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'I'm going to die here,' she thought in the dark
By ROBIN MITCHELL
© St. Petersburg Times, For 27 hours, as all hell engulfed the world above her, Gennelle Guzman was entombed in what had been the north tower of the World Trade Center. "I think I was going to die. When I saw that it became dark and no one came, and I'm not hearing any noises, nowhere around, I think I'm not going to make it," she recounted to CNN in an interview Thursday. "I'm going to die here. I'm going to see myself slowly dying." Guzman had been on the 64th floor when the tower shuddered from the impact of American Airlines Flight 11. She was the last of five survivors pulled from the wreckage a day later. After the tower collapsed, her head was stuck between two concrete pillars. Her legs were crushed in the crumpling concrete that had been a stairway and her face, hands and body were covered with scrapes. The 14 co-workers who joined the 31-year-old Guzman in ignoring the intercom's mantra to stay put, and the friend whose hand slipped from hers as the building imploded were gone. Guzman was alone. She hollered for help. Over and over. Nothing. As darkness covered New York City the day of the attack, she fell into a deep sleep. She awoke about noon Sept. 12. "I asked God to show me a miracle, or show me a sign that I'm going to get out of here today or the next day, and it so happened that I heard noises, like people moving stuff," she told CNN. "And I yelled out, and someone answered back, and then I yelled again, and someone did answer. They told me, "Well, do you see the light?' I couldn't see any light. They were flashing their lights, I guess. I couldn't see any light. "And then I took a piece of concrete and I knocked the stair above me, and then they heard a knocking. And then they started to come closer. And I put my hand through a little crack in the ceiling, like, in the wall, and I felt the person hold my hand. The fireman held my hand. And he said, "I got you.' "And I said, "Thank God.' " The first instincts to flee when the building was hit were calmed by a voice over the intercom. Stay put, it advised. For more than an hour, Guzman and her colleagues in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey offices did just that, even after United Airlines Flight 175 hellishly slashed through the 110-story twin tower next door. The intercom told workers: "Don't leave until further instructions," recalled Guzman, whom Time magazine described as an immigrant from Trinidad who now lives in Brooklyn. "I was like ... I was scared." But enough was enough. She and 14 others decided to leave. "We were passing firemen who were coming up the stairways, and we were going down. And they were just saying, you know, keep on the side, be careful, and stuff like that," she told CNN. "And I and my girlfriend were holding hands all the way down. And when we reached the 13th stairs, I stopped to take off my shoes. I told her to hold my shoes. "And then, boom." The north tower of the World Trade Center, one of the tallest buildings in the world, was disappearing around her. "We fell to the ground. We were still together, and then she kind of moved away, and I moved away, and then everything started crumbling faster and heavier, and I just stood there. Everything was just falling," she said. "I just stood in a corner and everything just kept falling." As she recovers, she watches the disaster unfold from a different viewpoint, from the outside. "I look at it on TV every day, and just get a lot on my mind, but I don't have nightmares about it," she said. "I think I pray too much and just keep thanking God."
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From the AP |
