Journey Through Shadow

Survivors Wrestle with Guilt, Gratitude

September 11, 2011

On a recent oven-baked Texas night, two men who once lived in New Jersey slipped into a booth at a restaurant on the outskirts of Dallas.

As old friends often do over dinner, they told a few jokes, traded tales about new jobs and updated each other on their families.

Then they turned back the clock -- to a September Tuesday when their lives changed forever.

"It doesn't seem like 10 years," said Doug Brown as he wrapped his fingers around a coffee cup.

"No, it doesn't," said Stan Kapica, shaking his head.

Ten years ago, Brown and Kapica worked on the 70th floor of the World Trade Center's south tower, the second of the Twin Towers to be struck by a hijacked jetliner and the first to collapse. Along with a small team of their co-workers from the Morgan Stanley investment firm, they barely escaped with their lives.

They have since moved on - Kapica to Dallas and a job with an investment firm; Brown to San Francisco as a financial consultant who travels often to Texas.

But like so many others, they are inexorably bound by the decade-old memory of that azure-blue-perfect morning in lower Manhattan that turned so gray and flawed and splintered.

Their story is not necessarily typical of everyone's experience at the World Trade Center that tragic day. But it is emblematic of the physical and emotional trauma of the day and its aftermath - of how ordinary people performed extraordinary feats and how the intervening years have been a slow rebuilding of broken hearts, wounded souls and scarred memories.

On the first anniversary of the terror attacks, Brown and Kapica were central figures in a story in The Record about a team of workers from that floor who were only just beginning to rebuild their lives.

On the 10th anniversary, that team is as scattered as the dust from the trade center. Or, as Brown noted: "We all fell off as leaves and got blown in different directions,"

None works for Morgan Stanley anymore.

None works in Manhattan.

But all carry memories of that day.

"Our understanding of reality changed," Kapica said. "For me, the most horrendous memory of that day is seeing people forced to jump to their deaths. I still see those people jumping."

Brown remembers the deafening roar of the plane.

"It's a sound I'll probably never hear again," he said.

Both men still have trouble stitching together the meaning of the day and its place in their lives -- in particular, why they survived and others did not and how they feel about events that followed, such as the invasion of Iraq.

"I had this feeling instantly that I was going to be OK, that I was going to survive," Kapica said. "But I never thought the buildings would collapse. That was unfathomable."

Brown said he deliberately avoids bringing up the subject of 9/11.

"I make a conscious decision not to bring it up," said Brown, 64. "It doesn't seem relevant, and I don't want the discussion to become about me."

Bright skies, busy day

Kapica, who grew up in Verona and was living on Long Beach Island on Sept. 11, 2001, stayed the night before at the trade center's Vista Hotel. His Morgan Stanley team had scheduled an 8 a.m. meeting, and he did not want to be late when everyone gathered in a conference room with an expansive southeastern view overlooking Wall Street, the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brown, who normally commuted from his home in Summit, also took a room at the Vista. The group had serious business to discuss, but Brown was looking forward to trading a few jokes before the meeting with the team's resident comedian, Tom Swift.

On that day, Swift, 30, wore a new present from his mother - a college ring in honor of the master's degree he had recently earned by taking night courses at St. Peter's College. He left his wedding ring at home.

Alison Greeley, 29, and a native of Ridgewood, figured the meeting would be a good time to share some news - that she was pregnant with her first child.

The team's leader, Jack Kemp, 59, of Ridgewood, hoped the meeting would end quickly. He had another meeting to rush off to.

Kemp's assistant, Nancy Kennedy, 39, who had grown up with Greeley on the same Ridgewood street as Kemp, just wanted things to start promptly. She too had a busy day.

On the opposite side of the 70th floor, Kevin Perry, 32, of Ridgewood took a seat at his desk. He gazed out his window and took in the north tower's gleaming silver skin, silent and shimmering in the golden sun.

Near the 70th floor elevator bank, a substitute security guard, 43-year-old Dereck Lovell, a Guyanese immigrant who was earning $10 per hour, took his place at a podium around 8 a.m. The regular 70th floor guard had a doctor's appointment.

"I will never forget the morning," Lovell said. "It was a lovely morning. A nice, perfect morning."

That changed at 8:46 a.m.

From the corner of his eye, Perry saw the flash of an American Airlines jet as it struck the north tower's 95th floor. In their meeting room on the other side of the 70th floor, Kemp, Kennedy and the others heard a boom, then saw papers and smoke blowing past the windows.

Kennedy stood up and ended the meeting.

Kemp and Brown headed for their adjoining offices and picked up their phones. Greeley lingered in the hallway. Kapica grabbed his coat and briefcase.

From his office, Perry was transfixed by the scene before him. He saw a body fall, then another.

Sixteen minutes passed. At 9:02 a.m., another hijacked jet struck the south tower, its wing slicing through the 78th floor where Silvion Ramsundar, 31, a broker with Fuji Bank, waited for an elevator.

Ramsundar was tossed to the floor. Moments later, he looked up and saw flames curling through the ceiling. Then he felt a searing pain in his chest.

Kemp, who was on the phone with his wife, Kathy, at the couple's beach house in Mantoloking, was knocked out of his chair and across his office. He got up, grabbed the phone and told his wife he was fine. Then he headed for the door.

Brown, who was on the phone with his sister in Colorado because he couldn't reach his wife, also was knocked across the room. He got up and went into the hallway and found Greeley.

Greeley, her pregnancy still a secret, grabbed a desk in the hallway to steady herself as the building swayed, then announced she wanted to fetch her purse before leaving the building. Brown told her no, but then grabbed Greeley's hand and walked her to her office.

Kennedy, also in her office, grabbed her cellphone - then dropped it and accidently kicked it under a desk. Fearing she would waste time searching for it, she turned and left.

Swift headed for a stairway.

Kemp looped around the floor.

"I wanted to make sure everyone was moving out," he said.

On the north side, Kemp found Perry alone in his office, still staring at the north tower.

"Look at the fire in the windows," Kemp remembers Perry telling him.

Kemp raised his voice - to a level he had learned to reach as an Army officer almost 40 years earlier.

"You've got to go down now," he told Perry.

Perry turned, got up and headed for a stairwell. A dozen floors below, Perry's wife, Suzanne, also headed down the stairs from her office.

Kemp strutted back across the floor. Fire blazed in a coffee room. Ceiling tiles had fallen to the floor. The lights were out. He turned a corner and saw Brown, Kennedy, Kapica and Greeley waiting for him with a computer technician, Greg Lowe of Wayne.

"It was dark," Brown recalled. "And smoke was curling along the floor like a snake."

Instinctively, the group headed for a stairway - the one they used for fire drills.

But there was a problem: The stairway was blocked.

The group paused. Brown remembers fear rising in him.

And then, a voice.

And a flashlight.

It was the substitute security guard, Dereck Lovell.

He had found a clear stairway.

10 years of wondering

The memory of surviving a trauma can be a nurturing gift. It can also be a painful scar.

Why do some people find their way to safety and others do not?

For the Morgan Stanley workers on the 70th floor of the south tower, the memory of what happened to them on Sept. 11, 2001, has often meandered between both extremes.

In the decade since the attacks, the team that worked for Jack Kemp not only moved to new jobs - and, for some, new ZIP codes - but all have struggled to come to grips with their own 9/11 experiences.

Nancy Kennedy, now 49, finds she is still haunted by survivor's guilt.

"Why did some mothers and fathers not make it to safety and I did?" she asked one day recently as she sat in a Ridgewood coffee shop.

Kemp, now 69 and working part time for a small investment firm from his home in Vero Beach, Fla., talks readily about the day and even appeared in a History Channel documentary.

"It's cathartic," he said one recent morning while relaxing at the Mantoloking beach house he and his wife rented for the summer. "I actually find it good to talk about it. It gets it out of my system. But I don't talk about the bad parts."

Kapica, now 66, compares the impact of the 9/11 attacks to a searing event from his 20s - the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Perry, now 42 and the father of a son and daughter, works for a global financial firm in Singapore. He says he tries not to think of what he saw that day from his office window in the south tower.

"I saw people falling or jumping out of windows," Perry said. "It was a terrible experience. I never understood what post-traumatic stress was until after that event."

Greeley, now 39 and the mother of two sons, moved with her husband to Ridgefield, Conn., but stayed with Morgan Stanley until 2008.

She told few of her new neighbors about her escape from the south tower even though the memories had not disappeared.

"I could taste it and smell it," she said.

But sharing those feelings with strangers seemed awkward and cumbersome.

"Socially and gracefully, I didn't know how to put it out there," she said.

That curtain of reticence lifted when Greeley volunteered for a committee to build a 9/11 memorial in her new town.

Yet she still struggles with an even more personal question: How to tell her sons, Drew, 9, and Kieran, 7, about 9/11 and her own experience on that day. In particular, Greeley wonders how to tell Drew that his middle name - Thomas - is a tribute to Tom Swift, the only member of the team who never made it to safety.

Greeley and Swift were as different as their hometowns - Ridgewood and Jersey City, respectively. But they shared a common bond - they were both intense Yankees fans. Along with Brown, they also loved a good joke.

Minutes after learning that a jetliner had struck the north tower, Kemp remembers "Swifty" heading for an open stairwell while others worked the phones or waited for the team to assemble.

Kemp figured Swift would be one of the first out of the building. Brown still smiles as he remembers imagining that Swift would probably head for a local tavern to regale patrons with tales of his escape.

But Swift never made it.

Midway down the stairs, Swift stopped. The south tower was still relatively calm - the second hijacked plane had not struck yet.

Swift opened a door and asked to use a phone in an office to call his wife, Jill. After leaving a voicemail, witnesses said, Swift announced he would take an elevator rather than continue down the stairs.

Moments after the elevator door closed, a plane struck the south tower, letting loose a torrent of flaming jet fuel down the elevator shafts.

Swift was killed instantly. As with more than 1,100 of the 2,753 victims of the trade center attacks, Swift's remains were never identified - nor were any of his belongings found.

His wife, Jill Marsalla, however, still keeps the wedding ring he left behind that morning.

She has since remarried and is the mother of an 18-month-old daughter. She lives in Freehold, where her husband runs a firm that installs solar panels.

"It's always a part of me," Marsalla, 40, said of 9/11. "That's never going to change. It's always there because of what I lost. But does it control me? No."

For Marsalla, the struggle to come to grips with her first husband's death and figure out how to shape her own future was not easy. A major emotional obstacle was the fact that Tom's remains were never recovered.

"It's weird," she said. "We're so used to what happens when someone dies. You have a wake, a funeral. Even though Tom is gone, there was no finality to it."

In the first year after the attacks, Marsalla quit her job with the Hudson County Career Development Center and moved back with her parents. She tried taking classes toward a teaching degree but dropped out after her parents became ill.

A new marriage in 2004 and the birth of her daughter were turning points, Marsalla said.

"I have a new life," she said. "But my old life is still a part of my life. The memories never go away. It's not a bad thing."

After security guard Dereck Lovell pointed them to a clear stairway, the team wasted little time in scampering down the stairs.

Greeley and Kennedy went first - each clasping the other's hand.

Kemp was on their heels.

"I still have this clear memory of Jack being a presence behind us," Greeley said.

Kemp's memory is far more ominous.

"I kept seeing these large V-shaped cracks in the walls," he said. "I was afraid to tell Nancy and Alison. I didn't want to needlessly scare anyone.

Kapica and Brown brought up the rear. But after a half-dozen floors, they stopped. A man was leaning against a wall in pain.

It was Silvion Ramsundar, who had been waiting for an elevator on the 78th floor when the jet struck.

"He was burned and he was dirty," Brown recalled. "His head looked like a charcoal briquette when it gets hot. It was gray. I didn't even know what nationality he was."

Brown and Kapica noticed something else about Ramsundar. Blood was flowing from a deep gash just above his heart.

Kapica pressed tissues to the wound. Brown reached in his pocket for a handkerchief.

Then Brown and Kapica each took hold of Ramsundar's arms and walked him down the stairs to safety. In the ensuing weeks, Ramsundar would learn how lucky he was. Of the more than 200 people who worked on his floor, he was one of only 16 to survive.

Neither Kapica nor Brown calls himself a hero, however.

"We were just good Samaritans," Brown said. "The real heroes were the firefighters going up the stairs that morning."

Ramsundar, now 41, described the experience another way: "Stan and Doug saved my life."

He recovered from his wounds at his home in Queens. Doctors removed a piece of metal the size of a playing card that had lodged near his heart.

But other wounds soon emerged. Ramsundar and his wife, Nimmi, separated. She has custody of the couple's three children. He now lives with his mother in Queens but said he hopes to reconcile with his wife.

"The 9/11 attacks brought my wife and I closer," he said. "But it also divided us. Now I really don't like to talk about 9/11. To me, it's in the past. Some people like to say I'm a 9/11 survivor. Don't get me wrong, I'm lucky to be alive. But it's been hard, too."

A lifesaving choice

After Kemp's team left the 70th floor, Dereck Lovell stayed behind. He felt he needed to take one final look around the acre-sized floor of offices and cubicles.

Then he headed for the stairs.

By this point, the stairwell was virtually empty. Most of those who eventually escaped had already left.

But after a dozen or so flights of stairs, Lovell found two middle-aged men. He recognized them from the Morgan Stanley cafeteria, where he sometimes bought snacks.

Lovell noticed that both men seemed exhausted. Like Kemp, Lovell noticed that the stairwell walls were cracking. The building was breaking apart.

Lovell had a choice: Should he rush ahead or walk slowly with the men?

He stayed.

Lovell walked the men to the bottom of the stairs and the safety of firefighters. They were among the last people to escape from the south tower.

Today, Lovell, 53, lives in Maryland with his wife, Jacqueline, and commutes to his job as an overnight security guard at the World Bank in Washington.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Morgan Stanley gave him a $15,000 bonus check and two medals for bravery.

Few of his World Bank co-workers know of his 9/11 experience. Even when he applied for U.S. citizenship and was accepted, he did not say anything about his heroism.

"I did not want to be singled out for praise," he said recently over lunch in Washington. "I felt what I did on that day, it was done already. Who I saved and who I helped -- they are thankful, and I'm glad we are here. That's good enough for me. Anyway, it was not in my nature to run and leave those people. I couldn't live with myself if I did that. "

Lovell paused at the thought, then added a postscript of sorts.

"I'm trying to move on," he said. "Like everyone else."