Remembering 9/11: St. Michael Grad Watched Horror from a Different "Ground Zero"

St. Michael-Albertville graduate Tia Elliott, then a college student in Boston, remembers vividly the events of Sept. 11, 2001 as they unfolded just hours away.

Like all of us, the images were etched in her mind. So much so, she headed to Gound Zero with college friends who hailed from New York and New Jersey less than a six months after the attack. The goal was to see the "unofficial" memorial the former World Trade Center site had suddenly become.

"A lot of memories and mini-stories with friends from that day," she wrote as she e-mailed pictures to St. Michael Patch.

She said the smell and dust from the towers' collapse was still hanging in the air.

"It was very quiet–everyone was reading the memorials, viewing the remembrance items left at the site," she said. "It was almost kind of haunting."

Now a resident back in St. Michael-Albertville, Elliott said the surprising facts came after Sept. 11.

It was revealed the hijackers who flew their planes into Tower 1 and Tower 2 had boarded two flights–American Flight 11 and United Flight 175–at Boston's Logan International Airport, and had stayed at a hotel just miles from her dorm room at Boston College.

"I flew out of Logan just a three weeks later," Elliott remembered. "It was a scary, nervous feeling."