A survivor recounts 9/11: 'Is this how my life is going to end?'

I met Vina Francisco during a healing Mass, at which she requested Fr. Gerard Deveza to help heal her of the hives that have been recently bothering her.

“I always get this,” she told Father Gerard, “whenever the anniversary of 9/11 approaches.”

Why, we asked her, does 9/11 affect you so much?

“Because,” she answered, “I was right there.”

* * *

In 2001, Vina Francisco, the second of three children of Doy and Marichi Francisco, was living it up as a Human Resources executive of American Express in New York City, which has its quarters beside the World Trade Center’s (WTC’s) twin towers. She was making $200,000 a year, travelled extensively and derived much satisfaction from her job.

“You could say that I had made it, and I had made it in New York,” says this Assumption College alumna.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Vina found herself running a few minutes late for work. She couldn’t find her glasses, and she was nearsighted. After a few minutes of futile searching, she just decided to go to work without her glasses. She took her usual subway route, which ended at the World Trade Center station.

Smoke billows from the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. AP

When she got off at the WTC station a few minutes after 9 a.m., the people near the token booth were excitedly telling her not to enter the North Tower, “because there’s a fire!” Unbeknownst to them, the first plane manned by terrorists had slammed into the tower some 10 minutes earlier. So Vina walked towards the exit of the station instead, foregoing her usual walk through the building, and ended up on the street facing the 18th century St. Paul’s Church.

“The smoke billowing out of the North Tower was still white, so I presumed the fire had just broken out,” Vina narrates. “I saw a chopper circling the building, I thought it was a rescue chopper. But I was surprised when I saw it pull away.” Apparently, it wasn’t a rescue chopper, it was a police reconnaissance chopper.

She also remembers seeing white and black ashes falling from the building. Vina decided to just walk away from the twin towers and even her own office building, which was still unscathed.

“Instinctively, I knew that something was terribly wrong. You know, in times of crisis, something just kicks in inside us that saves us.”

Suddenly, she heard a woman screaming. “People are jumping from the building! People are falling off from the building!”

Vina turned to the towers and gasped. What she thought was black and white ashfall turned out to be bodies falling from the North Tower — black for men in suits that were jumping out the burning building, white for the unsuited bodies plummeting after them.

She started to feel the onset of a panic attack — she was gasping for breath and her chest seemed like it was under a hollow block. She didn’t know yet what was going on, but her instincts told her NOT to take the subway.

She decided to just run away, and thought it would be better if she took off her high-heeled mules. But before she could take them off, she heard a loud explosion that blanketed the streets with a million and one pieces of glass — just like snowflakes, except that they were green. Oh, was Vina glad she had no time to take off her shoes, or she would be now treading on broken glass!

“I remember everything like it happened only yesterday,” Vina recounted to me after the healing Mass last Sept. 6, the birthday of her close friend Tessa Prieto-Valdes. It also happened to be Vina’s 46th birthday.

“The glass pieces seemed green to me as they were falling because they reflected the color of leaves on the trees that lined the streets,” she told me. She is amazed at how that detail remained embedded in her memory, even 10 years after the terror attack on the WTC.

The explosion, it turned out, was from the impact of the second jet hitting the South Tower of the building. Vina just kept on moving away from the WTC and the American Express tower, not looking back. It was a wise step, literally and figuratively, because an officemate who had also stopped by St. Paul’s Church had paused to look back at what was happening to the twin towers. She paid the price for her curiosity because she was hit by one of the wheels of the jet that rammed into the South Tower, and was in a coma for about a week.

* * *

Vina just kept on shouting the name of the building her sister worked in, because in her confusion, she had lost her sense of direction. Her cell phone had lost its signal (a major cell site had been crippled by the attack on the WTC). She finally located the building where her sister worked, and was able to call a relative who told her what was happening to New York.

America was under attack, and the twin towers bombing was just the opening salvo. Vina had no idea she was in the center of the worst act of aggression on the US since Pearl Harbor. America was under siege and she was all alone.

Vina finally had gotten hold of her sister, who had decided not to report for work on Sept. 11.

“Just head north Vina and I will find you!” her sister screamed on the phone. “Just get out of there!”

Vina ran out of the building and spotted a cab. She got in, not noticing or caring that it already had three other passengers.

“I found three women inside and they were all sobbing. From the driver’s radio, we heard that even the Pentagon had been hit.”

She remembers thinking: “Are we at war? Is this how my life is going to end?”

Vina then asked the cab driver, whom she saw constantly turning his head towards the direction of the burning twin towers, to instead follow the police car ahead. They finally ended up in midtown Manhattan. She recalls passing by so many hospitals, all battle-ready with gurneys, and stretchers and personnel waiting on the streets for an avalanche of gravely wounded people.

But the ambulances were empty. There were no wounded to tend to.

“They were all waiting for people who never came. Because you either survived to tell your story, or perished. There were no major injuries. Just minor injuries, or death.”

You either died or walked away, as Vina did in her high heels. A few days after Sept. 11, she finally was able to bring herself to open the bag she was carrying on that day and she found inside it several pieces of broken glass, from the millions that exploded from the twin towers. She kept them for several years, as a memento of the day that she thought would be her last. They were pieces, it seemed, from a past life. Of the day that she thought was going to be the last day of her life, but turned out to be, by God’s grace, the first day of her new lease on life.

Vina lost 11 officemates during 9/11. After the attacks, American Express temporarily relocated its offices to New Jersey and for a while, Vina wanted to quit her job. But American Express wouldn’t let her go, so she stayed on.

After 9/11, Vina became very safety conscious. Inside a building or a hall, she would always look first for the escape door before she even sat down, just in case. On a bridge that she would constantly pass, she would look for the lowest point, so she would know from where to jump in case of an emergency.

“More than anything, 9/11 taught me about my strengths,” she says as she looks back. She realized that many of those who didn’t make it out of the twin towers “were those that froze.”

“I became more appreciative of my life and of my blessings,” she adds.

She also learned how to care more for her loved ones. She decided to spend more quality time with her parents Doy, now 75, and Marichi, now 70. Last year, she decided to return to the Philippines, much to the surprise of her parents, who never thought their successful daughter who had been working in the US since 1998 would even consider returning to Manila. Vina now works as part of the HR team of a multilateral organization headquartered in Manila.

 On Sunday, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Vina is going to invite six of her closest friends to her new flat. It will be a celebration of life.

She, after all, had walked away from death and plunged into a new life.

“All I know is that as much as I loved life before September 11th, I love it even more now,” Vina smiles.

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