On 9/11, Luck Meant Everything

Jared Kotz, another attendee at that conference at Windows on the World, survived because a single publication was missing from his employee’s booth, so he offered to return to the office to fetch it. “I bid farewell to everyone and thought I would see them in an hour or less. I headed down the elevator,” he said later. “I walked into the office and called my London colleagues to let them know that everything but one box had arrived. I could see the time was 8:46. I remember thinking, Gee, I have plenty of time to get back downtown before the event starts. I was talking to one of my colleagues in London when I heard the plane go over.”

David Kravette, a broker at Cantor Fitzgerald, survived because one of the clients he was meeting with that morning had forgotten his driver’s license and needed to be checked in at the security desk; normally, he would have sent his assistant down, but she was eight and a half months pregnant, and he figured he was doing her a favor by not dispatching her to the lobby. Perhaps most amazingly, Monica O’Leary, who also worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, survived because the firm had laid her off not even a full 24 hours prior to the attacks. (She would later rejoin the firm after the attacks. Because all of the human-resources personnel who would have processed her layoff were killed on 9/11, she was never even taken off the payroll.)

Nicholas Reihner was supposed to have been aboard American Airlines Flight 11, his ride home from Boston to Los Angeles after vacationing in Maine, but he’d twisted his ankle while hiking in Bar Harbor and ended up missing the flight. The comedian Seth MacFarlane also had a ticket returning home after performing a gig in Rhode Island, but the travel agent had mistyped the time on his itinerary, and he showed up just a few minutes too late to catch the plane.

Later, at the Pentagon, the third hijacked plane hit a wedge of the building that had been upgraded to the highest security standards—meaning it was both well protected and largely vacant. “It was truly a miracle that the plane hit the strongest part of the Pentagon,” recalled one Army official, Philip Smith. “In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.”

In both the Pentagon and New York, fate played a key role in the escapes. Army Lieutenant Colonel Rob Grunewald was sitting in a conference room with his colleagues when American Airlines Flight 77 hit. “The plane came into the building and went underneath our feet, literally, by a floor,” he said later. “Where everybody went and how they get out of the room is very unique, because those are where decisions are made that are fatal, or cause injury, or cause mental fatigue, or great consternation. A bunch of my officemates that were in that meeting went in one direction and unfortunately didn’t make it. The person that sat to my right, the person that sat to my left apparently went out the door and took a right, and they went into the E-Ring, where they apparently perished. A decision to go in one direction or another was very important.” For his part, Grunewald paused for a minute to rescue a colleague, Martha Cardin, and thus was just a few steps behind the others leaving the damaged conference room. In the smoke, he and Cardin turned left instead of right—a decision that saved their lives.