Surviving 9/11 was 'just the first piece of the journey'

September 11 survivors bear scars and the weight of unanswerable questions

Trapped deep in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, Will Jimeno lived through the unthinkable. Twenty years later, he's still living with it.

A brace and a quarter-sized divot on his left leg reflect the injuries that ended his police career, a lifetime dream. He has post-traumatic stress disorder.

He keeps shelves of mementos, including a cross and miniature twin towers fashioned from trade center steel. He was portrayed in a movie and wrote two books about enduring the ordeal.

“It never goes away, for those of us that were there that day,” he says.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed when hijackers in Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network rammed four commercial jets into the trade center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001. Yet an estimated 33,000 or more people successfully evacuated the stricken buildings.

They navigated mountains of smoky stairs in the World Trade Center's twin towers or streamed out of a flaming Pentagon. Some fled an otherworldly dust cloud at ground zero.

Others willed their way out of pitch-dark rubble.

Sept. 11 survivors bear scars and the weight of unanswerable questions. Some grapple with their place in a tragedy defined by an enormous loss of life.

They get told to “get over” 9/11. But they also say they have gained resilience, purpose, appreciation and resolve.

“One of the things that I learned,” Jimeno says, “is to never give up.”

'It's Almost Like You're Reborn'

It wasn't Bruce Stephan's first incredibly close call.

In 1989, his car got perilously wedged on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and the upper deck collapsed while he was driving across.

Twelve years later, the engineer and lawyer was settling into his workday on the 65th floor of the trade center's north tower when one of the planes crashed about 30 stories above .

Only after his roughly hourlong walk down the crowded stairs did Stephan learn that another plane had hit the south tower — the building where his wife, Joan, also an attorney, worked on the 91st floor. Above the impact zone.

Unable to reach her by cell phone, Bruce Stephan dashed to a payphone and called her relatives, who told him she'd gotten out.

Then the south tower fell, and Stephan's fear spiked anew. Had Joan been caught in the collapse? Hours later, he finally learned that she was OK. (At least one other couple, elevator operators Arturo and Carmen Griffith, also survived; their story inspired a recent film, “Lovebirds of the Twin Towers.”)

“My experience from the first disaster was that it's a strangely happy moment when you know that you've survived," Bruce Stephan says.

“It's almost like you're reborn... to know that you're alive and that you still have a shot at life, and here's your chance to do something.”

“When it happened a second time, it's just like, Oh, my God.'”

After the earthquake, the New York City natives resolved to change their workaholic lives. After 9/11, they did.

Within two months, the couple moved to Essex, a northern New York town of roughly 700 people. While telecommuting and sometimes actually commuting, they made time for other things — church, a book club, amateur theater, gardening, zoning meetings, a local newsletter. They cherished a newfound sense of community.

But a work opportunity pulled them back to San Francisco in 2009. They loved it, until the pandemic made them rethink their lives again.

“One of the things that that we discovered as a result of the disasters was that being in a community ... is maybe the biggest reward you can have,” Stephan, 65, says from their front porch in Essex. They moved back last year.

'I Was a Walking Zombie'

Désirée Bouchat pauses by one of the inscribed names on the 9/11 memorial: James Patrick Berger. She last saw him on the 101st floor of the trade center's south tower.

“Some days, it feels like it happened yesterday,” she says.

At first, people figured the plane crash at the north tower was accidental. There was no immediate evacuation order for the south tower. But Berger ushered Bouchat and other Aon Corp. colleagues to the elevators, then turned back to check for more people.

Just as Bouchat exited the south tower, another plane slammed into it. Nearly 180 Aon workers perished, including Berger.

For a while, Bouchat told everyone, including herself: “I'm fine. I'm alive.”

But “I was a walking zombie,” she says now.

She couldn't multitask anymore. Remarks that used to bother her stirred no reaction. She was functioning, but through a fog that took more than a year to lift.

Bouchat eventually felt that she needed to talk about 9/11. The Springfield, New Jersey, resident has now led about 500 tours for the 9/11 Tribute Museum (it's separate from the larger National September 11 Memorial & Museum).

Bruce Powers has traveled from Alexandria, Virginia, to lead Tribute Museum tours, too. And every Sept. 11, the 82-year-old repeats his seven-mile (11 km) walk home from the Pentagon after the attack that killed 184 people, 10 of whom he knew.

The walk, the tours and hearing other guides' personal stories “serve well in helping me deal with what happened,” says Powers, a now-retired Navy aviation planner.

The public hasn't fully recognized the losses survivors felt, says Mary Fetchet, a social worker who lost her son Brad on 9/11 and founded Voices Center for Resilience, a support and advocacy group for victims' families, first responders and survivors. “Although they are still living, they're living in a very different way.”

'I Couldn't Figure Out How I Got Out of There Alive'

For a time after 9/11, Police Department Officer Mark DeMarco replayed the what-ifs in his mind. If he'd gone right instead of left. A bit earlier. Or later.

“I couldn't figure out how I got out of there alive," he says.

After helping evacuate the north tower, the Emergency Service Unit officer was surrounded by a maze of debris when parts of the skyscraper tumbled onto a smaller building where he'd been directed. Some officers with him were killed.