Remembering September 11, 2001: Eye-Witness Accounts

By Tina Ray
Staff Writer

On Sept. 11, 2001, Elethia Baldwin and Lee Benton Barnes both found themselves in the throes of the World Trade Center disaster. Baldwin, then an accountant with J. P. Morgan in Brooklyn, had taken the subway into the WTC from Newark, normally a 15 minute trip. She had gone to work at The Chase Manhattan Plaza early that morning. The time was 8:34 a.m. She remembers precisely because she’d commented to a colleague that she normally was never that early, and aside from an important speech to be given by the CEO of the company on that fateful day, she would not have been.

At 8:45 a.m., the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, Mass., crashed into the North Tower of the WTC. Baldwin and Barnes missed that horrific sight, but would not be spared that atrocity on the next occasion. At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Fight 175, also out of Boston, crashed into the South Tower of the WTC. Baldwin says, “I saw rubble toppling from the building and saw the second plane hit and [we] were screaming and crying.” She did not know if another plane would collide into the building she was in, only that she was on the 22nd floor and frightened. Authorities ordered the occupants on lockdown because of the uncertainty of what may lay ahead. Baldwin phoned her mother to let her know that she was all right and was able to make a few other calls until the circuits were overloaded by people wishing to get such news to their loved ones.

“People were nervous about friends in the towers. It was chaos. Later, we got the word that certain trains were back in circulation. I’d never been so happy to be back in Newark. It was kind of shocking,” Baldwin comments. When she returned to work a week later, she says, “You could still smell whatever was in the air. You could see the smut on the buildings. Tankers were driving down Wall Street like a battleground.”

Lee Benton Barnes, a trucker who was at the corner of Spring and 7th, was making a delivery for Remco Bindery.

“I’d gone upstairs to the 10th floor. I heard from someone that a plane had hit the WTC. I saw the second plane hit and thought it was debris falling, but realized it was people jumping,” Barnes says.

Like Baldwin, he says “it was chaos.” Once outside, he took a construction worker to retrieve a jack hammer from his truck so the man could help dig people out. “I’d never seen New York that quiet,” Barnes says. “They (Port Authority) wouldn’t let trucks through tunnels because they were scared there would be a bomb in the truck. I had to take the bridges. It was unbelievable.”

When asked about the impact of what September 11 means to both Baldwin and Barnes almost two years later, Baldwin explains, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to work on 9/11 this year. It’s such a somber day. I didn’t go last year. It’s just too moving there. I can’t see myself going on as though it were a normal day because of everything we witnessed. It’s still too new.” How close she came to being a victim is apparent when Baldwin said how she’d just taken the job a J. P. Morgan’s Brooklyn branch only a month prior to the attack. She’d previously worked on Wall Street for three-and-a half to four years, in the midst of where the attacks occurred.

Barnes verifies her sentiments, “It’s worse than visiting a graveyard; it’s something you’ll never forget.”

This story is especially touching to me because what you would not know unless I’d revealed it to you is that Elethia Baldwin is my maternal first cousin and Lee Benton Barnes is my maternal uncle. They are members of my family and my heart bleeds not only as I type this story but in the sheer remembrance of what they have conveyed to me. I can not begin to imagine the gaping hole that the loss of loved ones from that dark day in America have left for their families. Imagine a light, or lights, extinguished by the horrors of someone else’s stupidity and inhumanity toward his fellow man. Nothing America has ever done would dignify or justify this horror heaped on her. I pray for those who still live with the irrefutable knowledge that 9/11 was not just a date, but a day of emergency in their lives.