The second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit sometime during their drive, and amid the day’s chaos, Jimeno never even realized it had happened. The officers commandeered an MTA bus on Ninth Avenue and raced toward the burning building with a PAPD Suburban running escort ahead. Jimeno called Allison briefly, to explain he was OK, but what would linger in her mind over the hours to come was that he hung up, hurriedly, without his customary “I love you.” Inside, they were informed American Airlines Flight 11 had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center and they were being sent south to help with the rescue mission. “Yeah, I can’t imagine what it could be,” Jimeno replied. He crossed paths on his way back inside with a fellow rookie, his academy friend Dominick Pezzulo, who said, “Willy” - Pezzulo was the one person in Jimeno’s life who used his childhood nickname - “something must be really bad for them to call us all back to the police desk.” Seemingly within moments, Jimeno and every other PAPD officer at the bus terminal were called to return to the department’s main desk. He saw people point, but has no memory of hearing an airplane nor did he realize what had cast the giant shadow. “It completely covered the street for a split second,” Jimeno recalls. roll call he was assigned to the bus terminal at the time and at 8:46 he’d been standing post at the corner of 42nd and Eighth Avenue, watching the morning rush of commuters heading into work, when a shadow passed over the intersection. 11, he decided to skip the hunting and head in for the 6:45 a.m. “I waited all my life to become a police officer.” During the ceremony, Jimeno had seen his younger daughter Bianca waving in the crowd, shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” “We had big smiles on our faces,” Jimeno would say later. The sixteen-acre site was the shining jewel of the properties protected by the 1,700-officer multi-state Port Authority, which also protected New York-area airports - LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark - the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, the PATH commuter train system, as well as the tunnels and bridges between the two states. He and 76 other police cadets had graduated in a January 2001 ceremony at the Marriott Hotel at the World Trade Center, nestled between the bases of the Twin Towers. His father, a welder, and his mother, a beautician, had worked to send him to Catholic school, and he had joined the Navy right out of high school, serving aboard the helicopter carrier USS Tripoli, before returning home, heading to community college and taking the test to join the police department for the bistate Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. His parents had come to the United States, to Hackensack, N.J., in 1970 from Colombia when he was just two years old. Jimeno, 32, was still a rookie he’d been living his dream of becoming a police officer for just nine months. That fall, his wife Allison was seven months pregnant with their second child. Jimeno was an archer - he’d taken up bow-hunting from his wife’s family - and it was a perfect day for deer hunting. The giant storm that had blown through the northeast the afternoon before had left behind sun, clear blue skies, and crisp fall temperatures. 11 was so beautiful that Jimeno considered taking the day off to hunt. But just two people were rescued from underneath the ruin: Jimeno and his sergeant that day, John McLoughlin. One survived after the stairs she was rushing down disintegrated around her. Most were with a group of FDNY firefighters in the North Tower’s Stairwell B, which remained essentially intact. As rescuers began to flood the rubble field that would eventually become known as Ground Zero late Tuesday morning and into the afternoon, they found no survivors.ġ8 people survived the collapse that day. The intensity of the towers’ collapse meant that nearly all those near or trapped inside died. and the North at 10:28, hospitals across the New York region activated disaster protocols, planning for mass casualties, and even up and down the east coast, hospitals wondered if they’d receive airlifted trauma patients.īut by afternoon, the doctors and nurses lined up in overflow emergency rooms and triage sites in cafeterias realized that the flood of patients wasn’t coming. and then the second at 9:03, followed by the collapse of the South Tower at 9:59 a.m. In the moments after the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m.
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