Remains of the Day

September 11, 2006

5th Anniversary

Lives 'stuck' at Ground Zero

A flag.

A funeral card.

A steel cross.

A crumpled ID.

A memory -- of a young man's smile, a brother's generosity, a hijacker's guile.

These are some of what remains from that September day that began so golden, yet ended so gray.

9/11.

Where were you then?

And now?

"There is a journey, and today is not the same as yesterday," says Diane Horning of Scotch Plains, who lost her son at the trade center. "But many of us are stuck."

What follows are five stories from the last five years, each emblematic of where 9/11 has taken America and why, for some, the memory remains so painful still.

A day like no other

It is July 2006. Joe Szczepanski, a detective with the Port Authority police, leans forward in a booth at a Jersey City restaurant and tries to explain an enduring mystery.

"I don't know how I survived," he whispers.

Just like that, five years seem to vanish. Szczepanski returns to the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, with New York under a dome of blue sky, warmed by a pristine sun. A perfect day -- so it seemed.

Two months earlier, Szczepanski, who grew up in Bayonne and now lives in Warren County, graduated from the Port Authority Police Academy. On Sept. 11, he reported to his post at the PATH station in Jersey City with 18 other officers. It was 6:45 a.m.

About 90 minutes later on Manhattan's Hudson and Houston streets, Diane Horning's husband, Kurt, walked into a building where he worked as an editor for a legal publisher. If anything distinguished his office, it was the view -- of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers that rose like a tuning fork.

The Hornings' 26-year-old son, Matthew, who lived in Hoboken, worked as a data-processing administrator for Marsh & McLennan on the 95th floor of the north tower.

In that same north tower, 27 floors below Matthew Horning's office, Frank Carvill of Carlstadt normally would have been at his desk as a Port Authority paralegal at 8:45. But he already was on his way to an appointment in Brooklyn.

Twenty miles away, in Paterson, Mohamed el-Atriss opened the door of his Market Street office, where he sold unofficial ID cards and drivers' licenses.

Many customers were illegal immigrants. Others had legitimate visas, including two Muslims who dropped a few weeks earlier for photo IDs: Khalid al- Mihdhar and Abdulaziz Alomari.

El-Atriss remembered al Mihdhar in particular. The young man seemed impatient when el-Atriss did not produce a card fast enough. He also wanted his photograph and application back.

El-Atriss, who came to the United States as a legal immigrant in 1980, was a naturalized U.S. citizen. He did not think he was breaking any laws with his unofficial ID cards, which authorities would later call "fakes." He advertised in newspapers for all to see. What's more, his office was across the street from City Hall.

In his Little Ferry apartment, Frank Silecchia wondered where his next job might be.

A construction laborer, Silecchia toiled most of the summer dismantling a Manhattan power plant. On Sept. 11, he planned to help with small repair jobs at a friend's house.

The first hijacked plane hit the north tower at 8:46 a.m. The second struck the south tower at 9:03 a.m. At 9:37 a.m., a third hit the Pentagon. Still later, another smashed into a Pennsylvania field. Among the 19 hijackers were two men who visited el-Atriss in Paterson, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Abdulaziz Alomari.

Team's sole survivor

Officer Joe Szczepanski's radio jumped: Get to the trade center.

Kurt Horning's phone rang. His wife, Diane, at home in Scotch Plains, asked whether Matthew was at work yet.

Kurt reminded Diane that Matthew never got to work before 9 a.m. Then he hung up and phoned Matthew's fiancée.

Yes, Matthew was at his desk, she said. He had already sent his future bride a "good morning" e-mail.

"I was doing the old wishing game," Kurt remembers thinking as he looked out his window at the billowing smoke from the north tower. "Maybe he went down to get a coffee."

In Carlstadt, Frank Carvill's sister, Peggy, a chiropractor, dropped in on their elderly mother at the family's home on Passaic Avenue. Peggy Carvill-Liguori now lived with her husband amid Kinnelon's hills, but she often returned to the home her father, a mason from Ireland, built for his wife and four kids.

Listening to the news, Peggy was suddenly taken back to February 1993 -- to the morning a truck bomb exploded in the trade center parking garage. That day, her brother helped workers down the stairs in choking smoke.

And today? Yes, Frank knew how to cope with danger. He was, after all, a sergeant in the New Jersey National Guard.

But why hadn't he called?

The south tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., then the north tower at 10:28 a.m.

Szczepanski heard the rumble as he escorted workers through the mall beneath the trade center. He remembers yelling one word to the five other Port Authority cops on his rescue team: "Run!"

Szczepanski felt something hit his leg, then he leaped over a waist-high wall and down an escalator shaft to the PATH train station.

He tucked into a ball amid a concrete avalanche.

Then everything was black and quiet.

Szczepanski - alive -- was in an air pocket formed by a concrete slab that fell across the escalator shaft. But he couldn't stand and couldn't see.

He inched up the narrow tunnel and felt something wet.

A body.

He turned on his flashlight. Black dust hung in the air. "I could see maybe a couple of feet," Szczepanski said.

Then he heard a noise -- another officer.

The two tried to walk. Wires and pipes poked their faces and arms. They passed a lifeless woman, sprawled on the floor, a dead man buried up to his waist.

Then, from a clothing store: the voice of a clerk. His colleague was alive but trapped.

The cops had a choice: They couldn't move the debris to free the man. Why not get help and return?

They never made it back. Only minutes after reaching a nearby street, the second tower fell.

Szczepanski remembers running up West Street, chased by a gray cloud. Finally, the cloud dissipated. Szczepanski stopped, caught his breath, surveyed the dust-covered street, then his blue uniform, blood-soaked and gray now.

He didn't see any of the other five cops on his rescue team. They were all dead.

Dashed hopes

Just after noon, at her mother's Carlstadt home, the phone rang. It was Peggy's brother, Frank Carvill.

Yes, he was OK. He had just left the trade center in a van when he heard the explosion of the first plane. He saw the second plane strike the south tower while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.

In Scotch Plains, Diane Horning checked the Internet. Someone had already posted a note that Matthew was safe.

But she quickly learned the information was wrong.

Then, the phone rang.

"Hi, Mom," a voice said.

"Oh, Matt, where are you?" Diane remembers asking -- only to have her hopes dashed again.

It was her brother-in-law, calling Diane's mother, whom he routinely called "Mom." He had dialed the wrong number.

"I had great expectations that Matthew would make it out," Diane remembered.

"He was young. He could run down those stairs. I was just cheering him out. "

He never made it.

By October 2001, Matt's remains had not been found, but the Hornings held a memorial service anyway at a Catholic church.

Five months later, the New York City Medical Examiner's Office called. A small piece of Matt's body had been identified.

Not ready for a funeral, the Hornings asked a funeral director to keep the fragment.

During the next three years, the Hornings received three more small pieces of Matt's body - or so they thought. In 2004, the Medical Examiner's Office called again. One of the pieces had been mistakenly identified. Could the Hornings return it?

They did.

In May 2005, a week after Mothers' Day, they finally felt ready for Matt's funeral.

"His remains fit in a small box," Diane said. I held it on my lap."

Ground Zero shrine

By October 2001, Frank Silecchia, the Little Ferry construction laborer, was a bit of a legend.

His new work site was the trade center, now called Ground Zero. At dawn, only days after the towers fell, Silecchia discovered what has become one of Ground Zero's most iconic symbols - a steel cross, nearly 20 feet high standing amid the twisted, burnt pile of girders, rebar and pilings.

"It took my despair and my hardships of what I had seen and what I was doing, and it rejuvenated me," Silecchia said.

The cross became one of Ground Zero's first shrines, with the rubble cavern where it was found nicknamed "God's House."

By October, the cross had been pulled from the debris and mounted atop a bridge abutment on West Street. On St. Valentine's Day 2002, it was moved to a concrete stand near Church Street. It's still there but is the subject of a highly politicized debate about mixing religious symbols with a still-to-be-built Ground Zero memorial.

Silecchia worked at Ground Zero for a year, then moved on to other construction jobs. Meanwhile, he signed up with hundreds of other Ground Zero workers for special medical tests.

He seemed fine at first. Then, in 2002, he got bad news: His lungs had lost 20 percent of their capacity. Two years later, they had lost another 20 percent, he said.

He stopped working and focused full time on preserving the cross from Ground Zero - "my cross," he calls it now.

A marked man

In Paterson, Mohamed el-Atriss worried about his own preservation.

Days after the 9/11 attacks, an FBI agent visited his office. Did he remember the two Muslim men who purchased an ID card and unofficial driver's license from him during the summer of 2001?

El-Atriss turned over his files, and the FBI never arrested him.

But local police were watching. Undercover teams from the Passaic County Sheriff's Department, as well as police from Bergen and Essex counties, were buying his ID cards and licenses as part of a crackdown on phony documents.

Before 9/11, law enforcement authorities often turned a blind eye to businesses like el-Atriss's. But with a renewed focus on anti-terror security, police focused on el-Atriss.

Not long after 9/11, the FBI, with the help of Passaic sheriff's detectives, planted an electronic surveillance device inside a printer el-Atriss had ordered so they could monitor who he was making documents for.

"They never told me this," el-Atriss said recently, though his lawyer, Miles Feinstein, says el-Atriss promised to "keeps his eyes and ears open" for other terrorists.

The investigation never linked el-Atriss to any terror plots, federal and local law enforcement sources now say. Still, local police felt el-Atriss was violating New Jersey laws against forged documents.

In July 2002, Passaic County Sheriff Jerry Speziale notified reporters of a major raid with possible terror connections.

Sheriff's officers burst into el-Atriss's office and home - but he wasn't there.

Several weeks earlier, he had left with his wife and four children for Egypt.

Hearing of the raid, el-Atriss cut short his vacation and returned alone to America. Police arrested him as he stepped off the plane.

El-Atriss spent almost six months in jail, his case becoming one of the first in U.S. history in which local authorities used secret evidence, which they said was linked to national security, to raise his bail to $500,000 -- a figure usually set for murder suspects.

In early 2003, el-Atriss pleaded guilty to selling false documents. He was sentenced to five years' probation and fined $15,000.

In July 2003, authorities finally released their secret evidence, which included phone records from two more hijackers who contacted el-Atriss and bank records from a Jersey City check-cashing company whose owner was suspected by the FBI of having terror links. Records also showed the check-cashing service had been a mailing address used by several hijackers and, years earlier, by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whose followers carried out the 1993 trade center bombing.

Police said their records showed el-Atriss was a co-owner of the check cashing service. But el-Atriss maintains the records are misleading. He says he considered investing in the firm in the mid-1980s but dropped out after only two weeks. His name, however, remained on corporate papers.

"It's incredible what happened to me," el-Atriss now says. "They took an innocent person away from his family."

The Soldier

On March 20, 2003, a military coalition led by the U.S. invaded Iraq. So far, more than 2,650 U.S. soldiers have been killed.

After the 9/11 attacks, Frank Carvill went back to work in the Port Authority legal department. But by mid-2003, he knew his other job in the National Guard might take up more time.

He was called to active duty with his Lawrenceville-based unit by late 2003 and faced a choice: Because of his seniority, he told his sister Peggy, he could volunteer for assignment to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to Iraq. He told his sister something else: If anything happened to him, she would be the first in his family the Army would visit.

He chose Iraq.

"He didn't want to ask another soldier to take his place," Peggy recalled. "He felt it was his duty to not let his fellow soldiers down or to ask someone to do something he would not do himself."

Also, another factor weighed on her brother: He had never married. He wanted to let another soldier with a wife and children to head for safer duty in Guantanamo Bay.

Carvill's artillery unit landed in Kuwait in February 2004. A month later, he was patrolling Baghdad's streets in a Humvee.

Soon Carvill phoned home with good news. He was given time off to return to Carlstadt in early June 2004. Peggy made plane reservations for her brother to visit relatives in Florida.

Then Carvill called again -- with bad news.

A fellow soldier needed to return home to attend a funeral. Carvill gave up his vacation and stayed in Iraq.

On the evening of June 4, 2004, Peggy was cooking dinner at her Kinnelon home. From the next room, the TV news broadcasted a report that five U.S. soldiers had been killed that day in an attack on a Humvee patrol in Baghdad.

"I remember looking at the TV and seeing a soldier's body," she said.

Minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was an Army colonel and a chaplain.

"I started screaming," Peggy said. "I knew exactly why they were here."

Frank, had been killed in that Baghdad attack.

He was 51 - one of the oldest U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq.

Too much toxic dust

By late 2004, Frank Silecchia had no job, no home -- except a trailer parked on a friend's lawn just off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn.

But the cross was still at Ground Zero.

"My main goal in life is to keep that cross," he said.

A friend, former Port Authority Police Lt. William Keegan of Toms River, whose book, "Closure," chronicles the Ground Zero cleanup, sighs when he hears of Silecchia's mission.

"Frankie found peace in that cross," Keegan said. "But he has to learn to take that peace and figure out another way he can feel it. That cross is just a sign to point you in the right direction."

Silecchia hasn't worked on a construction site in more than two years. His breathing is getting worse, he said -- the result of inhaling too much toxic dust at Ground Zero.

"I stay up at night thinking," Silecchia recently said. "It bothers me that I can't work like I used to."

Around his neck, he wears a miniature replica of the Ground Zero cross.

Mohamed el-Atriss now lives in a home on the edge of an industrial park in Middlesex County, where he is trying to keep a low profile and build a new career as a business broker for stores. He recently lost a job when a prospective boss discovered his connection to the hijackers.

In a recent Spanish-language newspaper in Paterson, an ad appeared for another company, selling the same unofficial ID cards and drivers' licenses el-Atriss used to sell.

"Why don't they crack down on that?" he asked.

"Your country is my country and my children's country," he added. "I am an American citizen. When I took the oath, I meant every word of it."

And his memory of 9/11?

"Unfortunately, I am the person who handed an ID to a hijacker," he said.

Peggy Carvill-Liguori keeps the U.S. flag that draped her brother's coffin. A portion of Passaic Avenue in Carlstadt has been named after Frank, along with a street in Queens where he volunteered as an immigration counselor for an Irish community group.

Later this month, Peggy will hold a dinner-dance to raise money for a scholarship fund in her brother's name. This year's scholarship recipient is a young woman studying to be a nurse.

Joe Szczepanski reports to work mostly in civilian clothes now -- the uniform of a detective. But at home, he has created a 9/11 memorial inside his dress uniform hat.

Of the 18 cops who reported with Szczepanski to the PATH station on 9/11, 13 were killed -- including the five from Szczepanski's rescue team. He keeps all their funeral memorial cards inside his hat.

Diane and Kurt Horning still wonder about their son's remains. Besides the tiny fragments they buried, they were later given his bent ID card and the contents of his wallet - all found in the rubble.

Their focus now is the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and a mound of dust left when trade center rubble was cleaned.

"There are human remains in that dust," Diane said recently.

They have since filed a federal suit to remove the trade center dust and place it in a proper burial ground. They also make regular visits there, but visits bring little solace.

On a hot morning in early August, the Hornings stood at the edge of a Fresh Kills mound, the dirt dotted with sprigs of crab grass, wild flowers and scraps of the trade center.

Diane watched a garbage truck rumble by, its wheels kicking up dust.

"Matthew is here," she said, sadly.

"Yes," Kurt answered.