The day that changed their lives forever

For those who lived through the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the date divides a time of relative peace from an era of upheaval and fear. Sept. 11 brought a call to action for some. For others, the date brought a loss of innocence. For Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent, the attacks triggered an increase in discrimination. And, for those who loved one of the nearly 3,000 victims, Sept. 11 will always be a day of mourning.

On that day, Maryland was positioned near the center of the three crash sites: the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan; the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia; and the open field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where United Airlines Flight 93 came down. The attacks and their aftermath swept Marylanders into the roles of heroes, victims, witnesses and survivors. The following are some of their harrowing stories from that day.

The chief who raced to N.Y.

After watching the first tower collapse on TV, Stephen E. Allen Sr. knew the only answer was: Go!

He was Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport’s safety chief but worked part time for the federal Office of Emergency Preparedness. On that crystal blue Tuesday morning, Allen rushed from the airport to his home in Bowie. By nightfall, he was at New York’s Stewart Air National Guard Base, where first responders convened.

For 32 days, the since-retired Prince George’s County firefighter supervised more than 500 emergency workers — and countless rescue dogs — at the World Trade Center site.

“It was pretty tryin’, of course,” Allen said. “Because of being a firefighter, it hit home with me quite a bit.”

It took him 45 minutes to walk the perimeter of the pile — the mesh of mangled metal once known as the Twin Towers. Six blocks of buildings that didn’t collapse were coated in a ghostly ash.

For weeks, Allen said, he couldn’t walk into a restaurant without being offered a free beer or meal.

“Just between you, me and the gatepost, it’s a shame that attitude couldn’t stay with us,” the 75-year-old said.

When Allen returned to Ground Zero for a visit in November 2001, he delivered dozens of crab cakes and soup to other first responders to return New York’s kindness.

The National Guard member who protected the Pentagon

Ret. Command Sgt. Maj. Aarion Franklin got the call to muster 30 minutes after the first plane struck the North Tower. Hours later, he and fellow members of the Maryland Army National Guard piled weapons and gear into a convoy of Humvees and rolled down an empty Interstate 295.

When they reached the Pentagon, Franklin and the others stepped out, shocked to see the building still burning, as they moved to secure the perimeter and set up a command center.

Acrid smoke billowed from a V-shaped chasm where the plane had crashed hours before. A bell clanged each time rescuers pulled a body from the wreckage, causing a hush to ripple over the crowd. In time, the bell rang less frequently.

A general took in the sight of the destroyed building, the missing wall and, beyond that, his own office. He tearfully confided that his staff had been inside, Franklin recalled. Soon volunteers showed up with coffee. Outback Steakhouse delivered meals and a bit of normalcy to the surreal scene.

The events of 9/11 changed Franklin’s life. He spent the better part of the next year stationed at the Pentagon, away from his wife and two young children.

These sights and sounds are still vivid in his memory.

“I think about all the lives that were lost that day and just think about how uncertain life is,” Franklin, 51, said.

The young woman who found safety with strangers

As Lacy Pica Nugent stepped out of the World Trade Center subway station, she saw a swarm of people rushing past. Unsure of what had happened, she ducked back into the subway station with them, taking the train to the next stop.

Once in her office on Broadway, she watched as the second plane slammed into the other tower, exploding in a fireball. Her knees buckled. She lost her balance. She rushed out onto the street with her colleagues and dashed into another building just moments before clouds of debris left the clear blue day in darkness.

Nugent, then 22, huddled in a small office of the Chase building with strangers as they took turns calling loved ones. She called her parents in Baltimore and her sister in D.C. and waited for hours until Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered the evacuation of lower Manhattan. Officers told the crowd of soot-covered New Yorkers to leave on foot along the East Side Highway.

She walked with a young woman she guessed was about her age, who wasn’t able to get to her Brooklyn apartment, so Nugent invited her to stay with her in the West Village. They split a six-pack of Bud Light and watched the news explain what they had just lived through. They cried for hours.

Nugent, now 47 and a mother of three, said that day made her more fearful — of crowds, movie theaters, concerts — but hasn’t stopped her. She wants her kids to know what she survived.

“Through bravery and kindness you can see your way on the other side,” she said.

The passenger who fought back

Honor Elizabeth Wainio’s friends called her Lizz. The 27-year-old indoctrinated her kid sister Sarah with Blondie and ABBA songs. In an era before FaceTime, she was the kind of person who drove from New Jersey to Towson to watch 13-year-old Sarah’s dance recital.

Wainio worked for Discovery Channel as a district manager in New York and New Jersey. When she boarded a plane in Newark, New Jersey, for a San Francisco meeting, Sarah had no idea Lizz was even flying.

In the moments before certain death, the surviving passengers and crew voted to overpower terrorists hellbent on turning their plane into a missile bound for the U.S. Capitol.

Before they cratered in a Shanksville, Pennsylvania, field, Wainio called home:

“They’re getting ready to break into the cockpit. I have to go. I love you. Goodbye.”

Sarah Wainio was ushered out of gym class. She saw her principal, dad and a police officer sobbing in the lobby and instantly knew.

A hundred years from now, she said, she is terrified that people will remember only New York. That her sister’s bravery, and the untold lives it saved, will be erased from history.

So the filmmaker plans to share her indelible “Lizzie” in a documentary that asks: How will we remember United Flight 93?

The man whose spirit lives on

Father Pedro Arrupe coined the Jesuit motto: “men for others” in a 1973 speech — a year after Daniel “Dan” Walker McNeal was born. For the rest of his 29 years, McNeal embodied that motto.

The Towson native had a penchant for Reaganomics and three-piece suits and the ability to befriend anyone. McNeal’s family thought the Loyola Blakefield graduate was destined for politics.

He graduated from Boston College cum laude, earned an MBA from Georgetown University and worked for Sandler O’Neill and Partners on the 104th floor of the South Tower before the age of 30. When the first plane hit the North Tower, he left a voicemail for his mother, Kitty, promising to “get the heck outta Dodge.”

Moments later, while he was on the phone with his dad, Mike, the second plane struck.

“He wanted to make things right. … It wasn’t about the money. It was about doing the right thing.”

Even if downgrading a stock would cost his company an account, McNeal was resolute in making the ethical decision.

Their mother, now 91, often asked her husband, Where did this kid come from?

He was a devout Catholic, a loyal friend and a patriotic young man.

“Everything I could’ve dreamed I would have in a son was verified in Dan,” she said.

Sheeler’s son inherited his uncle’s name and dear-hearted nature. Both, Sheeler said, are “men for others.”

The child who lost his favorite toy

The plastic passenger plane stood out among the blocks, Matchbox Cars and other toys lining the shelves of Robert Boehlert’s kindergarten classroom in Syracuse, New York. For the first couple of weeks of school, the boy would grab the red- and blue-striped plane at playtime and whoosh around his classroom.

Then came the strange morning when teachers ushered young Robert and his classmates into the hallway, where all the children were waiting for their parents to pick them up. The children sat silently, bewildered, while the teachers paced the hallways, murmuring to each other about planes striking the Twin Towers. At home, Robert’s parents explained what had happened in simple language. Some people did something bad, and we picked you up early to keep you safe.

Back at school later that week, Robert raced to the shelf to see his favorite toy. The plane was gone. “We had to take it away,” his teacher said with a note of finality.

Boehlert, now an attorney at Maryland Legal Aid, recalled realizing in that moment that something had fundamentally shifted in a world he barely understood. “In some limited way, I comprehended that it was a scary moment,” he said.

The Muslim woman who confronted hatred

As Zainab Chaudry paused at a Baltimore traffic signal about a week after 9/11, a rock flew toward her car window.

Chaudry had been in the first month of pharmacy school when a professor abruptly canceled class. As she and other students hunkered in a friend’s apartment watching the devastation unfold, her father called her with an urgent plea: Take off your hijab.

“He said, ‘I am very worried for your safety,’” Chaudry recalled.

Then 20 years old, Chaudry had recently begun wearing the hijab as a sign of devotion to her Muslim faith. Her parents, Pakistani immigrants who worked with patients at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center, had instilled in Chaudry and her brothers the values of empathy, self-sacrifice and compassion.

Suddenly, Chaudry was surrounded by people who saw her faith as a threat. Someone yanked her hijab in a crowd. Others yelled Islamophobic slurs. And then there was the rock, which came flying at her car and cracked her window.

About a decade after the attacks, Chaudry, dismayed by rising Islamophobia, decided to work for the Council on American-Islamic Relations and is now the head of CAIR’s Maryland office. Chaudry said she works to reclaim Islam from terrorists and those who associate it with terrorism, so others may live their faith without fear.

The attacks “made me realize we had a choice,” Chaudry said. “I can either cave into the fear-mongering or reclaim my faith from those who seek to distort it.”