said, “Look. We have one here!”
People were looking at me with these “oh my God” expressions. Like, “This guy actually made it to church?” I couldn’t say nothing right then. I was speechless. I guess it was then that I started to realize how lucky I am.
Baptizing my son was the happiest thing for me. See, this big tragedy happened, but a great event happened afterward. Life goes on. It brightened up my spirit, you know? If I had died, my son wouldn’t have known me. Other kids would ask him, “Who’s your father?” And he’d have to say, “I don’t know. He died when I was one year old.”
That’s a sad thing to think about, and that’s exactly what runs through my mind these days.
HOMICIDE DETECTIVE “Y”
Homicide Detective “Y,” thirty-eight, is a member of the New York City Police Department. He works out of an East Side precinct, which covers all investigations south of 59th Street in Manhattan. He keeps his name a secret for reasons related to his work.
Detective “Y” has been on the force for eighteen years; he’s served as an undercover narcotics officer for five. Before joining the force, he pulled a three-year stint in the Marine Corps. He is a big, affable man with unstoppable energy, a real New Yorker who talks with his hands and tells you exactly what’s on his mind.
Tower Stories Page 10