Minnesotans' 9/11 stories remain painful, powerful 25 years later
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On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners over the United States. They crashed two jets into the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan. A third plowed into the west side of the Pentagon in Washington while the fourth jet crashed in a rural Pennsylvania field.
The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people that day. Thousands more later died of illnesses related to the attacks.
Many Minnesotans are directly connected to the events and aftermath of 9/11. Some died that day, some died later of grief or illness.
At least 11 people with Minnesota connections are believed to have died in the attacks. Here are a few of the stories of Minnesotans who witnessed the terror.
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‘Somebody was looking over us’
A room change saved Scott Wallace on the morning of 9/11.
The Woodbury resident had a business meeting scheduled inside the World Trade Center’s North Tower. He was expecting to meet on the 93rd floor but it ended up on floor 63. The hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building at 8:46 a.m., destroying floors 93 to 99.
The floors below survived long enough for people, including Wallace and his colleagues, to make the slow, crowded, tense journey down the stairwells and into the street.
“Somebody was looking over us that day that we ended up in 63 and not 93,” Wallace said in an interview with the Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum.
“The crash impact rocked the building. Debris cascaded past the windows. “And the tower tipped quite a ways,” he said. “I remember stumbling towards the one wall and then stumbling towards the other when it righted itself.”
Wallace and his colleagues made for the stairs and a slow, crowded, tense journey to the street.
“I remember getting on that stairwell and I looked at the stair marker. And it says 63. I thought, ‘Oh, man, we have a long way to go down.’ I remember praying to myself, 'Lord, give me the strength to just stay calm and get down and get out of here.' And I counted every stair marker for 63 floors,” Wallace said.
It took Wallace about 40 minutes to get down to the street. Smoke and jet fuel fumes made breathing hard. He met firefighters with their heavy gear making their way up. Elevators, even if they work, are shut off in such an emergency.
“I can't remember exactly the floor, but I think it was in the 30s, we ran into a man with a wheelchair,” Wallace said. “I'm sure we and everybody else that passed him asked him if he needed help getting down. And his response was, ‘Nope, we practice this all the time. The firemen will get me and get me out.’
“We said OK and good luck,” Wallace recalled. “Then we found out that he didn't make it out of the tower.”
Scott Wallace made it out. He was looking for a phone to call home when he felt the tower collapse. And by then a second plane crashed into the South Tower. That building also crumbled in a storm of dust and smoke. Wallace walked a mile to Chinatown to find a working pay phone. He called home to Minnesota to say he was OK.
‘Wrong places at the wrong time’
Lakeville resident Jeffrey Rosenthal was an eyewitness to terror in the sky. By an extraordinary course of events, he saw two of the four hijacked airliners that crashed on 9/11. All from the cockpit of an airplane.
On that morning, Flight Engineer Rosenthal of Minnesota’s Air National Guard 133rd Airlift Wing was aboard a C-130H cargo plane departing from Andrews Airforce Base, just outside Washington DC, after a cargo run to the Caribbean. The flight’s radio call sign was Gofer 06, a reference to Minnesota’s Gopher State nickname.
Gofer 06 was climbing into the sky on its way home to Minneapolis-St. Paul when air traffic controllers asked it to check out unusual activity nearby. Just then, hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington-Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles streaked across the C-130’s path.
“And with a matter of seconds we’ve spotted the aircraft going left to right. It immediately goes into a dive and crashed into the Pentagon,” Rosenthal said in a later interview with the Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum. “A huge plume of fireball rises above the Pentagon.”
In all, 136 people aboard AA Flight 77 and on the ground died, along with the 5 hijackers. One of the victims was pilot Charles Burlingame III, a St. Paul native. Burlingame was a former Navy pilot and, also, a father and grandfather.
The crew on Gofer 06 reported what they saw by radio. By listening to the other traffic, they realized that a larger terror event was underway, that the nation’s skies had become a battlefield. Airliners had also struck the World Trade Center. The United States was under attack.
Gofer 06 was directed to fly past western Pennsylvania where United Flight 93 had last been detected on radar. Rosenthal says the crew’s load master saw black smoke on the horizon. Gofer 06 radioed in the finding. That helped confirm that the fourth hijacked plane, United 93, had crashed.
“It was a case of being in the wrong places at the wrong time,” Rosenthal said later. “We were helpful in the sense that we could help put the puzzle together much quicker, saving tons of time. We did good.”
‘We’re going to have to do something’
Thomas Burnett Jr. had no intention of sitting still when al-Qaida terrorists commandeered United Flight 93.
A Bloomington, Minn., native, Burnett was living with his wife Deena and three daughters in San Ramon, Calif. He was an executive at a medical technology company and was aboard United 93 from Newark to San Francisco, heading home from a business trip.
After the hijackers seized United 93, passengers heard by cellphone that airplanes had already crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. They knew being compliant would not save their lives.
Deena had three calls with Tom. During the fourth call, he warned he was preparing to “do something,” she said. As a retired flight attendant, Deena counseled him to do what she’d learned in training: sit down, don’t draw attention to yourself.
“He said, no we’re going to do something. If they’re going to fly this plane into the ground, we’re going to have to do something,” Deena said.
According to the 9/11 Commission report, four al-Qaida hijackers took control of Flight 93 and turned it toward Washington. The passengers and crew then launched an assault on the cockpit.
“I think that they realized that the planes were being used as missiles,” Deena said in an earlier interview with MPR News. “I believe that they all agreed to storm the cockpit. I think that my husband probably asked for volunteers to go with him. And I have no doubt that they managed to overtake the hijackers.”
Investigators determined that the four terrorists deliberately crashed the plane near Shanksville, Pa. All 44 people aboard died. The site is now a national memorial.
Thomas Burnett Jr. was buried at Ft. Snelling National Ceremony with military honors. He received a 21-gun salute.
At one point, the Burnetts and other families who lost loved ones in the crash of United 94 listened to the cockpit voice recordings of the flight. The passengers apparently never made it past the bolted door, but the hijackers pitched and rolled the plane until deliberately plunging it to the ground.
At the graveside in 2002, Tom Burnett Sr. said his son sacrificed his life for the larger cause of freedom, and deserved to be buried alongside troops who served in America’s wars.
“ He, and all of those guys that went against those hijackers, they were in the vanguard of the new war on terrorism,” Burnett said. “They were civilian soldiers in effect.”
