9/11: Day’s End Reflection, 25 Years Later

The following piece is published annually on 9/11 as a testament to never forgetting …

It was a beautiful Tuesday. The sun was smiling with a crisp warmth. The air was a snappy fresh. The coffee even tasted especially good.

I remember. Most of us remember where we were on Sept. 11, 2001 at 8:46 a.m.. I know I do. I also remember how everything went from bright, crisp, fragrant and optimistic to dark, dank, acrid and terrifying in one second. I remember how it wasn’t about us observers, storytellers. It was about them — the victims, their loved ones, their message.

For me, a professional observer, a professional storyteller, thankfully close enough, yet far enough, yes, it was so very much about them — painfully so. I wasn’t one of them. I was lucky. I was grateful. I sought the bare honesty in the moments. I watched. They shared. I listened intently. I reported.

I was a journalist living in Fair Haven and covering Middletown for the Independent, Greater Media Newspapers. On what started out as a typical day, those victims of 9/11 and the people of Middletown manning the chaos and being the helpers ended up unwittingly, graciously, lighting a less traveled path for me. For many.

It’s this one storyteller’s perspective.

Through this one fortunate observer’s eyes and heart, it went like this …

It was the day after a busy deadline day at the weekly newspaper. We reporters were due in the office for our usual weekly editorial meeting. Two of us were carpooling to the newsroom in Freehold.

The routine meeting was set for 10 a.m.. Every Tuesday. My young colleague, Alison — pretty fresh out of college with about a year spent in her first newsroom and a lot of promise — was set to pick me up no later than 8:45. She always teased me about not being ready on story meeting day, the day after deadline day.

Ironically, this time I was. I had even washed my coffee cup, rather than the usual dumping of half of it in the sink as I darted out the door, zipping and slinging a backpack full of pens, reporter’s pads, glasses and a trusty point-and-shoot camera, should I need it for breaking news.

Perched on the porch and proud of my promptness (I know, former bosses, absurd alliteration meant to annoy), I waited and even started my new week’s story list. Last-minute lollygagger that I was, I usually jotted it down in the first few minutes of the meeting while daydreaming and decompressing after deadline (There I go again). I was shocking myself by being far too fastidious for my jumbled self that day.

It was just past 8:45. I had glanced at the clock before going outside. Alison wasn’t there yet. Neither of us had cell phones yet. I popped back inside and called her house. When she answered I started teasing her about being late when she was the one always heaping that ineptitude trip on my head.

“Uh, where the hell are you?? OK. This time you’re the one who’s gonna take the heat from Marilyn (our editor)!” I sniped and chuckled. I was the elder who was always late, but never missed a deadline, though sometimes by mere seconds, boss fingers a tapping atop that cubicle as I frantically typed. Ding.

My laugh was met with two beats of silence followed by, “Van Deee Velde, have you NOT been watching the last couple of minutes of the news?”

“Uh, no,” I said. “I was outside waiting for you!”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure our meeting is cancelled,” she said with an ominous overtone. The joking had stopped. “Turn on the news!” she yelled. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center … must be thousands of people dead.”

“What??” Silence. Disbelief. Gasp.

Lump in throat, adrenaline surge, I turned on the TV, just in time to see the second plane hit.

Suddenly, everything had changed — from light and bright to dark, heavy and murky. No one really knew what had just happened.

Was it a hoax? Was it just a freak accident? Were we at war? What was next?

Oh, my God. This was the World Trade Center in New York City. We lived in the center of a commuter community.

I was home, in Fair Haven. I was also the reporter covering Middletown, the largest municipality in Monmouth County — a 42-square-mile suburb of 67,000, many of whom worked in and commuted daily to New York. My colleague, my ride — she lived in Middletown.

All these thoughts flash flooding our minds, barely batting an eye or catching our breath, we assigned ourselves and got to work. What else could we do but what we did best? Feeling helpless, it was the only way we knew how to help. It was our job, after all. And it had to be done.

She was grabbing another reporter and going to the ferry terminals, where we soon found out people were being shuttled from out of the cloud of acrid smoke that chased and enveloped them in the city and drifted to our shores.

I was manning the phones, taking and making calls in rapid-fire pace. We still weren’t sure what had just happened. No one really knew.

I knew where my loved ones were. I was one of the lucky ones. Wrapping that gift up with a bow, I reached out beyond my cozy little home bubble to grasp at the scary truth and impart it. It was my job. It was what I knew best. How I could help. I kept reminding myself of that, swallowing any percolating fear to get it done. The first person I called, was, of course, my editor. She was choked up and just trying to keep a seasoned local news head about her while working amid what she described as an oxymoronic sullen mayhem in the office. I could hear it. I felt it.

Everyone there was grasping for answers, seeking those truths, while forcibly gulping down the horror. Phones were ringing. There were rumblings. There was shouting. There were tears.

I could hear it — the sound in her voice, the sounds in the background. I remember her words. “Everyone’s trying to get in touch with their families,” she said. “No one knows what to do first. People are crying … Oh, my God, I’m hearing that Cindy’s brother is missing. He was last seen going back into one of the towers. Oh, no …”

Cindy sat across from me in the office. She was a young reporter. Her brother was Port Authority Police Officer Kenneth Tietjen. We later found out that he never came out of a tower after leaving his post, commandeering a cab to get to Ground Zero when everyone else was running away, escaping before complete tower collapse, getting an air pack and rushing back in to save more lives. Cheating death, it turned out, was not be an option for Cindy’s brother that second time in. No one knew that story yet, though. Traumatic uncertainty was all anyone knew in those early moments.

Hearts started sinking deeper into that well of uncertainty. The reality started to unravel. Everyone was drowning in it. Then it came unspooled. A tsunami. It had hit home with a cruel thrust. We were under terrorist attack.

We, as journalists, were trying to get to the truth, cover it and help however we could. We just had to choke down our own fears, pain and empathy, get to those bitter truths and write about them. All of them.

Those truths — they were ugly. They were also resplendent. It was frustrating not being able to be there to help people find missing loved ones and one another. People here were just scrambling, at a loss.

The story had to be told from here, though — from where people left home to go to work, uncertainty looming about their otherwise typical evening’s homecoming.

I hung up with my boss feeling a burst of urgency peppered with dread over what I knew I would likely have to report. The interviews had to start. After my editor, my second call was to the mayor of Middletown at the time, Joan Smith.

Joan had to be the most soft-hearted, truly selfless public servant I had ever met. She was (well, I think she still is) sincere and kind. She firmly believed in the public aspect of her job as a the leader of Middletown’s governing body. She was always accessible. She was always fiercely gentle — composed, caring and just plain sweet in her demeanor.

She answered her home phone without hesitation or screening. I was actually her first call about all of this. “Do you have a flag?” was the first thing that came out of her mouth. “Yes,” I told her.

“I’ll hold on,” the mayor said in firm whisper. “You go get it and fly it right away. Fly your flag.”

I went upstairs into my hall closet, where the old flag had been folded properly stored since my dad’s death. I didn’t really know why I had never hung it again. But, I, toting my cordless phone (again, few actually had cell phones then) with me, got it and, sans flagpole, draped it properly on the porch while Joan hung on the phone.

“We have to show that we are united,” she said with a gentile, sad tone in her voice. “It may be a small gesture, but it’s something we should all be doing. That’s important right now. We are all at such a loss. We have to stand strong together.” I wrote down her words as we spoke. It was my job.

The mayor, being a no-frills, old-fashioned sort of woman without even call waiting to beep in emergency calls on her landline phone, then went on to tell me how upset she was at the prospect of so many in her town not returning to their cars at the train station or ferry terminal that night.

Her fear manifested. As night fell and people funneled their way through the darkness of it all, trying to find one another, many cars were never claimed from the Middletown Train Station.

In the end, 37 never came home.

In Fair Haven, in between Middletown calls, I checked in with police in my own hometown.

Then Captain Paul McCue had told me that Ted Luckett hadn’t come home. His car was brought to the police station from the ferry dock. Ted’s wife, Lisa, was a classmate from RFH. He was checking in on her.

A lot of the uncertainty remained for hours, days, weeks, even months. That day, though, the death toll was rising. We knew nothing yet. The list of the missing was growing. There was no list yet. People started acting out in some very right and wrong ways I’d soon find out. Aimless, scared people were stopping at my house, telling me fragments of horror stories in between the countless calls coming in and going out.

It was a young Fair Haven girl’s birthday. She was in my son’s class. They couldn’t find her dad. That was Ed McNally. He, too, never came home from work that day.

In the aftermath, police in Middletown were defying Chief John Pollinger’s orders and rushing to help at Ground Zero out of patriotism, perhaps misguided. Who was right? Who was wrong? “Trouble with the Middletown police, Elaine,” my editor said. “Call John again.” I had been on the phone with the chief on and off all day, as an officer gave him the finger and headed out to Ground Zero and another followed. I had earned Polinger’s implicit trust. Disgusted and dealing with some he did not trust, he hung up on me when I called to ask about the “trouble.” I called back. Apologizing and calling me tenacious and trustworthy, he promised to call back later that night. He did. And he told me everything in a two-hour talk about it. He knew I had to get the other side’s story, too. He respected that I met the defiant officers in a “secret meeting” (which I told the entire newsroom about, should I never return) at the water tower they had been assigned to patrol as punishment for their bucket brigade insubordination.

Then there was the unassuming, kind-hearted Middletown detective, Joe Capriotti, who was tasked with keeping the list of the missing and notifying loved ones each time another piece of a person was exhumed from the rubble. Yes, you read that right. Piece by piece.

It was daunting. He saw more of the deeply personal side of 9/11 than most. He was also a soothing source of strength to so many. It wore on him, but he still notified, consoled. It was his job. He considered it his honor.

I found out about Joe’s 9/11 job while talking to his chief, Pollinger, in the aftermath. I had gotten to know Joe Cap, as his friends and colleagues called him, from dealing with him regularly on police news. He was always not only a forthcoming, trusted source, but a relatable one whom I just happened to think was an all-around great guy. He became a friend.

His story, I thought, had to be told. My executive editor, Greg Bean, loved the idea. It was a unique one. So, I called Joe. He hesitated to be featured, but I thought his story was perhaps the most critical one. I convinced him to tell it to me. Joe would say, over and over again, that he was just doing his job. It was more than that, though. I knew that. His story was one of a different kind of heroism. An overlooked one. One with candid vision, heart and soul. We met up. Pain masked by a meaningful smile, the corners of his mouth always slightly quivering, a slight stammer in his speech, tears welling in his eyes, he talked about it all. I wrote his story.

Through Joe came the truest of stories behind the faces that ended up etched on the memorial stones in Middletown.

There was the story of the girl’s father who sat staring in front of the television day and night, waiting for his little girl to come home. She never arrived.

There was the story of the young deaf man who had gotten a job in the city and was thrilled about it. He never came home.

There was the expectant mother who clung onto the hope that her husband would walk in the door. He never did.

And on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I met up with Joe again, along with that widow, and interviewed him for a video and stories published on another online publication. That would be the last time I saw him. As I got to my car, he tried to give me two bottles of wine he had made himself. I put my hand up and said, “Joe, you know I cannot accept gifts. Besides, you’ve already gifted me with your insight and this interview.” I drove away hearing a clunking in the back seat. He had snuck them in.

There were so many stories to be told — stories of the both the ugliness and beauty that emerged from that unwitting burial ground.

The ugliest …

There was that bias-fueled fight that ensued at a Middletown gas station when a bigot saw a man in a turban come out of a gas station island to pour gas and punched him, somehow blaming him for it all.

There were the daily threats made to leaders of a Middletown mosque.

The most beautiful …

Those who persevered in their kindness — those who consoled and carried on at home in the tradition of those who never came home.

There was Joe Capriotti.

There was the family of Kenny Tietjen.

There was Lisa Luckett.

Those are just a few who suffered searing pain, but went on to inspire.

Twenty-five years later, as the day comes to an end, I vividly remember those cars at the train station, the fear and sadness, each of those unique stories that arose from it all from that day forward, each person I got to know posthumously and in the present.

I remember my luck in life to have been fortunate enough to have these incredible people pass through. I remember my fortune that they trusted me and my words enough to offer a glimpse into their complex worlds and, hopefully, create a better understanding of their humanity, our few degrees of separation in this world and how it all goes ’round in life.

We meet so many people as reporters — observers, storytellers. We have the privilege of learning from them and their lives and imparting that knowledge to the public so that it may enrich their lives as it has ours — making that little bit of difference. I thank those people for letting me in to tell their stories. I am also sorry I never met some of those who were killed that day, yet I still came to know.

Tonight, though, I look back on 25 years and I remember just how lucky I am. How lucky I am to not truly know their pain. How lucky I am to have known them and their stories.

I am humbled by them, by their truths. I am one person with one perspective, one gift from 9/11 — knowing them, their stories, passing through their lives. Writing about them so that others may learn from their stories. Our stories.

It only takes a moment for someone meaningful to pass through your life. Recognize them. Honor them. In the end, it is truly about them. It’s about you, too. The unity. It’s about why you were there in that moment with them.

Good night. Get home. Tell your stories. Listen to theirs. Care. Tell them you do. Every day.

Rest in peace, all our neighbors who never came home. Rest in peace, Joe Cap. Joe died in June of 2019, a victim of another terrorist, pancreatic cancer. Joe, thank you for telling me your story, for being a part of my life, for giving me those many valued moments.

By Elaine Van Develde, publisher, founding editor of Rumson-Fair Haven Retrospect

— Featured photo/Rachel Horowitz Sept. 10, 2021