“I’m sorry for bringing you into this crazy world,” Jenna Piccirillo recalls saying to her son, Vaughan.
Read more 25 years since September 11: the day the world changed
Although he was only a few months old, the mother turned him so he would only look at her in an act of protection against the chaos she was witnessing.
She was on the rooftop, watching in disbelief as the Twin Towers of New York collapsed. She felt grateful for her son, but vulnerable and, as she says, “hopeless about humanity.”
Like this, thousands of photographs captured the shock, horror, heroism, and humanity that the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, awakened.
The attack, carried out by Al Qaeda, left 2,977 fatalities (in addition to the 19 suicide terrorists) and triggered one of the largest rescue operations in United States history.
Behind each of those photographs is a person who lived through the collapse of the towers or escaped through the rubble. 25 years after the tragedy, this is the reconstruction of the lives of the protagonists of some of the photographs from that day.
Among those stories is Piccirillo’s, photographed by Alex Webb, from Magnum Photos agency, from the east bank of the East River, with her three-month-old son in a baby carrier, facing away from the smoke rising from Manhattan. That image became, over the years, one of the most cited portraits of that day.
Piccirillo was 31 years old and living in Brooklyn when, on the morning of September 11, 2001, she woke up to what sounded like thunder. She placed her three-month-old son, Vaughan, in his baby carrier and walked to the neighborhood café to get coffee.
“It was only then that I found out the Twin Towers had been attacked and that it was not an accident,” Piccirillo told La Tercera.
Piccirillo, now an interior designer based in Puerto Rico, said the photograph reminds her of the widespread devastation of that day. “We are a small spot on the map of all the people who lost their lives,” she said. It also reminds her, she added, that her son’s future turned out better than she could have imagined that morning.
Vaughan Piccirillo-Sealey was about 11 years old when his mother told him he appeared in a well-known 9/11 photograph.
“It was surreal. Is that really me?” he recalled thinking. As a college student, he realized that his mother had positioned the baby carrier so that he looked at her and not at the scene across the river.
“Obviously, my mother cares about me and my well-being, and she put me above the tragedy, and I think many parents would have done the same,” Vaughan said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“You can choose which story to focus on, and I think my mother chose those of love and care over despair,” Vaughan said then, now a 25-year-old banker living in Manhattan.
Other protagonists of 9/11 photographs agree on one thing. The moment the camera froze was just the beginning of a longer story, which included survivor’s guilt, physical and emotional rehabilitation, and bonds with strangers that ended up being crucial to staying alive.
Joanne “Jojo” Capestro, 39, was a sales assistant on the 87th floor of the North Tower when the building shook.
She went down the stairs with her colleagues, although stockbroker Harry Ramos stopped on the 30th floor to help someone. “I’ll see you outside,” she recalled telling him. Ramos was the only employee from her firm who did not make it out of the building.
Capestro managed to escape just as the South Tower collapsed.
“Everything was white when I opened my eyes,” she recounted. “I really thought I was dead.”
Photographer Phil Penman captured her minutes later, as she desperately searched for her colleagues.
Survivor’s guilt accompanied her for months, she told the New York media. “I was really, really bad,” she said. “It took me months to react and say, ‘I have to give my best.’”
In 2014, Capestro donated the dust-covered clothes she wore that day to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. A curator later recognized her in Penman’s photographs and introduced them. She is now an executive assistant at the financial firm Oppenheimer & Co.
In 2018, she asked Penman to photograph her wedding. “Phil was with me on the worst day of my life, and Phil was with me on one of the best days of my life,” Capestro said.
Srinath Jinadasa, an engineer with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, worked on the 74th floor of the North Tower.
Before fleeing, he did one thing: watered the flowers in his office because he feared a repeat of what happened after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when at noon on February 26 terrorists funded by an Al Qaeda member detonated a truck bomb in the North Tower’s underground.
That attack left six people dead and 1,042 injured.
On that occasion, he had left his plants dead for months. “In those circumstances, you don’t think logically, I guess,” Jinadasa said.
“You do things that don’t make sense.” When the dust cloud from the collapse cleared in front of him, in the lobby, he thought he was going to die.
“I’m still here,” he recalled thinking with surprise. He retired from the Port Authority in 2012 and now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, at 84 years old.
He says 9/11 is always present in his thoughts, especially because of the war in Afghanistan that the United States launched in response to the attacks and that ended in 2021, two decades after it began. The photograph hangs in his home.
Michael Sauer was 34 years old and a volunteer firefighter when he ran to Ground Zero to join search and rescue efforts.
He spent the day searching what firefighters called “the pile” for signs of life. “You walk around, alert to any noise or sign of life,” Sauer recounted. “That’s why you’re there, to try to help and, hopefully, get someone to safety.”
It was while rinsing his mouth at a faucet that photographer Yoni Brook took the photograph that would make him recognizable. Sauer, now 59, remains a volunteer firefighter with the Woodmere Fire Department and still sends a message to Brook every anniversary of the attack.
“We have a special bond,” Sauer said. “It’s a bond that arose from that day, and from him immortalizing me in history.”
Dominic Guadagnoli was a U.S. deputy marshal when he ran to the towers to help evacuate survivors.
At one point, he saw two exhausted men holding a woman about to faint and carried her in his arms, a scene photographer Gulnara Samoilova captured on camera.
The woman, he later learned, was Donna Spera, who had been thrown by the impact of the second plane on the 78th floor of the South Tower.
“Don’t let go of me, don’t let go of me,” he recalled her saying. He told her she would be fine and that she would soon see her family. “I was trying to make conversation in the middle of hell,” he recalled.
He carried her about 50 meters and helped get her into an ambulance before returning to assist others.
Minutes later, Guadagnoli was injured in the head and cornea when the South Tower collapsed. That night, back at home, he couldn’t sleep and heard fire trucks still heading to Ground Zero.
Through his contacts, he learned days later that Spera had survived, and later met with her and her husband for lunch. “For a long time, I had three triggers (for crises): planes, fire sirens, and any loud noise,” Guadagnoli said. “I was very startled. I would start shaking.” He says therapy helped him process what he experienced, although the anniversary of the attack still makes him nervous.
Now retired from the Marshals Service and living in Pensacola, Florida, he still sends flowers to Spera every September 11.
Shannon Stapleton was a freelance photographer when a Reuters editor asked him to go to the World Trade Center. He took photos of people fleeing and the collapse of the South Tower, until he saw paramedics pulling a man from the rubble.
He didn’t know at the time that the victim was Father Mychal Judge, chaplain of the New York Fire Department. “I immediately knew it was important,” he recalled. His digital camera, bought shortly before to improve his professional work, allowed him to review the photos immediately.
According to what he told the Journal, he believes that detail may have saved his life, because the certainty of having good shots dissuaded him from going further into the building. He then began thinking about his pregnant wife and fearing the other tower would collapse. He was two blocks away when it happened.
Days later, when the image and story of the chaplain were already circulating, Stapleton received a letter from the priest’s twin sister and niece.
“It made me cry,” he said. “They thanked me for risking my life and taking that photograph so the world could see the incredible person he was.”
Many called the photo a modern Pietà. “It was heavenly,” he said about the image. “It looks like how I imagine an angel would look. It was surreal.” Stapleton is now 57 years old and, according to his website, continues working as a Reuters photographer.
25 years after the attack, those stories regained relevance with the premiere of 9/11: Reunited, a National Geographic documentary miniseries made in collaboration with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, according to the specialized site Ars Technica.
The production brought together survivors whose paths had crossed that morning, including Bill Spade, a firefighter from Rescue Company 5 who was trapped under the rubble of the North Tower and managed to get out alive. “I’ve told my story at least 400 times and now, when I tell it, I also try to talk about what I haven’t fully said,” Spade told the Mexican newspaper Milenio.
“We don’t want these people to be forgotten,” Spade said.
