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Sometimes, survival can come down to the smallest of turns. It did for two police officers.
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 31, 2001
NEW YORK -- As the officers ran, a small arsenal of tools clanked around each man's waist. Guns. Ammunition. Flashlight. Handcuffs.
Racing through the trade center concourse, the team of five Port Authority police officers stopped at security closets to collect more gear -- Scott Airpaks, helmets, axes -- and piled it into a canvas laundry cart. Then they ran the cart toward a freight elevator, but it was 9:59 a.m. on that Tuesday, and the first of the towers was falling above them, burying light and space, men and women.
A few minutes passed, and a voice called from the darkness.
"Sound off!" the sergeant, John McLoughlin, hollered.
"Jimeno," said Will Jimeno.
"Pezzulo," said Dom Pezzulo.
From Officers Antonio Rodrigues and Chris Amoroso there was no response.
They were close to the exact center of the 16-acre complex, 20 feet underground, not far from the globe sculpture. Over the next half-hour, Pezzulo, a weight lifter, shoved rubble off his body, struggled to his feet, and then started to claw at the debris piled on Jimeno.
The north tower groaned. Jimeno remembers the vibrations rolling through his body, like a deep bass line. He called to his friend: "Dom! It's going to go!"
Having escaped one building, Pezzulo was crushed by the second.
Now only two were alive from that team of five: John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno. Those two officers were the last living people to be pulled from inside the destroyed buildings.
Their survival was built, first of all, on the bravery of many, but also on the smallest of turns: on gusts of wind that shifted fireballs a few inches; on canvas hoses that did not tear when stretched across jagged rocks; on a solitary pair of Marines who wandered near fire and called into the dark; and finally, on a $20 pair of handcuffs that Will Jimeno bought seven years and four jobs ago, when he was arresting shoplifters at Toys "R" Us.
Neither man could move. "Concrete across my chest, my leg, and a cinder-block wall on my right foot," Jimeno said.
Nor could they see each other, but they could talk.
"Can you see sky?" McLoughlin asked.
"No sky, but light," Jimeno replied.
The sergeant worked his radio. No one answered. An hour or so after the collapse, Jimeno heard a voice coming through the same hole where the light was entering. "The person said, 'Is so-and-so down there?' I said, 'No, but Jimeno and McLoughlin, PAPD, are down here."'
They heard no more from this person.
Jimeno's sergeant, widely admired for his skills and sense, told the young officer that the rescue operations would have to pull back for a day, until the scene was stable.
They waited.
Balls of fire tumbled into their tiny space, somehow veering away or spending themselves before they found more fuel.
Will Jimeno, 33, felt his death was near. His wife, Allison, and their daughter, Bianca, 4, would be sad but proud. Yet their second child was due at the end of November. So he prayed. "I asked God to let me see my little unborn child, and somehow in the future to let me touch this baby," Jimeno said.
Suddenly, shots rang out.
The fireballs had apparently heated up Pezzulo's gun. Rounds banged off pipes and concrete. Then they stopped.
With his one free arm, Jimeno reached his gun belt for something to dig with. He had graduated from the Port Authority Police Academy in January, and was issued the standard police tools, but he already had his own handcuffs -- a pair made by Smith & Wesson that he bought in 1994, when he was working department-store security jobs.
He scratched and chipped at the concrete. He put the cuffs down, and then could not find them.
By twilight, they were alone with the fires and crushing pain. Will Jimeno might have closed his eyes. He is not sure. About 8 p.m., he heard a voice:
"United States Marines. If you can hear us, yell or tap."
An accountant with Deloitte & Touche in Connecticut, David Karnes, saw the attack, left his office in Wilton, got his Marine Corps camouflage utility uniform and gear, and stopped for a prayer. At the scene, the search and rescue operation had been suspended because 7 World Trade Center had collapsed. Karnes found another Marine, a Sgt. Thomas.
Not another soul was around. They swept across the broken ground until they heard a voice.
"Over here," Jimeno called.
To get help, Karnes reached beyond the jammed and dead phone circuits of New York. He called his sister in Pittsburgh, who phoned her local police, who got word to the New York Police and Fire departments, which came with an army.
Besides the Marine, three people crawled into the pit with Jimeno: two emergency services officers, Scott Strauss and Paddy McGee, and a paramedic, known only by his first name, Chuck. A firefighter, Tom Ascher, pushed the fire back from the pile.
So tight was the entry shaft that the officers had to take off their gun belts to squirm in. So impacted was the rubble around Jimeno that they could not fit even a single folding shovel into the pit.
Strauss spotted the lost pair of handcuffs, and used them to dig.
From overhead, they heard firefighters shouting for them to hurry, telling them that 4 World Trade Center was burning like crazy and nearly collapsing.
Karnes opened a hole overhead. They passed a hand-held air chisel to Strauss, then the jaws-of-life tool, then shears. Strauss lay on top of Jimeno to work.
At 11 p.m., he was freed. They tied him into a basket and then called for a fresh team to save John McLoughlin, who would be there until dawn.
Lined up across the burning rubble were hundreds of police officers, firefighters, rescuers of all descriptions, stretching deep into the black smoke. From hand to hand, they passed Jimeno in his basket out to an ambulance. He was receiving intravenous liquids that Chuck the paramedic had started in the pit, hanging the line through Will Jimeno's $20 handcuffs.