9/11—A Client’s Experience

In 2001 I was living on the upper west side of Manhattan and working for Sipa Press, a French news photo bureau in Chelsea. My best friend, Chantal Vincelli, worked for DataSynapse, Inc. Through her, I had met her co-workers, including Raj, Keith, and Garth.

That Tuesday was gorgeous. That is something that I have always remem-bered because it seemed wrong that something so horrible should happen

on such a beautiful day. I was getting ready for work, NY1 news was on the TV and as I grabbed the leash to take my dog for her walk around the block I heard them mention a plane hitting one of the towers. I thought they must mean a 2 or 4 person plane as it wasn't unheard of for new pilots to end up in NYC and hit a building every now and then.

Once outside with my dog, I said hello to neighbors and dodged folks handing out pamphlets. It was an election day and pamphlet people were everywhere. Someone said to me "they are saying that they think the plane may have been a terrorist attack". I laughed because at the time I was still thinking a 2 or 4 person plane and couldn't see how a plane that size, crashing into a building, could be terrorism. I dropped my dog off back home, went to the subway and head-ed downtown for work. No one mentioned anything on the subway, it was a normal trip into work.

At the 23rd Street station, I walked up the subway stairs onto 6th Avenue (aka Avenue of the Americas) and it was like a scene from Stephen King's The Shining. Nothing ever brought traffic on 6th to a halt. That morning there were no cars, just people everywhere: on the sidewalks, in the street, etc. Everyone was just standing still and staring up. Against the blue sky, you could see the towers of the WTC and plumes of smoke. Rebecca, who worked with me at Sipa, saw me, ran over and grabbed my arm. She was cry-ing (like many people) and we just stood there. She told me no one was in the office because all of our photogra-phers were at the Trade Center. We stood there and watched as Tower 2, the second to be hit, collapsed. It seemed to be in slow motion. I didn't know it at the time but I had just witnessed my best friend's death. Everyone was crying including me. Rebecca and I ran into the office and the phones were ringing. The TVs were on and set to CNN and they were reporting on a plane that had been heading for the Pentagon. I picked up a ringing phone and spoke to Gary, a photographer, who was choking because he and another one of our photographers were trapped under a car trying to breathe. The dust from the collapse was all over them and they were choking. We calmed Gary down and Rebecca and I went back outside with a camera and as we stood there she looked at me and said: "Oh God, Carole, what if the other tower collapses?" She had just finished saying that when the crowd wailed "Nooooo" and we saw Tower 1 collapse. I yelled "Get the picture" because I was in work mode and I've felt guilty for the rest of my life for saying that. I couldn't believe it. I honestly don't think I was comprehending it even though I was witnessing it.

Back inside the office, I remembered something horrible. My BFF, Chantal, was helping her co-workers set up that Monday and Tuesday mornings for a Risk Waters Financial Trade show on the 106th floor of Tower 1. I started calling her but couldn't get any calls through. Our cell phone antennas were on top of the WTC and cell phones were not going through. I tried calling Mario, my friend and the #3 in our Three Amigos group. Mario and Chantal both came to NYC from Montreal. Mario wasn't answering and I called his apartment repeatedly and kept leaving hysterical voicemails.Later he told me he thought it was a prank because he worked nights and was asleep all morning and oblivi-

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By: Carole Coulson

ous to all of this. I went on to AOL because after quickly establish-ing no cell phone contact New Yorkers started using AOL chat to connect and share our news. They set up chat rooms for each floor of each tower so people could find out what was going on. Be-cause the 106th floor was the Windows on the World Restaurant and the Bar, and the Risk Waters Trade Show wasn't a permanent setting, we weren't having too much success. I, like many others, went down to the Cantor Fitzgerald chat rooms (they had floors 101-105. It was in there that I learned that no one had been found alive from above the 86th floor. But we weren't giving up hope. Misinformation was everywhere. People saying some folks had gone to the roof and ridden the building down and were ok, others

mentioned some people had been found trapped under rubble (this would turn out to be a false report given to the police because a woman was trying to find her husband and wanted police to dig where she estimated he'd be). The burning smell was very strong and very bad. It was everywhere. They announced that they shut down our air space, that rides on the subway wouldn't require tokens and that if you lived in an outer borough you should go home now because they were going to be closing down some services.

I was still frantically calling Chantal and getting no response. I got to Mario's and we went to her apartment. Chantal

had the biggest heart in the world. She was the kindest person to all. Everyone in our group of about 15 people knew

that when we met for dinner, drinks, or brunch, to expect Chantal about 30-45 minutes later. She would stop to say

hello to every cute dog or cat she'd see on the way, help anyone who needed help, etc. I once asked her for some cat

food because I had just had surgery and couldn't leave my house. She not only showed up with a 50 lb bag of cat food,

but she also had dinner delivered and brought movies from BlockBuster with her. She was that kind of person. She

spent $1,000 every week feeding the stray cats in her area and in the junkyards of Harlem, she trapped the ones she

could and paid for them to be spayed/neutered and get all of their shots, and then spent more money paying for cage

space at a veterinarian's office on 86th & Broadway to get them adopted out. There were 17 cats in her apartment

when we got there. She had a core group of ones that had been her cats to start with, then there were some feral cats

that were too afraid to be placed and some that were about to go out for adoption. We knew that if Chantal were alive

there is no way that she wouldn't have made it home to take care of the cats. We also knew if she were hospitalized

she'd have called one of us to take care of them. We realized either she was dead, she was trapped under debris or

unconscious in a hospital.

Chantal's mother had died of breast cancer years earlier and her brother was still in Montre-

al. He wanted to come down but there were no flights in and we could meet with the detec-

tives. Mario and I took hair from her hairbrush and a photo with us to meet with the detec-

tives. Unfortunately, the only picture we had of Chantal was from Halloween. We met with

the detectives and were given specially numbered cards for our cases with the Medical Ex-

aminers office. I also registered someone whose sister I had met in the chat rooms. Their

parents were elderly and her brother was at the Risk Waters trade show as well, so I took

his card and Mario took Chantal's.

Earlier I had mentioned Chantal's coworkers: Raj, Garth, and Keith. All four were in their 30s,

Garth was engaged and set to be married in a month. Raj and Keith were just young, kind,

guys who'd come to NYC to be successful. Peter was their boss. I learned from Peter that after the tower was hit, every

-one in the building was told to stay on their floors so that the first responders could use the stairwells to rescue folks

without fighting crowds. Raj called and told this to Peter. A little later Keith sent Peter a message from his Blackberry

that it was getting hot and they were going to head down the stairs, they didn't care. 5 minutes later Garth sent a mes-

sage from his Blackberry that there was fire everywhere, they were trapped, there was nowhere to go. Two minutes

later the tower collapsed.Some people never got their loved one's body back because if they were in the collapse they

were pulverized and turned to dust. Chantal walked out of Tower 1 (both towers were still standing) but as she walked

out Tower 2 collapsed on her. Her body was identified via DNA after two months. Tony, her brother, wanted to see her

body because he'd never had closure with his mom as she was buried while he was away. The medical examiner con-

vinced him not to look at her body, that she'd been laying on smoldering metal for weeks and was basically a gelati-

nous mass.

A man wrote to let us know that Chantal had saved his life. She had arrived just to do set-up of the DataSynapse table

for the day and was leaving to head back to their main office. A man, who had come alone, had the table next to them.

He asked Chantal if she would watch his table while he went across the street for a coffee and she said fine. When the

first plane crashed, he was across the street and safe. Chantal didn't stay on the floor like the others, she was going to

head to the office to update Peter and find out what to tell the guys to do. She headed down the stairwells and we got

another email telling us that she helped someone who couldn't walk very well all the way down the stairs to the bot-

tom before she ran up a little bit to help someone else. It was for reasons like these that when I found myself pregnant

with my daughter years later, I asked Tony Vincelli permission to name my daughter Chantal.

New Yorkers get a bad rap as being rude but often that is not true. In the days after the attacks, I saw the kindest ges-

tures made constantly by New Yorkers.

The WTC also gave me empathy for the Kennedy family. Until the first anniversary (and every one since) when the foot-

age is shown over and over, I never realized how hard it must have been for the Kennedy's to see the footage of JFK's

assassination. For some it is news, for others, it is a reminder. For people personally touched it is hard and it is awful to

see. I actually left my job at Sipa because I refused to sell the images and make a living off the deaths of my friends. I

went to WireImage, which was all celebrity photos so that I could escape it. Ironically, it was such a huge story,

WireImage began covering it and I moved to Pennsylvania.

Nowadays, when I see someone flipping out because they had to wait an extra 5 minutes in a line, or their order was

wrong, etc. I think "You are so lucky that that is the worst thing to happen to you in your life because if you lived

through something like the Trade Center and losing loved ones, you would remember that you are lucky, that there is

no need for the anger that you are spewing, just be kind and life will be better."