Students remember 9/11 attacks

“Where were you when it happened?” you might ask your grandmother of Dec. 7, 1941, when… “Where were you when it happened?” you might ask your grandmother of Dec. 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

You might ask your father of Nov. 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

Someone might ask you of Sept. 11, 2001.

The easy answer is in front of a television, but Pitt students all have distinct memories that vary in physical and emotional distance from the catastrophe.

Lauren Alexander is a sophomore from Gaithersburg, Md., 30 minutes away from the attack in Washington, D.C., and about 235 miles from where the World Trade Center stood.

She remembers being in ninth grade and hearing murmurs about the twin towers being knocked down.

“I thought they were talking about a video game,” Alexander said.

Rumors raged rampantly through her high school’s halls, she recalled. She heard, inaccurately, that someone had bombed the National Mall, and she remembers the fear she had for her father, who worked in Washington for the Smithsonian Institute.

“I was really afraid my dad had been exploded,” she said.

The confusion mingled with fear for all the students whose parents worked at the Capitol.

The sound of jets overhead remains one of Alexander’s most dramatic memories of the day.

“There were a lot of jets,” she said, “and every time one flew over there was silence.”

Inside Washington, D.C., 225 miles from the towers, Ori Waksman was running sprints in gym class.

Waksman said he remembers his class being interrupted by officials from his high school. The students were taken to the school’s theater for the announcement.

“Three periods later, three-quarters of the school was gone,” he said.

Lancaster, Pa., Junior Ryan Heichel’s hometown, is a 160-mile drive from New York City.

Heichel was in high school and he specifically recalls that he was in history class when someone turned on the television.

He said what affected him most was what his history teacher said that day.

“I’ll never forget — my history teacher said, ‘I think we’re going to read about this in our history books,'” he said.

Heichel said his high school principal instructed the teachers not to let students watch news coverage that day, and teachers tried to go on with scheduled class.

Alison Zellis is from Philadelphia, a 100-mile drive from New York, and she was a high school freshman in the fall of 2001.

She said she was in a history class, too, and she remembered working on a group project when the television came on. Zellis remembers confusion about what was happening.

“We really couldn’t figure out if someone did it on purpose or on accident,” Zellis said.

Also near Philadelphia, Jacqui Siler was in eighth grade, and she said she found out in religion class.

Siler’s school housed kindergarten through eighth grade students, which led them to withhold news of the tragedy for almost an hour in order to shelter the younger children, she said.

Siler described feelings similar to many others’, including shock and fear, but her school’s policies weren’t comforting.

“I remember wanting to go home and be with my family, but we weren’t allowed,” she said.

Lisa Duncin was at her Patterson, N.J., home, ten minutes from New York City, but she wasn’t with her family that day, which she describes as the worst of her life.

Duncin had decided to stay home that morning, and she recalls flipping through the channels on her television, trying to find “Golden Girls,” when scroll bars and alerts overtook regularly scheduled programming.

“I didn’t believe it,” she said. “I was in shock.”

A nearby hilltop gave Duncin the vantage she needed to see the towers in the distance.

“I ran outside to a park where I could see the World Trade Center and there was just all this smoke,” Duncin said. “I was just crying.”