New York stories: eight memories of 9/11

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the British Sunday papers gave considerable space to interviews with relatives, emergency workers and witnesses to the atrocity on September 11, 2001. Here, briefly, are eight of the most revealing...

1. Rene Davila, New York emergency services lieutenant

"They were jumping... one, two, three, four, smashing like fucking eggs on the ground," said Rene Davila, one of the first emergency services personnel at the scene. Someone suggested they should collect the names of those who were falling. "I was like, you're fucking out of your mind." Davila's recollections of 9/11 were among those collected by the Fire Department in the aftermath of 9/11. As the Sunday Times reports, these 'debriefing interviews' were only made public much later, thanks to a freedom of information request from the New York Times.

2. Maureen McArdle-Schulman, firefighter

"I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament," said Maureen McArdle-Schulman, one of the firefighters 'debriefed' by the Fire Department. Like Davila (above), she was suddenly aware of the sight and sound of bodies falling – but she couldn't watch. "They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn't have been, so me and another guy turned away and looked at the wall, and we could still hear them hit."

3. Madison Burnett, one of the '9/11 kids'

Madison Burnett was five. She recalls her mother "crying hysterically" on the phone to her father, who called her from on board UA flight 93. He was later credited as one of the passengers who tackled the hijackers and thwarted the terrorists' ambition to hit either the White House or the Capitol. Madison told the Independent on Sunday how her mother then turned on the TV. "The rest of the day is a blank, although what I do remember – much later – is looking out of the window when it was dark, and seeing that our neighbours had formed a human chain around our home, to stop the TV cameramen and journalists getting near us."

4. Elizabeth Turner, mother of a 9/11 baby

Elizabeth Turner, an executive at Channel 4 News, was seven months' pregnant on 9/11. She was at work in London, in front of a bank by TV screens, when the north tower, where her husband was attending a meeting on the top floor, was struck. Her son was born two months later. "I am the youngest of four children and I had always wanted to have a large family," she told the Sunday Telegraph. "And now I'd been transformed from a happily married pregnant career girl into a single parent widow."

5. Richard Pecorella, fiance of a 'jumper'

Nobody likes to talk about the jumpers, says Richard Pecorella of Brooklyn, partly because in America it's a religious taboo. But he is convinced his fiancee, Karen, was one of the 100-plus victims of 9/11 who jumped or fell from the towers. He cannot be sure. But he has seen a photograph showing Karen, wearing her customary bandana, climbing out of a window of the north tower, the flames behind her. A second photograph shows a woman falling: the bandana is gone but the hair and body shape are all too familiar. He told the Sunday Times he was thankful she had jumped and did not, in his words, burn up and become toast.

6. Helen Fospero, witness

An English television reporter based in New York, Helen Frospero was woken up by the din of sirens on the morning of 9/11, and scrambled out onto her fire escape in SoHo to see the Twin Towers crumble before her eyes. She was to broadcast live from Ground Zero hours later. She told the Daily Mail: "When the first of the towers fell, it went like a deck of cards... I don't remember any sound – just a slow, almost gentle collapse followed by a huge ball of dust and debris." But she also fell in love in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, with an American TV producer, Carl. The way he "offered to help...once the cameras stopped rolling really touched me," she said. They married and now live in Oxfordshire.

7. Jimmy Vigiano, member of a Ground Zero youth club

Jimmy Vigiano, whose father and uncle were among the firemen who died on 9/11, wants to be a normal teenager and doesn't like his peers at school harping on about the fact that he lost his Dad on 9/11. "One time this boy said something about my dad and I just snapped and hit him," he told the Sunday Telegraph. More than 3,000 children of 9/11 victims are now teenagers. Many of them joined support groups to help cope with the pressure of being a 9/11 kid. "Although we may disagree, or even argue, in the end we look after each other, and I can't see that ever changing."

8. Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald

Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services giant whose offices on the 100th floor of the north tower were decimated on 9/11, resulting in the deaths of 658 employees, "has begun quietly recruiting the children of employees who lost their lives 10 years ago," chief executive Howard Lutnick tells the Sunday Telegraph. Cantor has hired more than 20 children as full-time employees or interns. "It is the most extraordinary compliment a family can pay us," said Lutnick, whose brother was among those who died on 9/11. ·