Newspaper reporter Mike Kelly was working at the Bergen Record when the attacks of September 11 took place. He managed to board a tugboat crossing the Hudson from Jersey City a few hours after the towers fell. Kelly, who had left his laptop and phone charger in the newsroom, wouldn’t return home for three days, sleeping nights at a photographer friend’s apartment in the city and reporting and writing his stories longhand, then calling them in to the newspaper “the old-fashioned way,” he said in a recent interview over brunch at Montclair’s Red Eye Cafe.
As the nation commemorates the 25th anniversary of the attacks, New Jersey communities are hosting events, including one in Raritan Township, where Hunterdon County officials plan to establish a permanent memorial, the newest in a state that lost 750 residents on 9/11. People will gather at the Eagle Rock Reservation in Essex County, the Empty Sky Memorial in Jersey City, the Living Memorial Garden in Livingston and dozens of other locations. The annual America’s Ride to Remember takes place on the 11th, and the following day offers the 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford.
For Kelly, who has worked at the Record since 1975, the anniversary will be marked by his new book, After Ground Zero: Everyday Americans and the Unhealed Scars of 9/11. While he’s aware that the anniversary will see the publication of books about the political, legal and military aspects of the terrorist attack, Kelly says he wants readers to remember the “ordinary people,” and that what happened to them mattered, and still does.
The book follows 26 people who were affected by 9/11, including some who escaped the attacks, others who survived the loss of loved ones, and first responders who tried to find, save and help as many as they could.
Disembarking in lower Manhattan that day, what the reporter saw left him nearly at a loss for words. “It was horrific. We didn’t know what we were walking into,” Kelly says. “I remember the first time I saw the pile, it was surreal. It looked like something out of a movie.”
As the hours turned into days and then weeks, and the pile of rubble at Ground Zero began to attract New Yorkers desperate to help—“skilled construction workers, steelworkers, priests, nuns, rabbis, chefs, massage therapists,” Kelly says—he started to feel stupid. “What am I doing here?” he asked.
But then he made a decision: “The only thing I really know how to do is to tell stories, and so I’m just going to keep doing that.” These stories—of grief and anger, courage and hope—remind us that everyone who lived through 9/11 was marked by it.
Among the Garden State residents who talked with Kelly for his book is Nancy Karole Kennedy, who recalled her colleague Thomas Swift. He was just 30 years old, with a promising career at Morgan Stanley, in 2001. As he left his Jersey City apartment on September 11, Swift wore a newly arrived alumni ring from St. Peter’s, where he had recently earned his MBA in night school.
He arrived at the office early that day, excited to deliver a presentation at a quarterly staff meeting, which was barely underway, Kennedy remembers, when they heard the thud of the first plane hitting the North Tower, their building’s twin. In the South Tower, where Morgan Stanley was located, they were told to sit tight and not evacuate—advice rendered meaningless when the second plane hit. Kennedy recalls being led by a security guard to the one intact stairwell on the 70th floor, then making her way to safety. But Swift never made it.
“Why did some mothers and fathers not make it to safety, and I did?”
—Nancy Karole Kennedy, former vice president at Morgan Stanley who lives in Ridgewood (excerpt from After Ground Zero)
Others in New Jersey found their lives changed forever. Widows Terry Strada and Kristen Breitweiser would both seek answers to the nagging questions that arose in the aftermath: why hadn’t the U.S. government done more to prevent the attacks, and why, even years later, was the government unable or unwilling to release information about those who had provided support to the hijackers?
As Kelly chronicles, they were joined by others seeking information and accountability, leading to the formation of the 9/11 Commission chaired by retired New Jersey Governor Tom Kean (as Kelly’s book reminds us, the commission was nearly led by Henry Kissinger, who stepped down when a group of 9/11 widows pushed him to reveal his own foreign clients). In the end, the commission’s report stopped short of what many advocates had hoped for, leaving many of the survivors with “agonizing doubts about why their own country seemed so unwilling to investigate such important allegations,” Kelly writes.
As the American government responded to 9/11, the fallout continued to touch New Jersey lives. Captain James Yee, a Springfield native, had been raised Lutheran but became interested in Islam after graduating West Point, when he was deployed to Saudi Arabia in 1991, during the first Gulf War. In 2002, as one of the Army’s first Muslim chaplains, he was assigned to minister to the service members and detainees at the U.S. Army base in Guantanamo Bay, as well as to help educate non-Muslim soldiers and staffers about Islam, to help the base run more smoothly. He received a stellar officer evaluation report in September 2003 and was arrested two days later on espionage allegations. Although Yee was ultimately exonerated, he stepped down from the military in 2004, his trust in the government broken.
Other survivors found their bodies just as damaged as their souls. One firefighter recalls that “we did a great job taking care of the dead, but a terrible job taking care of the living.”
Then-NYPD detective Martin Davin, who grew up in Fair Lawn, was one of Kelly’s interview subjects on 9/11. Davin was at Ground Zero, but hadn’t signed any logbooks to indicate his presence there, so he reached out to Kelly years later because he needed confirmation of his presence so that he could receive the medical care he needed after suffering a Ground Zero-related illness. In fact, Kelly says, the death toll from diseases caused by exposure to toxic chemicals from 9/11 now exceeds the number who perished that day.
“I think a lot of guys were just trying to do something to help. There was a feeling of, Let me try.”
—Martin Davin, retired NYPD detective who grew up in Fair Lawn
(excerpt from After Ground Zero)
And yet, Kelly adds, he sees a lot of good things in the stories he tells in his book. “I didn’t want the book to be dismal and horrible,” he says. “And let’s be honest. This is sacred ground. I wanted to honor that by treating these people with dignity and not just taking advantage of the horror here. A lot of these people speak of hope. There’s a lot of courage in this book, and there’s a lot of decency in this book and love for each other. I wanted to capture that.”
One of the book’s most inspiring portraits is of Dereck Lovell, a security guard who led many of Thomas Swift’s Morgan Stanley colleagues to safety that day in the South Tower. “He wasn’t even an American citizen [at the time]. He was a 10-dollar-an-hour security guard,” Kelly says. “He could have run, but he didn’t. He searched the floor after things got really bad. He finally escapes, just barely. The building is starting to crash as he’s running down the street.”
And now, Kelly adds, “he’s got prostate cancer connected to this. He’s got bad kidneys. He went back to the 9/11 memorial and he searched for the one guy he couldn’t find on the 70th floor.” As Lovell tells him in the book, “I still feel bad that I couldn’t save Tom Swift.”
Over coffee, I point out that Kelly himself is a survivor of 9/11 along with the people he’s written about and ask whether covering the story has left him with some psychological fallout.
“For a while there, I wondered if that was a healthy thing, but I’m actually proud that I never left it,” he says. “In our business, we just move on—the circus leaves town, and these people are forgotten about. But I’m glad I kept going back. I wanted to talk about the people who were impacted. They were just ordinary people. They were just going to work. They weren’t fighting a war. I didn’t want people to forget this. I just wanted to preserve these stories as best I could.”
