September 11th in the Words of Those Who Lived it
By Office of Communications & Marketing | Sep 11, 2026
At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2026, members of the Downstate community stood in silence.
Exactly 25 years earlier, at 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
For many, September 11 punctuated time. There was life before that morning and life after it. Even today, the trauma continues for some who survived, responded, lost people they loved or live with illnesses connected to their exposure.
For Downstate, September 11 also became a story of service.
It began the moment the planes struck. Across the East River in Brooklyn, SUNY Downstate went into action.
With John C. LaRosa, M.D., then president of Downstate, the campus mobilized for what officials feared would be a mass-casualty emergency. University Hospital prepared to receive as many as 200 casualties.
Physicians, nurses, residents, technicians, laboratory personnel, University Police, administrators and support staff prepared for an influx of injured people. In the days that followed, students gave blood and raised money. Faculty members answered military calls to service.
Across the campus, people saw what needed to be done and did it. But the anticipated stream of patients never came. The reason soon became horrifyingly clear. Relatively few people had survived the collapse of the towers to be transported to hospitals.
Downstate's response took other forms. Some unfolded within hours. Others would continue for years.
Running Toward the Towers
Josh Kellerman's story captures the instinct to act. Josh, a Downstate Information Services employee, EMT and Hatzalah volunteer, was working across from the World Trade Center when the first plane struck. He grabbed his two-way radio and ran toward the disaster with his ambulance team.
When the South Tower collapsed, the enormous cloud created by the falling building swallowed them. It was not ordinary dust. The collapse pulverized concrete and gypsum, glass and mineral fibers and other building materials into a highly alkaline mixture that also contained asbestos, metals, soot and combustion products.
Visibility disappeared. Josh and his colleagues kept moving. With two injured people aboard, they drove through the dust to NYU's trauma center.
Then Josh returned to the emergency effort. He worked through the night, transporting primarily firefighters.
A Campus Responds
Back in Brooklyn, the response reached nearly every part of the campus.
The names recorded in Downstate's accounts from that time represent only part of the response. Physicians, nurses, residents, laboratory and radiology staff, respiratory therapists, social workers, University Police officers, administrators, secretaries, food service workers, facilities employees and others reported for duty, remained at their posts or took on whatever work the emergency required. Some went to Ground Zero. Others prepared University Hospital for casualties, supported emergency operations, donated blood, raised money or cared for colleagues and their families.
Tom Dugan, then a new member of the University Police Department and later its chief, learned from his son, an NYPD officer, that police at the disaster site were having difficulty using paper masks. Chief Dugan brought the request to University Hospital administrators.
The hospital immediately donated 50 masks and respirators and appealed to other hospitals for more. University Hospital also sent cases of casting plaster, padding and irrigation solution to hospitals and emergency crews responding to the disaster.
Several Downstate physicians and residents went to Ground Zero to help. So did John Czap of SMIC and Michael Donohue, a surgical technician and retired firefighter. Rosario de la Pena, associate director of nursing, remained in the OR holding area for 48 hours because she did not want to leave the nurses there alone.
Across campus, people stayed at their posts. Secretarial staff in the Command Center worked 16-hour shifts. Other employees came in on their days off. Many nurses remained at their posts so long that spouses arrived with dinner or simply came to keep them company. Laboratory employees stayed overnight. Cafeteria employee also stayed through the night, providing food for hospital staff and local police. Social Services operated a Crisis Center without interruption.
Students responded in overwhelming numbers to donate blood and raise money for victims' families. When a bomb scare at nearby P.S. 235 sent employees to retrieve their children, Laurel Whitaker, director of the Child Life Center, organized activities for the children brought back to campus.
These individual acts tell the larger Downstate story. People responded wherever they were needed, whether that meant going to Ground Zero, remaining at a laboratory bench or nursing station, feeding people through the night, caring for frightened children or answering a telephone in the Command Center.
Many of their names never appeared in an article or official account. Their service was no less important.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes later presented Dr. LaRosa with a Certificate of Appreciation recognizing Downstate's “service to the people of New York in their time of crisis.”
For some members of the Downstate community, that service took them elsewhere.
Mary Germain, Ph.D., a College of Nursing faculty member and retired Army Nurse Corps Reserve Colonel, was recalled to active military duty. Until additional medical support arrived, Dr. Germain and another nurse practitioner cared for more than 600 National Guard troops mobilized for disaster relief.
Downstate later recognized Dr. Germain with its Presidential Medal for Community Service. Years later, SUNY awarded her an honorary degree in recognition of her community service.
The needs kept changing. Downstate's response changed with them.
The Trauma That Followed
Not every injury from September 11 could be seen.
Downstate's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences became part of the response to the psychological trauma that followed the attacks.
The late Steven Friedman, Ph.D., then head of Downstate's Anxiety Disorders Clinic, and his colleagues treated firefighters and other first responders struggling with the psychological effects of what they had witnessed and experienced.
For some, ordinary sounds and experiences became reminders of that morning. A plane overhead, a motorcycle backfiring or an elevator could trigger fear and panic. Some first responders struggled even to talk about what they had seen.
Dr. Friedman and his team used cognitive behavioral approaches, including exposure therapy, to help patients confront memories and situations they had begun to avoid.
Ten years later, in a 2011 interview with 1010 WINS reporter Sonia Rincon, Dr. Friedman reflected on the firefighters he had treated. Some had adapted and moved forward with their lives. Others still carried the sadness and trauma of September 11. One man told him that his life had never completely recovered.
The interview made clear that September 11 had not ended for many of the people who survived it. Dr. Friedman and his team were treating wounds that could remain long after the physical injuries had healed.
Their work became another part of Downstate's response, one that recognized the psychological consequences of September 11 as well as the physical ones.
The Arms Of The City
The Downstate response also found expression in words.
Gerald W. Deas, M.D., MPH, a Downstate physician, 1962 graduate of the College of Medicine, public health advocate and poet, wrote “The Arms of the City” on September 12, 2001, one day after the attacks.
He began:
“Like two arms stretching to the heavens
The towers at the edge of the city
Greeted the rising and setting of the sun
Each new day”
Dr. Deas carried the image of the towers as outstretched arms through their destruction and the response of firefighters, police officers, doctors, nurses, ironworkers, construction workers and others. He ended with regeneration. Like a starfish, the wounded city would grow new arms.
Years later, Dr. Deas interviewed Alton Burton for Downstate’s Health Center television program. Burton, an African American engineer with the Port Authority, had been part of the staff that planned the World Trade Center. He later recalled watching the towers fall from his Brooklyn home and realizing with horror that what at first looked like a movie was real.
The interview brought together two very different connections to September 11. Burton had helped plan the buildings whose destruction he later witnessed. Dr. Deas, a physician and health communicator, sought to help people understand both what had happened and what it meant.
Dr. Deas's words captured something medicine alone could not address. People needed to understand what had happened, mourn those who were lost and find a way to move forward.
A year after the attacks, President LaRosa spoke of continuing grief, the uneasiness that could accompany something as ordinary as a plane flying overhead, and a renewed pride in the city and tolerance for fellow New Yorkers.
September 11, he said, had demonstrated something “far more powerful than terror: the heroism of everyday citizens.”
Downstate Physicians Join The Response
Downstate's role extended beyond the campus.
Physicians educated and trained at Downstate became part of the enormous medical and scientific effort that followed the attack. Their work ranged from identifying the dead to investigating illnesses among people exposed at the World Trade Center.
Charles A. Catanese, M.D., a 1990 Downstate medical graduate and former pathology resident affiliated with the Downstate/Kings County Department of Pathology, became part of New York City's forensic response through the Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
He spent more than nine months examining World Trade Center fatalities. The destruction made identification extraordinarily difficult. The airplane impacts, fires and collapse left thousands of human remains and fragments. DNA became essential.
Small samples of bone or tissue could sometimes provide enough genetic material to establish an identity. Investigators compared DNA from remains with samples from relatives or personal items belonging to the missing. It was exacting scientific work with an intensely human purpose. Behind every identification was a family waiting for an answer.
Over time, the forensic effort identified nearly 2,000 of the people who died at the World Trade Center. This work continues as advances in DNA technology make it possible to identify remains that could not be identified earlier.
Another Downstate physician became part of the effort to understand what September 11 had done to the living.
Walfredo J. Leon, M.D., a 1978 graduate of Downstate's College of Medicine, former president of the College of Medicine Alumni Association, and a pulmonologist affiliated with Downstate and Kings County Hospital, participated in research examining police officers who had served at the World Trade Center disaster site.
The research documented clinical and psychological abnormalities among officers exposed at Ground Zero. Dr. Leon's work connected Downstate's expertise in pulmonary medicine with one of the major medical questions that emerged after September 11. Physicians needed to understand what exposure to the World Trade Center environment had done to the people who breathed it.
Drs. Catanese and Leon represent another part of Downstate's 9/11 story. Downstate-trained physicians carried their education and expertise into the city's larger response. One confronted the extraordinary forensic challenge of identifying the dead. Another helped investigate illnesses emerging among the living.
Their work foreshadowed a responsibility that would continue for decades.
From Emergency Response To Long-Term Care
September 11 created a medical crisis whose dimensions took years to emerge.
Firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel, construction workers, cleanup crews, residents and others exposed to the World Trade Center environment developed respiratory illnesses and other physical and psychological conditions.
Downstate physicians became part of the effort to understand and treat those illnesses.
With SUNY Stony Brook, Downstate subsequently established a Brooklyn-based World Trade Center health program, extending care closer to responders and others affected by September 11. Jack A. DeHovitz, M.D., Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine, led the Downstate program.
An Accidental Witness
I was not at Downstate on September 11.
I should have been at work, but I had a physical therapy appointment that morning in an office directly across the street from the North Tower. The appointment was scheduled for about half an hour after the first plane struck.
I was still home, seven blocks from the World Trade Center, when I heard the first impact. My first thought was that it was a sonic boom from a military plane flying way too low.
From the windows of my 31st-floor apartment, I could see that something terrible had happened. This close and this soon after the impact, I could see where the plane had entered the tower, the outline of its wings in flame, with black smoke pouring upward.
I was on the telephone with Downstate, canceling a meeting, when I saw the South Tower begin to crumble.
I fled downstairs. About 30 tenants had gathered toward the back of our lobby. Then the other tower fell.
Until Building 7 fell, we still had electricity. The telephones worked. The elevators worked. But outside, visibility had nearly disappeared. Dust covered everything. We were told to remain inside.
In the days and weeks that followed, September 11 became part of the rhythm of our lives. Posters of the missing everywhere. Armed guards in the streets. Residents met repeatedly about the safety of our building. We fought to have it properly tested and cleaned. Some of us paid for our own environmental testing.
I attended numerous community meetings about local air safety. We watched trucks haul debris from the World Trade Center site through Lower Manhattan without protective coverings. I became increasingly troubled by the EPA's assurances about the safety of the air and by what we could see around us.
Dust had settled everywhere, and pockets of it remained. It collected on windowsills, in parks and in corners that had escaped the initial cleanup. I found it even on the historic ships at the South Street Seaport, where I volunteered.
After September 11, I became an informal, self-educated expert on HVAC systems and asbestos exposure. These were things I had never expected to know about, but suddenly they mattered to where and how we lived.
I also felt frustrated that I was not physically able to help with the recovery effort. Other people were working at the pile, treating the injured, feeding responders and doing whatever they could. I wanted to help, but physically I could not.
A distinctive odor hung in the air. I developed what people came to call the “World Trade Center cough.” Mine did not fully disappear until I finally threw away my bed and upholstered furniture.
The rituals of remembrance also became part of life downtown. For years, I attended sunrise memorials, laid flowers at the firehouse across the street and joined the annual reading of the names of nearly 3,000 people who died.
Months after the attacks, I was standing at the window of my 31st-floor apartment, looking out toward the water, when I saw the fireboat John J. Harvey taking part in a tribute to those who had been lost. The Harvey itself had answered the call on September 11, helping evacuate people from Lower Manhattan and then pumping river water to firefighters after the collapse damaged the city's water mains.
As I watched its great sprays of water rise above the river, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably.
Until then, I had not understood how much grief I was carrying. It had no single name. It belonged to people I knew and people I had never met, to the neighborhood around me and to a city that no longer felt quite the same.
For a long time, I also felt guilty.
I had done nothing heroic. I had not run toward the towers as Josh Kellerman had. I had not cared for National Guard troops, examined remains or treated first responders.
I simply lived there.
And there were thousands of us who simply lived there.
September 11 punctuated time for us. We remembered things as happening before September 11, three months after it, a year after it. Gradually those markers became years.
But for some people, September 11 never became entirely past tense.
The Story Continues
The cloud created by the collapse did not stop at the East River.
During the first hours after the towers fell, winds carried the plume east and then southeast across and beyond Brooklyn. The dust contained pulverized building materials, glass and mineral fibers, asbestos, metals and products of combustion.
Exposure was not confined to the people who stood at Ground Zero.
Over the years, the understanding of who was affected expanded. Responders developed respiratory disease and cancers. Survivors and residents reported illnesses. Research continued. The federal World Trade Center Health Program now recognizes portions of Brooklyn within its New York City Disaster Area.
Twenty-five years later, we may never know the full effect of September 11 on everyone who breathed that air.
What we do know is that the medical story did not end when the fires went out.
For Downstate, the response began with a hospital preparing for hundreds of casualties. It continued through Josh Kellerman running toward the towers; Tom Dugan responding to an NYPD need; John Czap and Michael Donohue going to Ground Zero; Rosario de la Pena staying with her nurses; laboratory, cafeteria, Social Services and Command Center staff working through the emergency; Dr. Germain caring for mobilized troops; Dr. Friedman and his team treating the psychological trauma carried by first responders; Dr. Deas finding words for grief and regeneration; Dr. Catanese helping identify the dead; Dr. Leon studying illness among responders; and clinicians caring for people whose illnesses emerged years later.
Twenty-five years later, the campus gathered again at 8:46 a.m. and stood in silence.
September 11 punctuated our history.
For some, its consequences continue to punctuate their lives.
Ellen Watson
Office of Communications and Marketing
Tags: observances