Upper Macungie Patch Editor Remembers 9/11 Attack

Tom De Martini, local editor of Upper Macungie Patch, was a writer who commuted to New York’s financial district for 14 years. For the last eight of them--ending in 2001--he worked at One World Financial Center. He was within spitting distance of the Twin Towers.

He has been silent on the subject of the attacks ever since. None of his colleagues ever guessed he was there that day.

Though he has written volumes about news, finance and sports, he has never written a single word about his experience on Sept. 11.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “I saw things that day that no human being should ever see.”

De Martini said he's glad about the demise of Osama bin Laden, but that one life lost does not even come close to settling the score for him.

“It’s not enough,” he says. “My hometown, Middletown (New Jersey), lost 37 people that day, more than any other single town.”

De Martini commuted daily to New York City from his then-home in Matawan, N.J. His job at Bridge Information Systems afforded him a window with a view of New Jersey, so he did not see the planes hit first the North and then the South towers of the World Trade Center that day.

By the time he and his co-workers felt the rumble and the shaking of the second hit, they knew it was time to get out of their building. Theirs was the one with the green pointed dome roof seen in many photos.

"We had a fire drill about a year before Sept. 11. We had regular emergency briefings because of what happened in the towers in 1993," he recalled, referring to an earlier terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

"They told us not to use the elevators and that the staircases were ‘here, here, here and here.’ We listened, but we never really thought we would need to use the information," De Martini said.

"Do you know…that day, everybody went immediately to the right staircase?” he remembered.

Once he reached Vesey Street, right outside his building, De Martini said he saw the vendor’s cart from which he bought coffee every morning. The cart was still there, but it was covered with dust and money. The vendor had run for his life.

Unbeknownst to him, De Martini’s brother-in-law--who also worked in the financial district--was running for his life too, across the Brooklyn Bridge. He was another lucky one.

De Martini lost countless friends that day, including the son of a colleague who called his mother from the doomed Cantor Fitzgerald offices to tell her he would never be home.

Every year De Martini watches that boy’s father on television reading the names of some of the approximately 3,000 people who died that day in New York.

“My cousin lost a bridesmaid,” he said.

There were too many memorials and funerals to attend in the following days.

So no, the loss of one life, albeit that of the horror's mastermind, is not enough, he said.

“There’s a lot of emotion behind this topic,” he said.

Even driving near the World Trade Center site is enough to break his heart all over again. Every time.

“To this day I cannot look at that skyline without picturing the buildings there. They were a big part of my life. When I drive the Jersey Turnpike my eyes automatically go there, and in my mind I still see the World Trade Center,” De Martini said.

"So no, it’s not enough. There were the 3,000 people (killed) in New York plus hundreds of people at the Pentagon and in Shanksville (Pennsylvania). Then there are the hundreds of people who have been killed trying to find bin Laden since then. And all their families," he said.

And there are people like Tom De Martini, who saw unspeakable things he will carry in his heart forever.

“A part of my soul was taken from me that day,” he said. “And I’ll never get it back.”

So no, it’s not enough.