Bob Ware, Senior Account Executive at KMIR News was working in New York City on 9/11, “It was a beautiful fall morning, I remember it,” he says.
He opened up an old briefcase that has remained closed since the day after 9/11 the evening of this anniversary. As he opened it, he found the newspapers he stored there on 9/12, 2001, memories of living and working there came flooding back.
“I hadn’t seen that in 17 years and to think about the heartache, the terrible loss and the pain and suffering that people went through, it’s real, and it’s real 17 years later,” he says.
He says everything about that morning seemed ordinary, “it was a regular old morning commuting in New York City. I took the train into Central Station.”
Until it wasn’t.
“Got a call from the office the Trade Center’s been hit. You’re trying to ingest that and your mind is just having trouble with these pictures and an instant later a second plane hit the other tower. All of the traffic had stopped and everyone was out of their cars and everyone was pointing and looking south. You could see the smoke and all of lower Manhattan.”
He says took one of the last trains out of the city, and didn’t look back. But the tragedy has never left him or the people he came face to face with when he got off of that train.
“All the moms and their strollers sitting there hoping to see their spouse coming down those stairs, hoping that they’d come home, a lot of them didn’t.”
Nearly 3,000 people would die that day. Among them, his friend.
“The Johnson family, Scott Johnson, who was just identified through forensic technology, just great folks.”
Also among those who died, 343 firefighters.
“I mean everyone’s running like hell from this place because it was hell and these guys are running into it, extraordinary,” he says.
He says through tears he’ll never forget that day, or what the American people are truly made of.
“The bright spot coming out of such a tragedy seeing the common American spirit on demonstration a sad day in american history, but a bright day for the American people.”
