Daughter fears for father's safety
Bridget Lepore of Technology Training had hundreds of connections to the World Trade Center, the strongest, however, was to her father, who worked in the second tower of the World Financial Center. Although not one of the twin towers, the World Finanacial Center was connected to building seven by the glass-enclosed walkway connection that now leads nowhere.

"My father, Richard, called my mother and me after the first crash," recalled Lepore. "He heard the plane's engines and looked up just in time to see the fireball emerge from the first tower. That's when we lost contact with him until 11 a.m. He saw the same thing happen to the second tower. At that point they were evacuated."

According to Lepore, her father, who works at Deloitte & Touche in the Information Technology Department, ran nearly 20 blocks to get away from the destruction. "While they were running, one of my father's colleagues got hit by a small piece of the plane. As his co-worker bent down to pick it up, part of the first tower came down 10 feet away from them. So they began to move even faster. My father said they felt the heat and tremors 10 blocks away when the first building collapsed."

Lepore said her father was one of the few lucky commuters who were able to take the PATH back to Jersey City before Port Authority shut them down. "He got home around 5 p.m.," she said. "He spent the next eight hours on the phone trying to find people from his area. All but three were found. Another 400 people from his company who were in the twin towers at the time are still unaccounted for. My father told us it was the most horrible thing he's ever seen. Other than that he's remained very quiet. He doesn't seem to be able to talk about it and he's been working from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day at one of the firm's New Jersey offices. He's not himself." Lepore's husband, who works with New Jersey's emergency management, brought dogs and supplies to the site. Said Lepore, "He was in the service and he does a lot of disaster work in this state, but he told me nothing could have ever prepared him for what he saw in New York."

An information technology trainer at the World Trade Center for five years before coming to Montclair State, Lepore said she didn't realize the extent of the number of people she knew until she saw the names of the companies on the television. "I keep watching TV because I'm drawn to it, but I don't want to recognize any of the hundreds of people I trained there," she said.

Husband worked in building 7
It was 9:15 on a picture perfect Tuesday morning when Barbara Krusko, director of the Annual Fund, came into work after sending her 8-year-old daughter off to school, and her husband to work at an Asian bank at the World Trade Center. "As I walked through the door the secretary told me a plane hit the World Trade Center," said Krusko. She called her husband, Marc, at work and got no answer, then tried his cell phone and got voice mail. "I checked my cell phone and listened to a message he left for me. My husband said he was standing in his office at 7 World Trade Center looking up at a gaping hole in one of the twin towers. He was talking about people jumping out of the windows and hung up just as the second plane hit the other tower. I was scared because I didn't know what was happening. I knew he survived the initial problems, but I didn't know where he was. My husband called again after his office was evacuated down the 27 flights of stairs and stopped two blocks away.

"When the first building collapsed he ran five blocks more," Krusko said. He made his way to a friend's apartment in midtown before calling again. "Marc said he saw things on Tuesday he never thought he'd see. He described it as surreal. He was glued to the window for five minutes because he was in shock. They didn't evacuate immediately because of fear that the falling debris and people would land on them. But they knew there was no choice after the second plane hit."

Krusko said her greatest concern was that he was in the vicinity when the first tower collapsed. She was also concerned that if another plane came down in the city, her husband was there. "His major focus was getting out of Manhattan," she said. "He took the ferry out of Manhattan after a five-hour wait, then a bus to Hoboken, and finally a train to Montvale.

"I was pacing all day. My first instinct," said Krusko, "was to pull my daughter out of school. The teachers said the students had no idea what was going on, so I let her stay until 3 p.m. I told her that there was an accident and that daddy was safe, but that he might not get home tonight. Her main concern was that the picture of her on her daddy's desk was destroyed with the building."

Krusko said her husband walked through the door at 10 p.m. He returned a lot of phone calls and called clients to tell them operations would be up and running in the morning. "He was up until 1 a.m. doing damage control," she said. "But the first thing he did after greeting us was grab a beer."

Family motors home from Disney World
Tim Carey, director of Continuous Quality Improvement, was vacationing at Disney World with his family.

"Tuesday was the last day of our vacation, so we went to breakfast, then stopped by our room at the All-Star Sports Resort before heading off to the Magic Kingdom one last time," Carey recalled. "My wife's mother called, distraught, and told us the news. Moments later we watched on television as the first tower fell. When you're far from home there's a need to get back just to be with loved ones."

Carey, who coincidentally met a family there whose children go to the same school as his, learned that all flights were cancelled. So the two families rented an eight-seat, all-terrain vehicle and returned to New Jersey together. "It cost more than $500 a day to rent that car, but it was important enough to get home," he said. "So we took it. We drove 22 hours straight home, listening to the radio all the way. The younger children and older children slept at different times, so we had some very different and intriguing discussions. There was incredibly light traffic, but we realized driving through the Carolinas that there were a lot of Florida license plates, so we could only assume that other vacationers had the same idea."

Carey said coming home did matter. "There wasn't joy, but relief to be on our home ground. I noticed a universal mindset. The people in New Jersey and in Florida were subdued and somber. In Florida, because the parks were closed, the pools at the hotel were full of children laughing, jumping and having fun. It was a relief to step away from the adults and the TV to watch the innocence of the children at play in the midst of this crisis."

Others who would like to share these personal stories should contact Bill Valladares at: valladaresw@mail.montclair.edu

Go back to the Insight index