I Was an Eyewitness to Infamy on September 11

Sherman Oaks Patch editor Doug Kriegel was there on September 11.

President Obama announced in a nationally televised appearance Sunday night that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a firefight during an operation Mr. Obama ordered inside Pakistan, ending a 10-year manhunt for the terrorist leader.

I just happened to be on a golf and fishing trip in New York on September 11, 2001.  When the attack on the World Trade Center occured my cell phone rang, it was my boss at KNBC News,  she told me to start covering the story immediately-which I did for the next month.

Tonight I feel a tremedous sense of satisfaction that the man who is believed to have been responsible for that mass murder has now himself been killed.

I saw the twin towers go down, the buildings looked decapitated. One of my colleagues at KNBC told me that he cried when he saw me report that,"New York City has been brought to its knees."

I couldn't believe it myself.

In the days immediately  afterward I met hundreds of people who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center attack. Many of them continued to hold out hope that somehow, their relatives were  still alive, perhaps in a hospital ward somewhere in the city.

They would hold out photos of loved ones and ask reporters,"Have you seen this person in your travels around the city?"

It was heartbreaking to tell them that I had not seen that person in the photo.

I'll never forget going to a firefighter's funeral in the Bronx, it was an Italian neighborhood and the man who died was the father of two children.

People in the neighborhood were furious.

One of the older men in the neigborhood started talking to me. There was fury in his eyes as he pointed to a store on the next corner of the busy street we were standing on.

"You see that place," he said angrily, "the people who work in that store were cheering when the World Trade Center was attacked."

"We're going to pay them a visit," he vowed.

The next couple of weeks I continued covering various other stories in the aftermath of the attacks.

I never found out if they paid those people a visit.