Living with 9/11: Memories Never Fade

By Alexandria Munroe •

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Grace Telesco, currently an associate professor and director of the School of Criminal Justice at NSU, was on her way to teach a crisis intervention class at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. When she emerged from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, she realized something was happening.

“I saw what looked like confetti coming down, like this glitter,” Telesco said. “It was actually the first plane [that] had hit the first tower at a quarter to nine in the morning.”

At first, she thought it was an office fire. But as she arrived at work, the news broke of the second plane striking the second tower.

“It was the bluest sky. It was so clear,” Telesco said. “I remember thinking, ‘A pilot wouldn’t get confused and hit the World Trade Center.’ And that’s when I knew it was a terrorist attack.”

Almost 25 years later, many college students only have secondhand knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, because they were not yet born.

“I first learned about 9/11 just like everyone else around my age, when we got introduced to it in first or second grade,” said Nasir Trower, junior sports management major and New York City-native. “It’s emphasized more in the city [because] our families were directly impacted that day, but our generation has that distance from it, mainly because [the] majority of us weren’t alive.”

For students who didn’t grow up in New York, the lessons focused on the basic information instead of lived experiences.

“I’ve never heard anyone’s personal stories from 9/11,” Andito Wills Jr., a junior finance and business management major, said. “We talked about it every year in school, but it was always just the basic facts of what happened, like a history class.”

Yet for those who were there, the memories remain vivid.

This year, on the 24th anniversary of 9/11, Telesco, who was also a lieutenant in the New York Police Department at the time, will host an online event called, “Never Forget, Sometimes Forgotten, Often Haunted: The Long-Term Effects of 9/11 on First Responders.”

Along with her colleague Dana Mills, the associate dean of research and strategic planning for the School of Criminal Justice, she will discuss how the trauma of that day continues to impact the lives of first responders who were on the scene that day.

“Cell phones didn’t work. There was no communication,” said Telesco, at the time assigned to coordinate evacuations and responses to victims’ families. “Families who knew that their loved one worked at the World Trade Center or even in the vicinity of the World Trade Center couldn’t get in touch with their loved ones, and it was panic.”

For a year and a half, she led a team of 50 people in ferrying the victims’ families to Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center, and the morgue to identify their loved ones.

“Many families, they kept hoping that their loved one was like, maybe sheltered somewhere underneath, underground, and that they were going to be okay and that they would be alive,” Telesco said. “There was this hope that I think families, they had to hold on to, because it was so shocking that their loved one was not only dead but missing.”

In Boston, Jennifer Magas, assistant professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts, felt a similar panic as she watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

“I was running across campus, and one of my friends said to me, ‘Run into the bookstore right now, you need to see what’s going on television,’” Magas said. “It was very upsetting because at the time, my boyfriend, [who was] soon to be my fiancé, was going into work that day.”

She recalls trying to reach her boyfriend, who commuted into Manhattan for work each day, and not being able to reach him.

“All the cellphones were jammed up and down the East Coast,” Magas said. “So I had no idea what was going on.”

In the days following the attacks, Magas remembers New York City emptying out and fighter jets constantly patrolling overhead due to other threats and paranoia.

“It was like a ghost town,” Magas said. “You’d be working at your desk, and all of a sudden, there would be a fake bomb scare, [so] people were afraid to go in.”

The sense of dread wasn’t limited to the New York area. More than a thousand miles away in Miami, Estela Bruno, a graduate student in the Master of Business Administration program and DJ for Mako Radio, was sitting in her science class at Madison Middle School when she saw the attack on their classroom television.

“I thought it was another typical lockdown that day, but then they rushed us to class, saying, ‘Go to your class, and don’t leave until we tell you to … And then our teacher turns on the TV,” Bruno said. “And he’s like, ‘They’re attacking the Twin Towers in New York.’”

For Bruno, the shock was immediate and personal, since she went to elementary school in Manhattan and still had family living in the area.

“The first thing that came to my head was that my grandma was on a flight [to New York] from the Dominican Republic that day,” Bruno said. “As a kid, you think about, ‘Well, we could’ve been there,’ but it was more, ‘I wanna get home for my family.’”

Bruno recalled her school shutting down for a few days because the panic and paranoia after 9/11 affected daily life in South Florida.

“Rumors went around that they were gonna attack the [Air Force] base in Homestead, so it was a lot of panic,” Bruno said. “Parents just didn’t let their kids out. Everybody stayed home as much as they could.”

The following weeks were marked by suspicion and hostility toward individuals.
“My sister got profiled a lot at school,” Bruno said. “She got called a terrorist because of her skin color, because she’s darker than me.”

For years, she continued to feel the impact of 9/11.

“Every time she traveled, she would get stopped,” Bruno said. “And then we just got accustomed to it, which is crazy.”

For Telesco, the feelings of fear and uncertainty never fully went away.

“It changed me to a point where I ran away from New York,” Telesco said. “I feel like a part of my heart, a part of my mind, and a part of my spirit is still at Ground Zero, and I can’t—I don’t want to return there.”