Very Few of us who were alive will ever forget where we were the morning of September 11, 2001. It was such a beautiful and sunny day in Toledo. I had gone to the YMCA on Summit Street, worked out, showered and dressed for the day. 

The news broke somewhere between when I left a parking garage I parked at a block or so south of my office at a former firm, where I was a partner at on Erie Street, and when I arrived in the office.

I walked into our third floor lobby to our staff huddled around a TV in our large conference room. They told me of the first plane hitting the first tower. I told them the story of a WW II bomber hitting the Empire State Building in a rainy, foggy night. But much like Toledo, NYC had perfectly clear skies.

And then we saw the second plane hitting the second tower and I knew it was terrorism.  Tom Clancy had written a book I read a short time before called Debt of Honor where someone slammed a plane into the US Capitol Building to seek revenge.  

Not long after word broke of the plane hitting the Pentagon a client showed up for his appointment. He was a World War II veteran and I asked him if he wanted to go forward with our meeting. He asked if I did. I said sure, this was my generation’s Pearl Harbor, but we were safe in Toledo and I couldn’t do anything that minute to help anyone. Either in the midst of that meeting or shortly after the first tower fell.  

I explained to our team that both or at least part of both would eventually collapse. No building could take that kind of hit. Then the confusion and fear spread further.  Word broke of a car bomb near the State Department building in DC, which was false. Then word of a fourth plane and it crashing outside of Pittsburg. We found out that our local air national guard, the 180th Fighter Wing had been sent to shoot it down, but it was crashed before then.

My boss wouldn’t let everyone go home yet. I went to lunch with my wife and some friends as she is a pastor and our team at her church needed to meet and reconfigure Sunday’s service. After lunch, my boss finally relented and we told everyone who wanted to leave they could with pay. But a group of holdouts refused to go. So I decided to stay as the management person.  

My wife and child were safe, obsessing about missing relatives, all of whom were fine, wasn’t healthy, so I worked the files at work. Later that afternoon, I got a frantic phone call from our second floor telling me there was a fifth plane, it was in Toledo airspace, and was resisting orders to land. The remaining staff people were panicked.

I got them to tell me where they got their info, went onto the website and read the story.

It wasn’t breaking news but the recap of the local angle to the story.  

Flight 93 was in Toledo Airspace, between Toledo and Mansfield, when the hijackers took control. Again we had a pair of fighters at our air national guard base on alert and they went after it. About 7 or so planes did emergency landings in Toledo. No fifth plane nearby.

Later that day, when we finally got everyone to go home, I joined my wife and my two years and four month old daughter. The adults took turns watching video after video, while the other played with our daughter in the sun room off of our living room.

Of all of the videos, the horror of the planes hitting three of the largest buildings in the world, one hit me the most and my wife couldn’t get why it, of all the other horrors of the day, hit me the worst.

A man had a camera and was blocks away when one of the towers collapsed. The wave of ashes and debris blew over him as he ducked under a car. But it wasn’t the sights of the video, it was the sound. Specifically a piercing chorus of sounds.

I have spent three decades now representing injured first responders. Thanks to my position on Toledo City Council, I had the honor of chairing the Public Safety & Criminal Justice Reform Committee of Toledo City Council, and even at an event called Fire Ops 101, got a one day taste of the job.

I knew about the emergency locator beacons, being the son and great grand son of volunteer firefighters back then, and that the sound I heard was several hundred New York Firefighters in distress all at once. I knew the toll in the those who ran to that danger was going to be staggering.

And then I was taught a lesson by my child we weren’t screening her enough. She was playing and build a tower of bricks and crashed a toy plane into it. So the TV finally went off for a while.

Within about 24 hours, as I could see the men & women of the 180th Fighter Wing flying a combat air patrol to protect us from any attempt to hit us from Canada, I had an idea what I could do to help.

We had a young associate who really wanted to do will and probate work. I am a Navy dependent, and but for a really thick set of glasses would have served in the JAG Corps right out of the law school.  I therefore knew, we were going to be undertaking the most massive deployment of troops in decades. So I contacted the local Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and National Guard units and asked to talk to the JAG officer assigned. As expected, to say they were overwhelmed by the coming task was understatement. 

So thanks to a great team of partners, that associate and our support staff, we decided to offer to any local active duty or reserve military personnel a free will and durable power of attorney and discounted ones for their families.  And we did hundreds. Within a day of our story hitting local media, many firms throughout our area joined us.

A month or so later, I signed up for Trial Lawyers Care, which was started by the now American Association for Justice. Because of the scale of the tragedy of 9-11, with people killed in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia and a web of possible ways to get families help, a clearinghouse was set up with training and insurance to cover us. We would provide free assistance with workers’ compensation claims, social security survivors claims, and eventually claims to funds for those injured on the ground.   

That December, my wife and a team from our church got to do something constructive on the ground. She and two others trained as grief counselors went to a church, blocks from Ground Zero in New York and offered prayer and comfort to those working “The Pile”. It was a mound of what was the World Trade Center, the picture with the candle was shot just outside the work area. The team wanted to record and be a little light in that darkness.

Our local Muslim Community faced incredible hate and anger. Threats to attack the local Muslim schools, their children, and the local mosques were way too common.  So our church joined a group of others in the area. We would form a group of people who would come and stand watch outside so the children could play outside, their teachers eat lunch, and any troublemakers would face a wall of Christian witnesses to go through.

I will never forget the hospitality and gratitude we were shown for doing that, the basic thing our faith would compel us to do.

Since then, my family and I have been twice to where Flight 93 went down in Shanksville, PA. And we visited the Ground Zero Memorial in New York and the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, VA.

If you’ve never gone to them, they are truly holy ground. You can almost feel the energy, not of the horrible evil that cost so many lives that day but of the courage and heroism that saved many more. The first responders and ordinary people running to danger, helping others escape it, giving their lives all leaves an impression you can feel. 

As the quote from the Roman poet Virgil on a wall at the memorial in New York says “No Day Shall Erase You From the Memory of Time.”. I am glad I didn’t know when I took the picture why the wall was so long and massive. Behind it is a room where many of the dead’s remains are and the families can come visit them.

Today we remember those who died that day and over the years since including 343 firefighters, 23 police officers, 37 Port Authority police officers, who ran to the danger instead of from it. And the more than 2,200 civilians the couldn’t rescue and the 550,000 plus they did.

God bless those we lost, those who committed such amazing acts of heroism, kindness, sacrifice, that we know of and many more that we don’t. And please protect us from another day like that. We will never forget you all.