Twenty years after 9/11, shock and loss remain fresh

“You’d see it through the trees,” he said. White, then 55 and an accomplished photographer, wasn’t alarmed until he heard a “very deep, guttural sound.”

U.S. Coast Guard member Carlos Perez had just come off a three-year stint in San Juan conducting rescue operations. Perez, then 24 and training to be a search-and-rescue team leader, had been stationed at his outpost near the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge for almost three weeks working long, firehouse-type shifts. 

The Brooklyn native was prepping the boat for a shift change when the alarm sounded. “Sure enough, we can see one of the towers is smoking,” Perez said. “Our dispatcher told us to ramp up our crew and head up to the World Trade Center.”

Perez’s vessel was just south of Governors Island when he eyed a second low-flying plane heading in what looked like the wrong direction. It was just after 9 a.m.

“We were so close that we could hear the hydraulics kick in and out as (the pilot) was trying to make course corrections to line himself up with the (south) tower,” Perez said.

Some 130 miles north, Anne Mulderry was at her morning yoga class in Kinderhook, where she had recently moved after her son Stephen had bought her a new home on the earnings from his successful career at an investment firm.

In Albany, Frank Tatum was at his job at the state Department of Taxation and Finance, where his mother, Diane “Dani” Moore Parsons, was another longtime employee. Nearing the end of her career, she would work in the agency’s office in the south tower once a month or so: “She was the quintessential small-town girl … going down to the big city,” Tatum said.

He heard the news and called her work number. It said she’d be out of town for the week. “I felt my heart sink,” said.  

Twenty years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, local survivors and first responders still recall the perfect morning and what came after. For many, the links between the Capital Region and the city — geographic, governmental, familial — were drawn even tighter. Many rushed there to be part of the recovery; others moved here in the years that followed in part to lessen the impact of the events of that day. But the details remain as vivid as that azure sky.

“To have this horror happening amid all this beauty … it came to me that a real evil had been released into the world,” White said.

‘Just get here’

When the first plane — American Airlines Flight 11, which had been hijacked not long after taking off from Boston, and wheeled south just after passing over Albany — struck the north tower, the Rev. Mychal F. Judge was at the Franciscan friary located across the street from the West 31st Street firehouse. 

The beloved 68-year-old chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, Judge headed out to meet first responders at the emerging command post, which included top brass from city and state government. 

The Brooklyn-born priest had been part of the administration at Siena College in Loudonville earlier in his career, but returned to his hometown. A dashing figure to those who knew him, he relished tending to the daily rituals of Catholic life — from baptism to last rites. 

“He always loved the action, and loved being where the action was,” said Father Kevin Mullen, a protege and friend from Judge’s days at Siena. 

So Judge went into the lobby of the north tower to assist and pray for the victims. 

Douglas Faulisi, a rookie firefighter with the Schenectady Fire Department, was at home when his pager went off: “Just get here,” the message read. He turned to his wife, who was pregnant with twins.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he told her, “but I’m headed to New York City.” 

A year earlier, Faulisi had been tapped to join a new unit of elite regional first-response teams formed by Gov. George Pataki. After a training session in 2000, the crew posed for a group photo at the top of the twin towers — a tourist’s gesture, they thought at the time.

“The only way you’re coming to New York is if the World Trade Center falls down,” a senior officer joked to him. 

Faulisi’s crew fell in with a convoy that was guided down the Northway amid a whirl of flashing lights. The Schenectady crew wasn’t paying attention to the magnitude of the unfolding situation. Events were a blur, the radio reports were fuzzy — was it one or two buildings? 

Tatum hadn’t been able to get through to his mother in the south tower, but his sister, Karen Tatum of Schenectady, reached her via cellphone. The older woman assured her daughter that she was OK and was following authorities’ request to stay in the building. Then the phone went dead. 

The south tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. When the north tower fell 29 minutes later, Judge was killed by debris that flew through the lobby. He would be designated as “Victim 0001,” the first official casualty of the attacks. A photo of the fallen clergyman being carried across the street to St. Francis of Assisi Church won a Pulitzer Prize.

“What is seared in my memory was that he was the first body taken from ground zero, as we came to call it, and brought to his local church,” said Mullen, who first met Judge as a Siena student in 1971 and now serves as provincial minister of the Franciscan Friars of Holy Name Province in New York City. 

The pile

Faulisi’s crew was met with chaos when they reached the corner of West and Vesey streets, on the edge of ground zero. 

He couldn’t stop thinking about Michael Canty, a Schenectady High School classmate who worked for a brokerage firm high in the north tower. “I was hoping that he’d come in late to work, like a lot of times he would,” Faulisi said. But Canty, 30, had been at work when the first plane struck just above his office.

Faulisi briefly huddled with officials. As building-collapse specialists, their goal was to locate gaps, get into them and bring people out.

They went into the pile equipped with special listening equipment. Rumors of a successful rescue of a group of Port Authority workers buoyed their spirits, giving them hope they’d find more survivors amid the pockets.

There were none. “We didn’t find live people,” Faulisi said. “We found parts of people. It was awful.”

For Perez and his Coast Guard crew, what was initially conceived as a patrol to scoop up debris that would be used as evidence was transformed into a mass evacuation effort to transport survivors out of Lower Manhattan.

When the towers were burning, engineers thought they would fall into the Hudson River and create a 50-foot wave, he said. But when they pancaked almost straight down, the southern end of the island was engulfed in a cloud that blotted out the sun and coated everyone and everything in a fine white dust. It was “surreal,” Perez said.

His vessel took part in operations that ultimately relocated a half million people in nine hours — the largest water evacuation in American history.

“It became chaos, but it was controlled chaos,” Perez said.

Like millions of others across the nation and world, Paul Burke watched the catastrophe on TV — in his office at General Electric headquarters in Schenectady, where he worked as a computer engineer. 

Burke’s office became a hub as his co-workers trickled in to absorb the news of the worst attack on U.S. soil in generations.

“You know what this means?” one told him. “We’re at war.”

Burke was thinking about his friend Michael Taddonio, the best man in his wedding party. Taddonio worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm with its headquarters on the 82nd floor of the north tower, just a few floors below Michael Canty’s office.

“Watching live, we tried desperately getting in touch with him,” Burke said. There was no answer.

Burke later learned that Taddonio had called his mother, and told her he wasn’t going to make it. 

Last words

In Kinderhook, Anne Mulderry went from her yoga class to the post office, where she first heard about what had happened.

When she got home, the answering machine was blinking with one final message from her 33-year-old son, once a co-captain of the University at Albany basketball team.

“I just want to tell you that I love you,” Stephen Mulderry said. “I’ll be all right, and I’ll call you.”

His mother was sure the sixth of her eight children was dead. “Suddenly the end comes, and all someone can think of is all the years the person was present,” she said. 

Stephen Mulderry, 33, was one of the 2,753 people who died in New York that day — in the towers, in the street and on the planes. They joined 184 who were killed when a third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and another 40 killed aboard United 93, which came to ground in rural Pennsylvania as passengers attempted to retake the cockpit from hijackers.

Burke felt like he needed to do something — anything. Within four days, he made his way to the pile via Hoboken, N.J. He joined a bucket brigade in the last-ditch effort to find survivors. “There was twisted metal hanging from buildings: It looked like licorice, just total devastation,” he said. 

Amid the ruined metal and tangle of wires, errant office papers and objects had survived; everything else had been pulverized. Every 90 minutes, Burke would flush out his eyes with water. 

After one particularly grueling stretch, he made his way through the dust and discovered a church — he never learned its name. He sat on the front steps. Others slept in the pews.

Just as he felt at his lowest, a woman materialized — an angel, he said — and hugged him.

At the time, everyone was working in tandem, a feeling of camaraderie that has long since been elusive. “We were a bunch of people all on the same team,” Burke said, his voice cracking. 

Burke, now 60, seldom talks about those experiences. “I try to block it out,” he said. “I just want this day to pass, because it brings back terrible memories.”

Survivors

Mulderry, 85, lives in New York City now. She remembers her son as a peacemaker. In the months and years that followed his death, she threw herself into activism, especially her participation in September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. 

She remains disappointed that the U.S. military interventions that followed 9/11 didn’t yield more transformative results to better global society. “The opportunity was missed,” Mulderry said. 

It can be easy to be consumed and swallowed by grief, Mulderry said. She came close. But the mind is surprisingly resilient.

“You’re either going to fall in love with the death of others who have caused that, or you’re going to fall in love with your own death,” Mulderry said. “But you’ve got to fall in love with life.”

Tatum is now 51, seven years younger than his mother was on her last day. He and his sister keep her memory alive, in part, by making her recipes. He lives in Stillwater, and still works for Taxation and Finance.

“I feel like my mother was an innocent who was killed for a (political) reason,” he said. “So I don’t always feel like we’re doing the right thing by doing the same thing (in other countries). It’s not that some Iraqi’s or Afghan’s life is worth less than some American’s life.”

Each year’s commemoration of 9/11 is difficult for the survivors and witnesses. The 20th will be harder, both because of the two-decade mark and because of the chaotic and messy pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

“Every anniversary brings something back,” said Mullen, the Manhattan priest. “But the milestones are a little sharper. … For those who could smell — and I hate to say it, who can taste it — this will never leave us.” 

What doesn’t get talked about nearly enough with the passing of each successive year, Mulderry said, is the humanity that came to the surface in the immediate aftermath, manifesting itself in acts of kindness and a collective sense of working toward a common goal. 

Burke recalled a silent ferry ride as New Yorkers grappled with their new reality. “Everyone had the same thoughts,” Burke said. “We were somber, sore and devastated, but we knew what this had done to us and we all needed to pull together.”

Perez, now a federal police officer for the Department of Homeland Security and a Niskayuna resident, recalled a similar feeling. So did Faulisi, one of two members of the Schenectady Fire Department who remains on duty 20 years later.

As the grim milestone approaches, Mullen wants people to be more like Mychal Judge — whose potential canonization has been the goal of a grassroots movement.

“We are not in charge,” he said. “We delude ourselves. But we can cooperate and work together, so I think the lessons are there to pick up on and learn from.”

Each year, Perez checks in with those who were with him in the trenches. They call each other and give each other wellness checks. But they’ll eschew Facebook this year and have a reunion in New York City. 

In the years that followed, a 9/11 memorial quietly went up adjacent to the Waters Edge Lighthouse on the shores of the Mohawk River in Glenville. Burke always finds a moment during the anniversary to go there and spend time with the memory of Taddonio, his friend and best man. 

Lawrence White, the printer and photographer who was on his way to work when he heard the first plane, moved to Wilton after the attacks. He said he rarely discusses what happened that day. “I prefer to talk about Sept. 12, because Lower Manhattan became a series of villages again,” he said.

White swore that he would only create positive art moving forward. He still has photos from that day he has never shared with the world. Next Saturday, he plans to destroy them. 

“There’s no reason for them to be in the public imagination,” White said. “We’ve seen them enough.”

Steve Barnes contributed to this report.