When Tragedy Strikes & The Moment Calls
Five stories of heroic courage from September 11, 2001
Twenty-five years have passed since the morning of September 11, 2001, but there are certain images that time has done little to soften. The smoke rising above Manhattan. A section of the Pentagon burning beneath a clear September sky. An empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where a commercial airliner came down before reaching its intended target. Nearly 3,000 people were killed that day, and in the years since, September 11 has become part of our national memory.
At Pass the Torch, we believe some of its most important lessons are found in individual lives: in the moments when an ordinary person is confronted with something unimaginable and chooses what they will do next. September 11 was filled with those moments. Firefighters climbed stairwells while thousands descended. Police officers returned to buildings they had already escaped. Coworkers refused to abandon one another. Passengers aboard an airplane, armed with nothing but the knowledge of what had happened elsewhere that morning, and deciding they would fight back.
Twenty-five years later, remembering September 11 also means remembering them.
These are five of those stories, to remember and honor these ordinary heroes who answered the call when tragedy struck.
Todd Beamer
“Let’s Roll”
Todd Beamer was supposed to be home that night. The 32-year-old husband and father worked as an account manager for Oracle and had boarded United Airlines Flight 93 in Newark that morning for a business trip to San Francisco. His wife, Lisa, was pregnant with their third child.
At 8:42 a.m., Flight 93 lifted off. Less than an hour later, the passengers and crew found themselves trapped aboard the fourth hijacked aircraft of the morning. By then, something had changed that the hijackers could not control: information was beginning to reach the people aboard the plane.
Through Airfone calls to family members, operators and authorities, passengers learned that two aircraft had already struck the World Trade Center and another had hit the Pentagon. What might initially have seemed like a traditional hijacking suddenly had a different meaning. Their airplane was not simply being diverted. It was a weapon.
At approximately 9:44 a.m., Beamer reached a GTE Airfone operator. His call would remain connected for the rest of the flight. He described what he could see: injured or possibly dead pilots, men with knives, and one hijacker who appeared to have a bomb strapped around his waist. He explained that several passengers were planning to do something.
The people aboard Flight 93 had begun discussing whether they should attempt to take back the airplane. According to the National Park Service, the passengers and crew made the decision collectively. They knew what had happened in New York and Washington. They understood what was likely waiting at the end of their own flight path.
Before joining the others, Beamer asked the operator to relay a message to his wife: that he loved her. He prayed with the woman on the other end of the telephone. Then the operator heard him speaking to the people around him.
“Are you guys ready? Okay. Let’s roll.”
At 9:57 a.m., the passengers and crew began their assault on the cockpit. They never regained control of Flight 93. At 10:03, the aircraft crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers and crew members aboard. But the hijackers never reached Washington.
Investigators concluded that the aircraft had been headed toward the nation’s capital, with the U.S. Capitol considered the likely target. The National Park Service describes Flight 93 as the only one of the four hijacked aircraft that failed to reach its intended target because of the actions of the people aboard.
Todd Beamer became closely associated with the words spoken just before that final effort began, but the fuller story belongs to everyone who stood with him. They were not soldiers being sent into battle. They were business travelers, students, parents, flight attendants and people trying to get home.
They understood what was happening. But they were unwilling to sit by and watch it without doing something. They didn’t know if they could save the intended targets, or even themselves, but they knew if they banded together, they could have the courage to act.
2. Benjamin Keefe Clark
A Life of Service, Long After the Uniform
On the upper floors of the South Tower, Benjamin Keefe Clark spent his working days feeding people. Clark was an executive chef for the food-service operation serving Fiduciary Trust Company International. He planned meals for more than 250 employees and was remembered as someone who knew the people he cooked for by name.
Before becoming a chef, he had worn a different uniform. Clark had served in the United States Marine Corps. By September 2001, however, that part of his life was behind him. He was 39, a husband and father of five, building a career around a craft he loved. His family remembered a man particular about his kitchen tools, confident enough as a cook to measure ingredients by feel and happiest when feeding a house full of people. Then came the morning of September 11.
When United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower, Clark was inside the building. What followed was confusion on a scale that is difficult to imagine now: damaged stairwells, smoke, conflicting information and thousands of people attempting to escape a skyscraper that had been struck by an airliner. Clark began helping. His military service may have ended years earlier, but the instinct to take responsibility never left.
He assisted coworkers as they evacuated. And somewhere along the way down, Clark encountered someone who could not simply join the stream of people moving toward the exits. According to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Benjamin Clark was last seen on the 88th floor of the South Tower with three other people helping a woman who used a wheelchair.
He never made it out. There is no famous photograph of that moment. No recording of a final speech. We do not know exactly what Clark said or what went through his mind as precious minutes disappeared. We know only what he did. He stayed.
There is something fitting about the fact that the objects preserved in his memory at the 9/11 Museum are not weapons or pieces of military equipment, but utensils and handwritten recipes. They belong to the life he was actually living when history found him. A Marine had become a chef. A chef had become a hero.
A man who once served his country had built another life centered around serving others in a new way. When the moment came, those two versions of Benjamin Clark did not seem very far apart.
3. Abraham Zelmanowitz
He Would Not Leave His Friend
On the 27th floor of the North Tower, Abraham “Abe” Zelmanowitz faced a decision that, from the distance of twenty-five years, can seem almost impossibly simple. He could leave. Or he could stay with his friend.
Abe was 55 years old, a computer programmer for Empire BlueCross BlueShield and a native New Yorker. He loved chess, music and nights out with his longtime coworker and friend, Edward Beyea. Beyea was quadriplegic. A diving accident when he was 21 had left him paralyzed from the neck down. He used a wheelchair and had learned to type using a stick held in his mouth. On September 11, he was working alongside Abe when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower above them.
As the evacuation began, Beyea could not descend 27 floors of stairs on his own. His personal aide, Irma Fuller, was there. But Zelmanowitz urged her to go ahead, get downstairs and tell rescue personnel where Beyea was waiting. Abe remained behind. It is easy, with the benefit of knowing what came next, to imagine his decision as an act of extraordinary sacrifice, but those who knew him saw something more familiar.
His brother Jack later remembered Abe as the kind of man who quietly helped people throughout his life, never looking for recognition. He believed that even if Beyea had been little more than an acquaintance, his brother would have stayed.
“He could never turn his back on another human being,” Jack recalled.
Eventually, FDNY Captain William Burke of Engine Company 21 reached the two men. By then the South Tower had collapsed. Burke ordered members of his company to evacuate but remained behind with Zelmanowitz and Beyea. Together, they managed to move down several floors, reaching approximately the 21st floor.
They would go no farther. At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed. Beyea, Zelmanowitz and Burke were all killed. Burke was the only member of his firehouse to die that day.
There are stories from September 11 that involve enormous acts of physical courage. Men carrying equipment up dozens of flights of stairs, people breaking through walls, strangers lifting strangers and carrying them toward safety.
Abe Zelmanowitz’s courage was quieter. His friend could not leave, so neither would he.
4. Officer Moira Smith
One More Person
When the North Tower was struck at 8:46 that morning, NYPD Officer Moira Smith headed downtown. She was 38 years old, a 13-year veteran of the department, a wife and the mother of a two-year-old daughter. Courage was not new territory for her. A decade earlier, she had earned the department’s Distinguished Duty Medal after helping save people following a deadly subway derailment.
At the World Trade Center, she found a disaster developing faster than anyone could fully understand. Survivors remembered her in the South Tower lobby, directing people toward safety with remarkable calm. Amid smoke, noise, injuries and growing panic, she became something recognizable in the chaos: a leader giving clear instructions when calm was almost impossible.
A photograph taken that morning captured Smith helping an injured, blood-covered man away from the towers. She could have continued out with him. Instead, she returned. And then she returned again.
New York City officials later credited her with helping evacuate hundreds of people from the South Tower. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly described a pattern remembered by survivors: each time Smith brought someone out, she went back inside to help someone else. Eventually there was no next trip. Smith was last seen continuing to help evacuees inside the South Tower shortly before it collapsed at 9:59 a.m.
She was the only female NYPD officer killed in the September 11 attacks and was posthumously awarded the department’s Medal of Honor. Twenty-five years later, it is tempting to look at people like Moira Smith and imagine that they possessed some quality entirely separate from the rest of us. That heroes somehow know in advance what they will do when the moment calls for someone to rise.
But perhaps the more meaningful truth is that Smith’s final morning looked like an extension of the way she had already chosen to live. She had spent her career responding when someone needed help. On September 11, she simply kept responding. No one would be left behind if Moira Smith was still around to help.
5. Frank De Martini
The Man Who Went Up
Inside the North Tower, almost everyone understood one thing. They needed to go down. But Francis “Frank” De Martini went in the opposite direction. De Martini worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as a construction manager at the World Trade Center. His office was on the 88th floor of the North Tower, below the point where American Airlines Flight 11 tore into the building. He survived the impact, and so did several of the people working around him, but the explosion had transformed the floors above and around them. Doorframes had twisted, debris blocked exits, and people were trapped in offices without knowing whether there was any route down.
De Martini understood the building. That knowledge suddenly mattered enormously. Alongside Port Authority construction superintendent Pablo Ortiz and other coworkers, he gathered tools and began working to free people. They forced open doors and cleared paths into stairwells. Survivors later remembered De Martini and Ortiz appearing where exits seemed inaccessible and finding ways through. They could have followed the people they freed, but instead, they kept climbing.
Ortiz led efforts on the 89th floor, prying open a damaged doorway and directing trapped workers toward a usable exit before continuing upward. De Martini did the same. Together with colleagues Pete Negron and Carlos da Costa, the group is estimated to have helped at least 50 people escape.
The distinction between civilian and first responder had begun to disappear. They had tools, they knew the building and there were people above them. That was enough.
De Martini and Ortiz never came back down. They were still somewhere inside the North Tower when it collapsed at 10:28 a.m. Below, thousands of people were descending staircases toward daylight. Every instinct would have told De Martini to join them. Instead, he looked upward, toward the people who could not get out, and climbed.
The People Who Answer
There are thousands of stories from September 11 that will never fit neatly into history books.
Some belong to people whose names became known across the country. Others survive only in the memories of the person they carried down a staircase, the stranger whose hand they held, the coworker they refused to leave, or the family that later learned what they had done.
Todd Beamer was going to a business meeting. Benjamin Clark was preparing food. Abraham Zelmanowitz was sitting beside a coworker. Frank De Martini was at his office. Moira Smith was working a Tuesday morning patrol. Elsewhere, flight attendants, office workers, firefighters, police officers, construction workers, military personnel, and complete strangers were all being asked versions of the same question: what do you do when the moment in front of you suddenly demands more than you ever expected to give?
None of them began September 11 knowing that before the day was over, they would be asked to make choices that would define how others remembered them.
That may be one of the reasons their stories matter so much twenty-five years later. We sometimes speak about heroes as though they are a separate kind of person. As though courage belongs naturally to a select few who are somehow born knowing what to do when everything goes wrong. September 11 tells a different story.
A hero can be a chef. An airline attendant. A police officer. A construction manager. A computer programmer. A passenger sitting in an airplane seat with a family waiting for him at home.
A hero can be anyone.
Perhaps the capacity for heroism lives in all of us, waiting for the right collision of courage and calling. But even courage is not enough on its own. The final ingredient is action. It is the decision to move. Not because you are certain of the outcome. Not because you have been handed a perfect plan. Not even because you fully understand what is happening around you. Sometimes there is no time for certainty. There is only the realization that something must be done, and the choice to be the person who does it.
On September 11, that choice took countless forms. At Pass the Torch, we tell these stories because remembrance asks something of us. Not simply that we know the names or mark the anniversary, but that we understand what those lives can still teach us.
Twenty-five years later, we remember the unimaginable loss of September 11, 2001. But we also remember what rose against it: service, loyalty, courage, and ordinary people who recognized a moment that demanded action and chose not to look away.