September 11, 2026 • 34 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Lock and load.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
The Michael Derry Show is on the air.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
25 years ago this morning.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
846.
Speaker 5 (00:31):
American Flight 11 goes into the North Tower. 17 minutes later,
United 175 hits the South. By then, the whole country
is watching.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
937.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Flight 77 goes into the Pentagon.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
959.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The South Tower comes down. 56 minutes after it was hit.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
1003. Over a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania... 40 passengers and
(01:01):
crew who had called home and knew, take the plane back.
It never reaches Washington. 1028, the North Tower falls. 102 minutes,
first plane to last tower.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
2,977 people.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
Firefighters who went up while everybody else came down. And
more than 15,000 people who walked out of those towers
alive because somebody in a helmet was climbing the stairs
past them. 25 years ago this morning.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
This just into our newsroom, a plane has crashed into
the World Trade Center. They just played the tape again.
It is horrific.
Speaker 5 (01:48):
A second plane the size of a passenger jet crashed
flying into the second tower of the World Trade Center.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our
nation into chaos and retreat.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
But they have failed.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
Our country is strong. Another plane has been hijacked from
out of Dulles. It's turned around and it's heading for Washington.
So immediately speculation begins. Is it going to be the
White House? The White House is too small, too hard
to find from here. The Capitol building is easy to see,
but You know, there aren't a lot of people in
(02:20):
the Capitol building at any one time. The only building
that is easy to find from the air that has
a lot of people in it, the largest office building
in the world, the Pentagon. Within a couple of minutes,
I began to hear the sound of a jet engine.
And it was pretty clear this plane was on full
(02:41):
throttle as if it were taken off. But Instead of
the sound diminishing with time, it just kept getting louder
and louder and louder, and we realized this is really happening.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Tonight I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve,
for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all
whose sense of safety and security has been threatened, and
I pray they will be comforted by a power greater.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Than any of us.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
Spoken through the ages in Psalm 23, even though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
fear no evil, for you are with me.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
There's facts and figures and pounds of steel, and there's
how hot things were and how many people died. But
to me, the stories that matter are the individual stories.
Father Michael Judge, he prayed the same prayer every single
day of his life. And it went like this, Lord,
(03:37):
take me where you want me to go. Let me
meet who you want. want me to meet. Tell me
what you want me to say and keep me out
of your way. His name, as I said, was Michael Judge.
I want to be clear because that's kind of confusing.
He's a priest, Father Michael Judge. He's not a judge.
(04:01):
He was 68, a Franciscan friar for Ramon. No, not
that kind of friar. a Franciscan friar for 47 years,
a priest for 40, and chaplain to the New York
City Fire Department since 1992. Remember, this is 2001, so
(04:23):
he's been there a little less than 10 years. Born
in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants out of the countryside. His
father died when he was six years old. He went
out and shined shoes outside Penn Station to help feed
his mother and his sisters when he was six. He
(04:43):
was an alcoholic, got sober in 78, stayed sober 23 years.
He talked about it openly. He thought it was important
that people know it might help somebody. During the AIDS crisis,
when hospital staff wouldn't touch those with AIDS, Michael Judge
walked in and put his hands on them and anointed them.
(05:04):
He walked New York in a brown Franciscan robe and
knew the homeless by name, handed out his own money
until he didn't have any more. The night of September 10th,
he preached at a firehouse in the Bronx. The last
homily he ever gave, the night before 9-11, he said,
You do what God has called you to do. You
(05:25):
show up. You put one foot in front of the other.
He's talking to firefighters. No matter how big the call,
no matter how small, You have no idea what God
is calling you to do. He said that on a
Monday night, and Tuesday morning he put on his chaplain's
gear and he went downtown. Nobody made him do that.
(05:46):
That wasn't in the job description. That wasn't required. A
68-year-old priest. He could have stayed at the friary and prayed,
but he went. He walked into the lobby of the
North Tower where the fire department had set up its
command post. and he stayed there, praying over firemen, giving
(06:08):
last rites to men who were about to walk up
100 flights of stairs and not come down alive. At
9.59 in the morning, the South Tower came down. The
force of it tore through that lobby, and Father Michael
Judge was killed. A New York police lieutenant named Bill
(06:28):
Cosgrove found him on the floor. Five men picked him
up and carried him out of that building. Two firemen,
a police lieutenant, a fire department EMT, and one civilian
who just happened to be standing there. A Reuters photographer
named Shannon Stapleton took that picture. You've seen it. Everybody's
(06:50):
seen it. Five filthy, exhausted men. carrying a dead priest
out of the smoke in a chair. They call it
the American Pieta after Michelangelo, Mary holding the body of
(07:11):
her son. It's a powerful imagery, man. They carried him
to St. Peter's Church a few blocks away, and they
laid him down in front of the altar. He is
listed as victim 000. The first one. Hundreds of people
(07:35):
died before Michael Judge, the friar, did that morning. But
his was the first body they pulled out. First one
carried from the carnage. The first death certificate signed. At
his funeral, apparently, Fellow priest stood up and said, we
(07:59):
come to bury his hands, but not his good works.
We come to bury his heart, but not his love.
Never his love. 25 years ago this morning, a man
who asked God every day to send him where he
was needed, got sent.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
We will never forget 25 years ago this morning, the
Michael Berry Show. 25 years ago this morning, Michael Benfonte
started down from the 81st floor of the North Tower.
On 68, he found a woman named Tina Hansen sitting
in a motorized wheelchair, 41 years old, waiting. On the
(08:45):
floor next to her was an emergency evacuation chair, still
strapped up. Nobody had ever used it. Benfonte figured out
how it worked. He and a co-worker named John Sequeira
strapped her in and picked her up. 68 flights. It
took them almost an hour. Near the bottom, a fireman
took the back end. They carried her through the lobby
(09:08):
and put her in an ambulance on the West Side Highway.
Minutes later, the tower came down and Benfonte dove under
a truck. All three of them lived. Years afterward, he
said this. For whatever measure of human cruelty that exists
in the world, there's a hundredfold measure of human decency
ready to respond to it.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I can hear you.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
The rest of the world hears you.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And the people....
Speaker 4 (09:37):
And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Of us soon.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I don't know if you heard the interview with Todd
Beamer's father this week, a couple days ago. Oh, Todd
Beamer is the let's roll fellow.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
It....
Speaker 2 (10:00):
You can find it on the Internet.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
It's out there.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
At about 20 minutes to 11, 25 years ago today,
September 11, 2001, a 26-year-old Air National Guard lieutenant named
Heather Penny said, climbed into an F-16 at Andrews Air
Force Base outside Washington and took off with the mission
(10:26):
to bring down a passenger airliner full of American citizens.
That is not something that you are prepared to do
before that day. Not emotionally. She had no missiles. There
hadn't been time to load them. All she had was
(10:46):
the gun in the nose of that airplane. And the
only thing in the gun was about 100 rounds of
training ammunition, practice bullets, lead, nothing that could bring down
a jetliner. So she and her flight lead worked out
(11:07):
the only plan available. He was a lieutenant colonel named
Mark Sassville. And as they're pulling on their flight gear,
he looks at her and says, I'll take the cockpit.
And she decided on her own, without a word, that
she would take the tail. Understand what those two sentences mean.
(11:32):
They were going to fly their own airplanes into an airliner.
He didn't say, I'll take the cockpit of the plane
we're flying to. He said, I'll take the cockpit of
the plane in the air that we're going to take down.
And she said, I will crash into the tail. They
(11:57):
just said, I'll take the cockpit, I'll take the tail.
Think about that for a moment. That was it. Ram
the plane to crash it so it could not do
any more damage. She said it about as plainly as
a human being can say it. We wouldn't be shooting
it down. We'd be ramming the aircraft. I would essentially
(12:17):
be a kamikaze pilot. When SAS and I took off,
we believed that if we were successful, this was a
one-way mission. And this is the one that gets me.
Refusing the mission never crossed my mind. It just simply didn't.
She was 26 years old. She had been in that
(12:38):
squadron about nine months, green as grass. Wet behind the ears,
as they say. The first and only woman ever in
the 121st Fighter Squadron. Her daddy was an Air Force
colonel who flew 139 combat missions in Vietnam and then
flew for the airlines. And she wanted to be what
he was. Somebody asked her once about ejecting, punching out
(13:02):
at the last second. She said, no, you only got
one chance. You don't want to eject and then miss.
She was going to stay with the plane all the
way in and crash the thing. Here's the part nobody
tells you. They never found Flight 93. By the time
those two jets got airborne, the passengers had already taken
that plane down in a field in Pennsylvania 30-some minutes earlier,
(13:30):
but they didn't know that yet. She flew for four
hours and found nothing, landed, got a fully armed jet,
went back up for four more. You know what she
calls that day? A failure. Her words, you have to understand,
in my view, we were a mission failure because we
didn't get there in time. 25 years, and that's how
(13:53):
she grades herself. Every time somebody tries to call her
a hero, she will not have it. We weren't the
heroes that day. The passengers on Flight 93 were the heroes.
Years later, she's a mother now, two daughters. Would you
still get in that plane?
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Absolutely. even with daughters, even with my life now. She said,
I served, and I'll tell you that the thing about
the American military that our enemies have never once understood
is that we do not train for suicide missions because
(14:32):
we value our people too much to spend them. And
on September 11th, a 26-year-old girl, because she's still a
girl to me, she's still practically a kid to me,
from the D.C. Guard climbed into a jet with practice
bullets and volunteered.
Speaker 7 (14:48):
To be spent anyway. She thinks she failed. She didn't fail.
Telling these stories helps me remember.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Here's another one. This boy had been to the top
of the World Trade Center. He remembered it. He knew
it was the tippy top, the highest you could go.
A little kid wants to see it. And after September 11th,
he had one thing he wanted to say to God.
It is the most honest prayer you will ever hear
(15:22):
because it comes from a child who does not yet
know that some things cannot be unmade, only remembered. He
knows it now.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
On September 11th, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
And then 21 minutes later, they fell down. I went
to the tippy top once. I went to the floor
underneath the tippy top once. I miss all those fun
(16:05):
things I did there. I can't believe they would do
some mean thing like that. You can always pray to God. God,
do you think you can use Everybody's sleepy to make
(16:26):
the twin towers build itself together again. Make all the
stuff like silver again. If I could talk to God,
that's what I would say to him.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
They went up the stairs. 25 years later, we remember.
The Michael Berry Show. 25 years ago this morning. United
Flight 93 sat on a runway in Newark for 45 minutes.
That delay is the only reason anybody on board knew anything.
(17:01):
By the time the hijackers took the cockpit at 928,
both towers had already been hit, and 33 passengers and
7 crew had telephones. They called home. Their families told them.
So they knew exactly what the plane was for. Over Pennsylvania,
about 20 minutes flying time from Washington, they took a vote.
(17:22):
40 Americans, strangers, they voted. Tom Burnett told his wife,
I know we're all going to die. There's three of
us who are going to do something about it. At 9.57,
they went up the aisle. Todd Beamer said, are you
guys ready?
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Let's roll.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
Six minutes later, the plane went into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Nobody on board came home. 25 years later, the Capitol
is still standing.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Stanley Pramuth had already gotten out. Man came here from Guyana, 1982,
worked at a bank on the 81st floor of the
South Tower, living the immigrant dream. When the first plane
hit the other building, he went down to the lobby
with about 20 of his coworkers. He was out. He
was out of the building. He's safe. A security guard
(18:13):
told him the building was secure and sent them all
back upstairs. He rode the elevator back up, sat down
at his desk, picked up the phone, looked out the window,
and saw an airplane coming straight at him at eye level.
His words, I made eye contact. I dropped the phone
and screamed and said, Lord, I can't do this. You
take over. And he dove under his desk. That wing
(18:38):
came into his office and stopped about 20 feet from
where he was lying. The floor was gone. The ceiling
was gone. Sorry, the ceiling was not gone. It was down.
He was buried in the dark alone on the 81st
floor of a building that was on fire above him.
So he started screaming. And when screaming didn't work, he
started beating on the wall with his hands until the
(18:58):
nail went straight through his palm. Now 50 feet away
and three floors up, a 54-year-old Canadian named Brian Clark
was coming down a stairwell. Brian Clark had volunteered to
be one of eight or ten fire wardens on his floor,
which is a job nobody wants and which came with
(19:21):
exactly one piece of equipment, a flashlight. He's arguing with
his coworkers about whether to go up or go down,
and through the wall he hears banging and a voice,
and he stops. He said, Who's there? Where are you?
And out of the dark, oh, I can see your light.
Or it was probably like this. Oh, I can see
(19:41):
your light.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
I'm in here.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
And then, can you see my hand? Brian Clark turned...
to the man next to him on those stairs and said, Ron,
we got to go get this guy. Stanley Prenmouth, behind
a sheetrock wall, he cannot get over. Clark tells him,
(20:05):
you got to jump. You got to get over this
last barrier. He jumps and falls back. Come on, you
got to do this. It's the only way out. He
jumps again. Brian Clark reaches down in the dark, grabs
a man he's never met by the armpit, and hauls
him through a wall. They fell in a heap on
the floor, and they hugged each other. Can you imagine
(20:25):
the emotions? And Clark stuck out his hand and said,
I'm Brian Clark. Stanley Primeth said, I'm Stanley Primeth. We'll
be brothers for life. Both their hands were bleeding when
they shook. Can you imagine their ears had to be ringing,
their heads just about to explode with all they had
(20:47):
seen and heard, the air thick. They walked down 81
floors together in the dark, one flashlight between them. On
the way, they passed a man named Jose Marrero going up.
Clark told him to come down with them. Marrero said, no, no, no, no, no.
It'll be fine. I can help. He was 32 years old.
(21:08):
He did not make it out alive. Brian Clark and
Stanley Primeth walked out of the South Tower with somewhere
between three and five minutes to spare. Only four people
who were on the 81st floor or higher in that
tower lived. That's two of them. A year later, Brian
(21:29):
Clark gave Stanley Primeth the flashlight. Man, that one chokes
me up. It sits in a museum in New York
City today, and Stanley Primeth quit banking and became A preacher.
Tell you what, he's seen the light, brother. 25 years
ago this morning, a man heard knocking and stopped. That's
(21:50):
the whole story. He stopped. It's the stories that get me.
Then there is this story. Just after 5 o'clock on
the evening of September 11th, three New York firemen found
a flagpole standing on West Street with a faded green
flag on it, Ramone. Dan McWilliams had spotted an American
(22:10):
flag flying off the back of a yacht tied up
in the marina. So he went and got it. George
Johnson and Billy Isengren helped him run it up. Little flag,
three by five. Newspaper photographer named Thomas Franklin was standing
good ways off with a long lens and he took
the picture. You've seen the picture. You know this picture.
(22:34):
Everybody on the earth, on this earth, knows this picture.
If you saw it, you'd know that you know it.
Eisengrein described the whole thing later like this. We stood
there and looked at it for a second and went
about our way. That flag was gone within hours off
the pole. Nobody saw who took it. And nobody noticed
(22:54):
because another flag turned up that everybody assumed was that flag.
That flag flew at City Hall. That flag was at
Yankee Stadium for the prayer service where Pataki, then governor,
and Giuliani, then mayor, signed it. That flag got handed
to an admiral, flown out to the USS Theodore Roosevelt,
(23:16):
and carried into the war. The whole country stood up
for that flag. It was their own flag. The couple
who owned that yacht asked to borrow their flag back.
They unfolded it five by eight, way too big. The
lady's line about it is perfect. She said, this wraps
around the two of us, and we're not the thinnest
(23:37):
people on earth. So we knew right away it was
the wrong flag. Somewhere in the confusion of that week,
somebody handed someone the wrong flag, and it went to
sea and was saluted by the U.S. Navy, and the
real one was gone. For 13 years. This story wouldn't
be a story if it didn't have this ending. November 2014. Everett, Washington,
(24:03):
about as far from lower Manhattan as you can get
and still be in the continental United States. A man
walks into a fire station carrying a shopping bag, a
Joann's Fabric shopping bag. Tells him he thinks he has
the Ground Zero flag. He'd been watching a History Channel
show about the missing flag and recognized the rope and
(24:25):
the electrical tape wrapped around it. Says his name's Brian.
And then he leaves before anybody gets the last name.
Everett Popo worked at for two years. And listen to
how they proved it. They sent the dust off that
flag to the state crime lab and a forensic scientist
found asbestos and mica. And is it mica or mica? M-I-C-A.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Somebody email me and let me know. They found asbestos
and mica. Might be mica. Mica. and cement into fibers
in the right proportions to match verified World Trade Center debris.
Then a detective sat down with 24 photographs Thomas Franklin
never published and compared that rope to the rope in
(25:13):
the pictures. And he found one specific tear in the
electrical tape in 2001 and in his hands. Same flag. 2016,
the man came forward on his own, Brian Brown. Somebody
had given him that flag earlier as a gag gift,
and he had no idea what it was. His word.
(25:34):
I took care of it. It was never dishonored or
flown or anything. He would not take a reward. He said,
donate it to the new one. And that's where it is.
Right next to the photograph. The Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 5 (25:49):
25 years ago this morning, Michael Benfonte started down from
the 81st floor of the North Tower. On 68, he
found a woman named Tina Hansen sitting in a motorized wheelchair,
41 years old, waiting. On the floor next to her
was an emergency evacuation chair, still strapped up. Nobody had
(26:11):
ever used it. Benfonte figured out how it worked. He
and a co-worker named John Sequeira strapped her in and
picked her up. 68 flights. It took them almost an hour.
Near the bottom, a fireman took the back end. They
carried her through the lobby and put her in an
ambulance on the West Side Highway. Minutes later, the tower
(26:32):
came down and Benfonte dove under a truck. All three
of them lived. Years afterward, he said this. For whatever
measure of human cruelty that exists in the world, there's
a hundredfold measure of human decency ready to respond to it.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
I can hear you.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
The rest of the world hears you.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
And the people....
Speaker 4 (26:57):
And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
All of us soon.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
I don't know if you heard the interview with Todd
Beamer's father this week, a couple days ago. Oh, Todd
Beamer is the let's roll fellow. You can find it
on the internet.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
It's out there.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
At about 20 minutes to 11, 25 years ago today,
September 11, 2001, a 26-year-old Air National Guard lieutenant named
Heather Penny climbed into an F-16 at Andrews Air Force
Base outside Washington and took off with the mission to
(27:46):
bring down a passenger airliner full of American citizens.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
That is not.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
That is not something that you are prepared to do
before that day. Not emotionally. She had no missiles. There
hadn't been time to load them. All she had was
the gun in the nose of that airplane. And the
only thing in the gun was about 100 rounds of
(28:15):
training ammunition, practice bullets, lead, nothing that could bring down
a jetliner. So she and her flight lead worked out
the only plan available. He was a lieutenant colonel named
Mark Sassville. And as they're pulling on their flight gear,
(28:37):
he looks at her and says, I'll take the cockpit.
And she decided on her own, without a word, that
she would take the tail. Understand what those two sentences mean.
They were going to fly their own airplanes into an airliner.
(28:59):
He didn't say, I'll take the cockpit of the plane
we're flying. He said, I'll take the cockpit of the
plane in the air that we're going to take down.
And she said, I will crash into the tail. They
just said, I'll take the cockpit, I'll take the tail.
(29:19):
Think about that for a moment. That was it. Ram
the plane to crash it so it could not do
any more damage. She said it about as plainly as
a human being can say it. We wouldn't be shooting
it down. We'd be ramming the aircraft. I would essentially
be a kamikaze pilot. When SAS and I took off,
(29:43):
we believed that if we were successful, this was a
one-way mission. And this is the one that gets me.
Refusing the mission never crossed my mind. It just simply didn't.
She was 26 years old. She had been in that
squadron about nine months, green as grass, wet behind the ears,
as they say. The first and only woman ever in
(30:06):
the 121st Fighter Squadron. Her daddy was an Air Force
colonel who flew 139 combat missions in Vietnam and then
flew for the airlines, and she wanted to be what
he was. Somebody asked her once about ejecting, punching out
at the last second. She said, no, you only got
one chance. You don't want to eject and then miss.
(30:28):
She was going to stay with the plane all the
way in and crash the thing. Here's the part nobody
tells you. They never found Flight 93. By the time
those two jets got airborne, the passengers had already taken
that plane down in a field in Pennsylvania 30-some minutes earlier,
(30:50):
but they didn't know that yet. She flew for four
hours and found nothing, landed, got a fully armed jet,
went back up for four more. You know what she
calls that day? A failure.
Speaker 7 (31:04):
Her words.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
You have to understand, in my view, we were a
mission failure because we didn't get there in time. 25 years,
and that's how she grades herself. Every time somebody tries
to call her a hero, she will not have it.
We weren't the heroes that day. The passengers on Flight
93 were the heroes. Years later, she's a mother now,
(31:28):
two daughters. Would you still get in that plane? Absolutely.
Even with daughters. Even with my life now. She said,
I served. And I'll tell you that the thing about
the American military that our enemies have never once understood
(31:49):
is that we do not train for suicide missions because
we value our people too much to spend them. And
on September 11th, a 26-year-old girl, because she's still a
girl to me, she's still practically a kid to me,
from the D.C. Guard climbed into a jet with practice
bullets and volunteered to be spent anyway. She thinks she failed.
(32:16):
She didn't fail.
Speaker 7 (32:18):
Telling these stories helps me remember.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Here's another one.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
This boy had been to the top of the World
Trade Center. He remembered it. He knew it was the
tippy top, the highest you could go. A little kid
wants to see it. And after September 11th, he had
one thing he wanted to say to God. It is
the most honest prayer you will ever hear because it
comes from a child who does not yet know that
(32:45):
some things cannot be unmade, only remembered. He knows it now.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
On September 11th, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
And then 21 minutes later, they fell down. I went
to the tippy-top once. I went to the floor underneath
(33:18):
the tippy-top once. I miss all those fun things I
did there. I can't believe they would do some mean
thing like that. You can always pray to God. God,
(33:41):
do you think you can.
Everybody's sleeping to make the Twin Towers build itself together again.
Make all the stuff like silver again. If I could
talk to God, that's what I would say to him.
Speaker 5 (34:01):
They went up the stairs. 25 years later, we remember.
The Michael Berry Show.
It's that time.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Lock and load.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
The Michael Derry Show is on the air.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
25 years ago this morning.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
846.
Speaker 5 (00:31):
American Flight 11 goes into the North Tower. 17 minutes later,
United 175 hits the South. By then, the whole country
is watching.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
937.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Flight 77 goes into the Pentagon.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
959.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The South Tower comes down. 56 minutes after it was hit.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
1003. Over a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania... 40 passengers and
(01:01):
crew who had called home and knew, take the plane back.
It never reaches Washington. 1028, the North Tower falls. 102 minutes,
first plane to last tower.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
2,977 people.
Speaker 5 (01:23):
Firefighters who went up while everybody else came down. And
more than 15,000 people who walked out of those towers
alive because somebody in a helmet was climbing the stairs
past them. 25 years ago this morning.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
This just into our newsroom, a plane has crashed into
the World Trade Center. They just played the tape again.
It is horrific.
Speaker 5 (01:48):
A second plane the size of a passenger jet crashed
flying into the second tower of the World Trade Center.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our
nation into chaos and retreat.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
But they have failed.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
Our country is strong. Another plane has been hijacked from
out of Dulles. It's turned around and it's heading for Washington.
So immediately speculation begins. Is it going to be the
White House? The White House is too small, too hard
to find from here. The Capitol building is easy to see,
but You know, there aren't a lot of people in
(02:20):
the Capitol building at any one time. The only building
that is easy to find from the air that has
a lot of people in it, the largest office building
in the world, the Pentagon. Within a couple of minutes,
I began to hear the sound of a jet engine.
And it was pretty clear this plane was on full
(02:41):
throttle as if it were taken off. But Instead of
the sound diminishing with time, it just kept getting louder
and louder and louder, and we realized this is really happening.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
Tonight I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve,
for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all
whose sense of safety and security has been threatened, and
I pray they will be comforted by a power greater.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Than any of us.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
Spoken through the ages in Psalm 23, even though I
walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
fear no evil, for you are with me.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
There's facts and figures and pounds of steel, and there's
how hot things were and how many people died. But
to me, the stories that matter are the individual stories.
Father Michael Judge, he prayed the same prayer every single
day of his life. And it went like this, Lord,
(03:37):
take me where you want me to go. Let me
meet who you want. want me to meet. Tell me
what you want me to say and keep me out
of your way. His name, as I said, was Michael Judge.
I want to be clear because that's kind of confusing.
He's a priest, Father Michael Judge. He's not a judge.
(04:01):
He was 68, a Franciscan friar for Ramon. No, not
that kind of friar. a Franciscan friar for 47 years,
a priest for 40, and chaplain to the New York
City Fire Department since 1992. Remember, this is 2001, so
(04:23):
he's been there a little less than 10 years. Born
in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants out of the countryside. His
father died when he was six years old. He went
out and shined shoes outside Penn Station to help feed
his mother and his sisters when he was six. He
(04:43):
was an alcoholic, got sober in 78, stayed sober 23 years.
He talked about it openly. He thought it was important
that people know it might help somebody. During the AIDS crisis,
when hospital staff wouldn't touch those with AIDS, Michael Judge
walked in and put his hands on them and anointed them.
(05:04):
He walked New York in a brown Franciscan robe and
knew the homeless by name, handed out his own money
until he didn't have any more. The night of September 10th,
he preached at a firehouse in the Bronx. The last
homily he ever gave, the night before 9-11, he said,
You do what God has called you to do. You
(05:25):
show up. You put one foot in front of the other.
He's talking to firefighters. No matter how big the call,
no matter how small, You have no idea what God
is calling you to do. He said that on a
Monday night, and Tuesday morning he put on his chaplain's
gear and he went downtown. Nobody made him do that.
(05:46):
That wasn't in the job description. That wasn't required. A
68-year-old priest. He could have stayed at the friary and prayed,
but he went. He walked into the lobby of the
North Tower where the fire department had set up its
command post. and he stayed there, praying over firemen, giving
(06:08):
last rites to men who were about to walk up
100 flights of stairs and not come down alive. At
9.59 in the morning, the South Tower came down. The
force of it tore through that lobby, and Father Michael
Judge was killed. A New York police lieutenant named Bill
(06:28):
Cosgrove found him on the floor. Five men picked him
up and carried him out of that building. Two firemen,
a police lieutenant, a fire department EMT, and one civilian
who just happened to be standing there. A Reuters photographer
named Shannon Stapleton took that picture. You've seen it. Everybody's
(06:50):
seen it. Five filthy, exhausted men. carrying a dead priest
out of the smoke in a chair. They call it
the American Pieta after Michelangelo, Mary holding the body of
(07:11):
her son. It's a powerful imagery, man. They carried him
to St. Peter's Church a few blocks away, and they
laid him down in front of the altar. He is
listed as victim 000. The first one. Hundreds of people
(07:35):
died before Michael Judge, the friar, did that morning. But
his was the first body they pulled out. First one
carried from the carnage. The first death certificate signed. At
his funeral, apparently, Fellow priest stood up and said, we
(07:59):
come to bury his hands, but not his good works.
We come to bury his heart, but not his love.
Never his love. 25 years ago this morning, a man
who asked God every day to send him where he
was needed, got sent.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
We will never forget 25 years ago this morning, the
Michael Berry Show. 25 years ago this morning, Michael Benfonte
started down from the 81st floor of the North Tower.
On 68, he found a woman named Tina Hansen sitting
in a motorized wheelchair, 41 years old, waiting. On the
(08:45):
floor next to her was an emergency evacuation chair, still
strapped up. Nobody had ever used it. Benfonte figured out
how it worked. He and a co-worker named John Sequeira
strapped her in and picked her up. 68 flights. It
took them almost an hour. Near the bottom, a fireman
took the back end. They carried her through the lobby
(09:08):
and put her in an ambulance on the West Side Highway.
Minutes later, the tower came down and Benfonte dove under
a truck. All three of them lived. Years afterward, he
said this. For whatever measure of human cruelty that exists
in the world, there's a hundredfold measure of human decency
ready to respond to it.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I can hear you.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
The rest of the world hears you.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
And the people....
Speaker 4 (09:37):
And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Of us soon.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
I don't know if you heard the interview with Todd
Beamer's father this week, a couple days ago. Oh, Todd
Beamer is the let's roll fellow.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
It....
Speaker 2 (10:00):
You can find it on the Internet.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
It's out there.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
At about 20 minutes to 11, 25 years ago today,
September 11, 2001, a 26-year-old Air National Guard lieutenant named
Heather Penny said, climbed into an F-16 at Andrews Air
Force Base outside Washington and took off with the mission
(10:26):
to bring down a passenger airliner full of American citizens.
That is not something that you are prepared to do
before that day. Not emotionally. She had no missiles. There
hadn't been time to load them. All she had was
(10:46):
the gun in the nose of that airplane. And the
only thing in the gun was about 100 rounds of
training ammunition, practice bullets, lead, nothing that could bring down
a jetliner. So she and her flight lead worked out
(11:07):
the only plan available. He was a lieutenant colonel named
Mark Sassville. And as they're pulling on their flight gear,
he looks at her and says, I'll take the cockpit.
And she decided on her own, without a word, that
she would take the tail. Understand what those two sentences mean.
(11:32):
They were going to fly their own airplanes into an airliner.
He didn't say, I'll take the cockpit of the plane
we're flying to. He said, I'll take the cockpit of
the plane in the air that we're going to take down.
And she said, I will crash into the tail. They
(11:57):
just said, I'll take the cockpit, I'll take the tail.
Think about that for a moment. That was it. Ram
the plane to crash it so it could not do
any more damage. She said it about as plainly as
a human being can say it. We wouldn't be shooting
it down. We'd be ramming the aircraft. I would essentially
(12:17):
be a kamikaze pilot. When SAS and I took off,
we believed that if we were successful, this was a
one-way mission. And this is the one that gets me.
Refusing the mission never crossed my mind. It just simply didn't.
She was 26 years old. She had been in that
(12:38):
squadron about nine months, green as grass. Wet behind the ears,
as they say. The first and only woman ever in
the 121st Fighter Squadron. Her daddy was an Air Force
colonel who flew 139 combat missions in Vietnam and then
flew for the airlines. And she wanted to be what
he was. Somebody asked her once about ejecting, punching out
(13:02):
at the last second. She said, no, you only got
one chance. You don't want to eject and then miss.
She was going to stay with the plane all the
way in and crash the thing. Here's the part nobody
tells you. They never found Flight 93. By the time
those two jets got airborne, the passengers had already taken
that plane down in a field in Pennsylvania 30-some minutes earlier,
(13:30):
but they didn't know that yet. She flew for four
hours and found nothing, landed, got a fully armed jet,
went back up for four more. You know what she
calls that day? A failure. Her words, you have to understand,
in my view, we were a mission failure because we
didn't get there in time. 25 years, and that's how
(13:53):
she grades herself. Every time somebody tries to call her
a hero, she will not have it. We weren't the
heroes that day. The passengers on Flight 93 were the heroes.
Years later, she's a mother now, two daughters. Would you
still get in that plane?
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Absolutely. even with daughters, even with my life now. She said,
I served, and I'll tell you that the thing about
the American military that our enemies have never once understood
is that we do not train for suicide missions because
(14:32):
we value our people too much to spend them. And
on September 11th, a 26-year-old girl, because she's still a
girl to me, she's still practically a kid to me,
from the D.C. Guard climbed into a jet with practice
bullets and volunteered.
Speaker 7 (14:48):
To be spent anyway. She thinks she failed. She didn't fail.
Telling these stories helps me remember.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Here's another one. This boy had been to the top
of the World Trade Center. He remembered it. He knew
it was the tippy top, the highest you could go.
A little kid wants to see it. And after September 11th,
he had one thing he wanted to say to God.
It is the most honest prayer you will ever hear
(15:22):
because it comes from a child who does not yet
know that some things cannot be unmade, only remembered. He
knows it now.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
On September 11th, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
And then 21 minutes later, they fell down. I went
to the tippy top once. I went to the floor
underneath the tippy top once. I miss all those fun
(16:05):
things I did there. I can't believe they would do
some mean thing like that. You can always pray to God. God,
do you think you can use Everybody's sleepy to make
(16:26):
the twin towers build itself together again. Make all the
stuff like silver again. If I could talk to God,
that's what I would say to him.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
They went up the stairs. 25 years later, we remember.
The Michael Berry Show. 25 years ago this morning. United
Flight 93 sat on a runway in Newark for 45 minutes.
That delay is the only reason anybody on board knew anything.
(17:01):
By the time the hijackers took the cockpit at 928,
both towers had already been hit, and 33 passengers and
7 crew had telephones. They called home. Their families told them.
So they knew exactly what the plane was for. Over Pennsylvania,
about 20 minutes flying time from Washington, they took a vote.
(17:22):
40 Americans, strangers, they voted. Tom Burnett told his wife,
I know we're all going to die. There's three of
us who are going to do something about it. At 9.57,
they went up the aisle. Todd Beamer said, are you
guys ready?
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Let's roll.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
Six minutes later, the plane went into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Nobody on board came home. 25 years later, the Capitol
is still standing.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Stanley Pramuth had already gotten out. Man came here from Guyana, 1982,
worked at a bank on the 81st floor of the
South Tower, living the immigrant dream. When the first plane
hit the other building, he went down to the lobby
with about 20 of his coworkers. He was out. He
was out of the building. He's safe. A security guard
(18:13):
told him the building was secure and sent them all
back upstairs. He rode the elevator back up, sat down
at his desk, picked up the phone, looked out the window,
and saw an airplane coming straight at him at eye level.
His words, I made eye contact. I dropped the phone
and screamed and said, Lord, I can't do this. You
take over. And he dove under his desk. That wing
(18:38):
came into his office and stopped about 20 feet from
where he was lying. The floor was gone. The ceiling
was gone. Sorry, the ceiling was not gone. It was down.
He was buried in the dark alone on the 81st
floor of a building that was on fire above him.
So he started screaming. And when screaming didn't work, he
started beating on the wall with his hands until the
(18:58):
nail went straight through his palm. Now 50 feet away
and three floors up, a 54-year-old Canadian named Brian Clark
was coming down a stairwell. Brian Clark had volunteered to
be one of eight or ten fire wardens on his floor,
which is a job nobody wants and which came with
(19:21):
exactly one piece of equipment, a flashlight. He's arguing with
his coworkers about whether to go up or go down,
and through the wall he hears banging and a voice,
and he stops. He said, Who's there? Where are you?
And out of the dark, oh, I can see your light.
Or it was probably like this. Oh, I can see
(19:41):
your light.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
I'm in here.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
And then, can you see my hand? Brian Clark turned...
to the man next to him on those stairs and said, Ron,
we got to go get this guy. Stanley Prenmouth, behind
a sheetrock wall, he cannot get over. Clark tells him,
(20:05):
you got to jump. You got to get over this
last barrier. He jumps and falls back. Come on, you
got to do this. It's the only way out. He
jumps again. Brian Clark reaches down in the dark, grabs
a man he's never met by the armpit, and hauls
him through a wall. They fell in a heap on
the floor, and they hugged each other. Can you imagine
(20:25):
the emotions? And Clark stuck out his hand and said,
I'm Brian Clark. Stanley Primeth said, I'm Stanley Primeth. We'll
be brothers for life. Both their hands were bleeding when
they shook. Can you imagine their ears had to be ringing,
their heads just about to explode with all they had
(20:47):
seen and heard, the air thick. They walked down 81
floors together in the dark, one flashlight between them. On
the way, they passed a man named Jose Marrero going up.
Clark told him to come down with them. Marrero said, no, no, no, no, no.
It'll be fine. I can help. He was 32 years old.
(21:08):
He did not make it out alive. Brian Clark and
Stanley Primeth walked out of the South Tower with somewhere
between three and five minutes to spare. Only four people
who were on the 81st floor or higher in that
tower lived. That's two of them. A year later, Brian
(21:29):
Clark gave Stanley Primeth the flashlight. Man, that one chokes
me up. It sits in a museum in New York
City today, and Stanley Primeth quit banking and became A preacher.
Tell you what, he's seen the light, brother. 25 years
ago this morning, a man heard knocking and stopped. That's
(21:50):
the whole story. He stopped. It's the stories that get me.
Then there is this story. Just after 5 o'clock on
the evening of September 11th, three New York firemen found
a flagpole standing on West Street with a faded green
flag on it, Ramone. Dan McWilliams had spotted an American
(22:10):
flag flying off the back of a yacht tied up
in the marina. So he went and got it. George
Johnson and Billy Isengren helped him run it up. Little flag,
three by five. Newspaper photographer named Thomas Franklin was standing
good ways off with a long lens and he took
the picture. You've seen the picture. You know this picture.
(22:34):
Everybody on the earth, on this earth, knows this picture.
If you saw it, you'd know that you know it.
Eisengrein described the whole thing later like this. We stood
there and looked at it for a second and went
about our way. That flag was gone within hours off
the pole. Nobody saw who took it. And nobody noticed
(22:54):
because another flag turned up that everybody assumed was that flag.
That flag flew at City Hall. That flag was at
Yankee Stadium for the prayer service where Pataki, then governor,
and Giuliani, then mayor, signed it. That flag got handed
to an admiral, flown out to the USS Theodore Roosevelt,
(23:16):
and carried into the war. The whole country stood up
for that flag. It was their own flag. The couple
who owned that yacht asked to borrow their flag back.
They unfolded it five by eight, way too big. The
lady's line about it is perfect. She said, this wraps
around the two of us, and we're not the thinnest
(23:37):
people on earth. So we knew right away it was
the wrong flag. Somewhere in the confusion of that week,
somebody handed someone the wrong flag, and it went to
sea and was saluted by the U.S. Navy, and the
real one was gone. For 13 years. This story wouldn't
be a story if it didn't have this ending. November 2014. Everett, Washington,
(24:03):
about as far from lower Manhattan as you can get
and still be in the continental United States. A man
walks into a fire station carrying a shopping bag, a
Joann's Fabric shopping bag. Tells him he thinks he has
the Ground Zero flag. He'd been watching a History Channel
show about the missing flag and recognized the rope and
(24:25):
the electrical tape wrapped around it. Says his name's Brian.
And then he leaves before anybody gets the last name.
Everett Popo worked at for two years. And listen to
how they proved it. They sent the dust off that
flag to the state crime lab and a forensic scientist
found asbestos and mica. And is it mica or mica? M-I-C-A.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Somebody email me and let me know. They found asbestos
and mica. Might be mica. Mica. and cement into fibers
in the right proportions to match verified World Trade Center debris.
Then a detective sat down with 24 photographs Thomas Franklin
never published and compared that rope to the rope in
(25:13):
the pictures. And he found one specific tear in the
electrical tape in 2001 and in his hands. Same flag. 2016,
the man came forward on his own, Brian Brown. Somebody
had given him that flag earlier as a gag gift,
and he had no idea what it was. His word.
(25:34):
I took care of it. It was never dishonored or
flown or anything. He would not take a reward. He said,
donate it to the new one. And that's where it is.
Right next to the photograph. The Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 5 (25:49):
25 years ago this morning, Michael Benfonte started down from
the 81st floor of the North Tower. On 68, he
found a woman named Tina Hansen sitting in a motorized wheelchair,
41 years old, waiting. On the floor next to her
was an emergency evacuation chair, still strapped up. Nobody had
(26:11):
ever used it. Benfonte figured out how it worked. He
and a co-worker named John Sequeira strapped her in and
picked her up. 68 flights. It took them almost an hour.
Near the bottom, a fireman took the back end. They
carried her through the lobby and put her in an
ambulance on the West Side Highway. Minutes later, the tower
(26:32):
came down and Benfonte dove under a truck. All three
of them lived. Years afterward, he said this. For whatever
measure of human cruelty that exists in the world, there's
a hundredfold measure of human decency ready to respond to it.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
I can hear you.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
The rest of the world hears you.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
And the people....
Speaker 4 (26:57):
And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
All of us soon.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
I don't know if you heard the interview with Todd
Beamer's father this week, a couple days ago. Oh, Todd
Beamer is the let's roll fellow. You can find it
on the internet.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
It's out there.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
At about 20 minutes to 11, 25 years ago today,
September 11, 2001, a 26-year-old Air National Guard lieutenant named
Heather Penny climbed into an F-16 at Andrews Air Force
Base outside Washington and took off with the mission to
(27:46):
bring down a passenger airliner full of American citizens.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
That is not.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
That is not something that you are prepared to do
before that day. Not emotionally. She had no missiles. There
hadn't been time to load them. All she had was
the gun in the nose of that airplane. And the
only thing in the gun was about 100 rounds of
(28:15):
training ammunition, practice bullets, lead, nothing that could bring down
a jetliner. So she and her flight lead worked out
the only plan available. He was a lieutenant colonel named
Mark Sassville. And as they're pulling on their flight gear,
(28:37):
he looks at her and says, I'll take the cockpit.
And she decided on her own, without a word, that
she would take the tail. Understand what those two sentences mean.
They were going to fly their own airplanes into an airliner.
(28:59):
He didn't say, I'll take the cockpit of the plane
we're flying. He said, I'll take the cockpit of the
plane in the air that we're going to take down.
And she said, I will crash into the tail. They
just said, I'll take the cockpit, I'll take the tail.
(29:19):
Think about that for a moment. That was it. Ram
the plane to crash it so it could not do
any more damage. She said it about as plainly as
a human being can say it. We wouldn't be shooting
it down. We'd be ramming the aircraft. I would essentially
be a kamikaze pilot. When SAS and I took off,
(29:43):
we believed that if we were successful, this was a
one-way mission. And this is the one that gets me.
Refusing the mission never crossed my mind. It just simply didn't.
She was 26 years old. She had been in that
squadron about nine months, green as grass, wet behind the ears,
as they say. The first and only woman ever in
(30:06):
the 121st Fighter Squadron. Her daddy was an Air Force
colonel who flew 139 combat missions in Vietnam and then
flew for the airlines, and she wanted to be what
he was. Somebody asked her once about ejecting, punching out
at the last second. She said, no, you only got
one chance. You don't want to eject and then miss.
(30:28):
She was going to stay with the plane all the
way in and crash the thing. Here's the part nobody
tells you. They never found Flight 93. By the time
those two jets got airborne, the passengers had already taken
that plane down in a field in Pennsylvania 30-some minutes earlier,
(30:50):
but they didn't know that yet. She flew for four
hours and found nothing, landed, got a fully armed jet,
went back up for four more. You know what she
calls that day? A failure.
Speaker 7 (31:04):
Her words.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
You have to understand, in my view, we were a
mission failure because we didn't get there in time. 25 years,
and that's how she grades herself. Every time somebody tries
to call her a hero, she will not have it.
We weren't the heroes that day. The passengers on Flight
93 were the heroes. Years later, she's a mother now,
(31:28):
two daughters. Would you still get in that plane? Absolutely.
Even with daughters. Even with my life now. She said,
I served. And I'll tell you that the thing about
the American military that our enemies have never once understood
(31:49):
is that we do not train for suicide missions because
we value our people too much to spend them. And
on September 11th, a 26-year-old girl, because she's still a
girl to me, she's still practically a kid to me,
from the D.C. Guard climbed into a jet with practice
bullets and volunteered to be spent anyway. She thinks she failed.
(32:16):
She didn't fail.
Speaker 7 (32:18):
Telling these stories helps me remember.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Here's another one.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
This boy had been to the top of the World
Trade Center. He remembered it. He knew it was the
tippy top, the highest you could go. A little kid
wants to see it. And after September 11th, he had
one thing he wanted to say to God. It is
the most honest prayer you will ever hear because it
comes from a child who does not yet know that
(32:45):
some things cannot be unmade, only remembered. He knows it now.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
On September 11th, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
And then 21 minutes later, they fell down. I went
to the tippy-top once. I went to the floor underneath
(33:18):
the tippy-top once. I miss all those fun things I
did there. I can't believe they would do some mean
thing like that. You can always pray to God. God,
(33:41):
do you think you can.
Everybody's sleeping to make the Twin Towers build itself together again.
Make all the stuff like silver again. If I could
talk to God, that's what I would say to him.
Speaker 5 (34:01):
They went up the stairs. 25 years later, we remember.
The Michael Berry Show.
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