My dog and I returned from our morning walk to find the “Today” show reporting a plane hit a building in Lower Manhattan. I figured it was a student pilot in a small craft. Then they said airliner. Terrorism, I thought. In my home office, I dialed the modem that connected our Gannett/USA Today bureau in the New Jersey Statehouse in Trenton to the Asbury Park Press, home to our computer system.
Two of our staff of 10 lived in New York City. One was News Editor Colley Charpentier. His wife, who worked for the New York Times, answered my call to inquire if he had left. She seemed too cheerful and questioned why I was asking. They lived a few blocks north of Ground Zero but she hadn’t heard. I broke the news.
I got a terse message from reporter Lilo Stainton who lived in Greenwich Village: “Don’t know if subways running or cells working. Taking my bike and a pocket of change and heading to Twin Towers.”
The second plane hit. The towers fell as I watched on TV. Just then, my mother in North Carolina called, “Are you okay?” I said I was. “Are your people okay?”
I had just seen the towers collapse and it hit me Lilo was there. I just lost it. My mother recognized what was happening and assured, “She will be okay.”
The first word on that came via phone from my administration assistant in Trenton. She began, “I heard from Lilo’s mom” and my heart sank. Then she added “Lilo can’t get through to New Jersey but called her mom in Vermont and asked her to tell you she survived and will check in when she can.”
When the towers came down and the wall of thick debris blocked the sun, police and firefighters told everyone to run for their lives. Lilo dropped her bike and ducked into a store then noticed a pregnant woman struggling on the sidewalk. Lilo literally grabbed her hand and pulled the woman into the building, just as the mountain wave of debris passed.
Since Manhattan was closed, and communication limited, in Trenton I spend the day talking to other news organizations who knew we had Lilo on scene, some as far away as Australia.
Colley couldn’t get home that night so he went to my house. Lilo covered the major story in the world with backup from our New Jersey-based team for the rest of the week. Driving the 35 miles north to Trenton was an eerie experience, No planes in the sky, which was beautiful and clear except for the smoke rising on the horizon 80 miles away.
When Lilo came into the bureau Friday I told her editors wanted a big Sunday front page package for our papers. She said she didn’t know if she could.
I told her it was emotionally draining and everyone is exhausted but it’s the job we chose and suggested she pull up a chair and tell me. I began, “What do you remember most?”
It was a thumping sound made by bodies falling from upper floors.
New Jersey lost the most people on 9/11. All of us were touched. The pilot of United 93 lived near me. His wife went to my gym.
Future New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was to be nominated for U. S. Attorney on September 10 and his wife, Mary Pat, worked on Wall Street near Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost the most employees, 658.
Mrs. Christie and colleagues were herded into her building’s basement which had no working lights. They eventually found a door that would open, wrapped their faces in T-shirts and linked hands, using a human chain to escape the dark. They walked two and a half miles to Pete’s Tavern in Union Square where they helped serve food to dazed New Yorkers. Chris Christie watched it at home on TV, not knowing how his wife or brother, also a Wall Street worker, were doing. Someone in Pete’s had a Sprint card and passed it around for use at a pay phone. Mrs. Christie reached Chris via Kansas City.
He advised Mary Pat to go to the East Side and catch the ferry to Atlantic Highlands, about 20 miles away in Monmouth County, New Jersey. People covered in dust and debris were hosed down by firefighters because they didn’t know what the pollutants were. It turned out to be a wise move. Christie made the trip a second time to get his brother, Todd.
Meanwhile, FBI agents had their hands full so Christie’s nomination to U.S. Attorney was delayed. He was summoned to the office of U.S. Sen. Bob Toricelli, D-NJ, who told him he wasn’t his first choice but “we can’t screw around with this.” The senator could have blocked the nomination, but didn’t.
In a coincidence, President George W. Bush finally announced his intention to nominate Christie on another infamous day in American history — Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Christie was confirmed on Dec. 20. U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft called him, saying, “Remember, over 700 people in your district were murdered. It’s the single largest loss of life in the country. It’s your job to make sure it never happens again.”
I included Mrs. Christie’s first-person account in my book “Chris Christie: The Inside Story Of His Rise To Power.”
I told my editor at St. Martin’s Press to do whatever is needed but I wanted the 9/11 part to stay in, that people in the future need to hear an unsanitized version from someone who was there. He said it was one of the book’s best parts and would remain.
That was not the end of the 9/11 story and New Jersey governors. The toxic waste and polluted air caused people working in the area to be sick immediately and afterward despite the federal EPA saying air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe. The EPA administrator on 9/11 was Christie Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor. In 2016, she issued an apology, saying her misleading advice caused people to die. Days before the 9/11 anniversary in 2026, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani released files showing the government lied about the toxicity of the air and water.
Comedian, TV host and 9/11 advocate Jon Stewart, who was born in New York but grew up in the Trenton area, said Manhattan government knew by October, 2001, a month after the attack, the air was toxic. “So, to be fair to them, they only buried that information for 25 years.”
Most of us who have handled major stories move on. But 9/11 is different. My team has gone separate ways but we forever will be bound by that event.
In speeches and book signings, people always ask the biggest story I had a hand in. For years I told the 9/11 backstory and became emotional. I still do, writing this 25 years later.
We don’t know what happened to Lilo’s bike. I bought her a new one. Told her to pick out the best.
I sail every September in Maine. In a rowboat going from the big sail boat to an island, I chatted with a woman from Vermont. I told her I was bureau chief for the wire service for Gannett papers and USA Today in Trenton. She said her niece had worked in Trenton, “you may know her.”
The woman was Lilo’s aunt.