‘The fire and the smoke’

Andree Marshall, an Island Park resident, worked at the World Trade Center for years before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

An employee of Merrill Lynch, she was in the building on Feb. 26, 1993, when a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower. She had often purchased tickets from the American Airlines kiosk in the lobby, and was just on her way back to her office in an all-glass overpass when the bomb went off.

“So walking over it, it shook and everyone was looking at each other, and over the overpass, you could see the glass blown out of the World Trade Center and you could see the ticketing agents for the airlines crawling over the glass to come out onto the street,” Marshall recalled.

But it was Sept. 11, 2001, that stuck in her memory more than anything else.

Marshall was in the mall beneath the Twin Towers that morning. She had to go to Merrill Lynch’s New Jersey office, so she was getting ready to take the PATH train. She had stopped at the Duane Reed in the mall to pick up something when the first plane hit. “As I was paying for my items, I looked around and saw everyone screaming and running in the World Trade Center,” she said.

She left the store, trying to figure out what was going on. “And I asked this gentleman as he went zooming by me what was going on,” Marshall said, “and he just said, ‘A plane crashed.’

Not being able to see what was going on and not yet understanding the magnitude of what was happening, Marshall started to make her way to her train. She was stopped by Barbara Sciequan, a coworker from Merrill Lynch that Marshall barely knew. Sciequan told Marshall not to get on the train, but to get outside and out of the building.

Marshall protested, because an announcement was playing in the mall telling people not to go outside. But Sciequan insisted, and dragged Marshall, who was more than a foot taller than her and seven months pregnant with twins, outside.

Sept. 11, 2001 was a Tuesday. That Friday was supposed to me Marshall’s last day before her two-month maternity leave.

Hell

Marshall and Sciequan exited the Trade Center at the corner of Church Street and Vessey Street.

“Something had happened, but you didn’t know what it was,” Marshall recounted. “As I went to the corner of Vessey Street and Church street, that’s when you saw people jumping out of the World Trade Center, that’s when you saw where the plane had hit. That’s where you saw the fire and the smoke, body parts.”

Marshall was in disbelief. Her first thought — her rationalization of the horror — was that she had wandered onto the set of a Bruce Willis movie. Not everyone was able to rationalize it, though.

Across from the World Trade Center was a church, with a huge, metal gate running around its perimeter.

“There were people holding on to those bars and screaming and hitting their heads on the metal bars,” she said. “There were other people consoling others, and I’m almost sure they didn’t know each other. That was how it was.”

The air was filled with smoke, screams, people and papers.

After emerging from the underground mall, Sciequan pulled Marshall out of the area, telling her that they couldn’t stay there. The two went down the block to J&R Music World. The security guard in the building let them in, and the two went up to the fifth floor. Once there, Marshall felt a vibration in her chest, like being on a propeller airplane.

“That’s what we felt in the building before the second plane hit,” she said. “That’s how low the plane was to the building.”

Marshall called her mother in California and her now ex-husband, Craig, to let them know she was alright. But the security guard wouldn’t let her leave.

“So I stood in the building for the whole day, watching the buildings implode,” said Marshall. “I watched the people scream and yell as the buildings were falling. Just listening to the screaming and the yelling, because I was on the fifth floor. And you could see people trying to hide because they knew the buildings were falling. I was in there all day.”

The air was filled with papers, smoke, screams and people.

The Wait

As morning turned into afternoon, everyone else had evacuated the building Marshall was staying in — except for a database administrator from Merrill Lynch, Yvonne Swayman, who refused to leave Marshall’s side. Around 4 p.m., a firefighter came up to the fifth floor and told Marshall she’d have to evacuated, because the air conditioning system couldn’t keep the smoke out of the building anymore.

The firefighter escorted her downstairs and outside, where he flagged down two detectives, had them empty out the back of their truck, and take Marshall over the Brooklyn Bridge.

“I walked about two blocks and I saw a fire hydrant running,” said Marshall. “I was dirty from the soot. So I bent over and washed my face and my hands.” Marshall dried her face with her shirt and walked a few more blocks, until she was stopped by Artie Robinson, a corrections officer.

Robinson saw how pale Marshall was and refused to let her keep walking around. He took Marshall to the nearby corrections facility he worked at and kept her there while they waited for her husband to pick her up.

“He made me come in the building and he told the officers there that I wasn’t allowed to leave the building, that someone had to sit with me, that if I had to go to the bathroom a female guard would walk me to the bathroom, go in there with me, and come back out,” Marshall said.

Marshall waited for her husband, her feet up in a chair, for nearly four hours. Robinson brought her food and water in the interim.

At the time, Marshall and her husband lived in Bell Harbor, a 20-minute drive from where she was. But with the traffic that day, it took her husband four hours to get to her.

“[Robinson] walked me over to Atlantic Avenue, which is another three blocks, where my husband was,” said Marshall. “He picked me up and it took us a while to drive home, because we had to do a lot of maneuvering. So we got home around 10:30, 11. Finally got home, relaxed, and then the next day you saw what happened.”

Early

But the next day was just as trying for Marshall.

The stress and horror of Sept. 11 finally began to sink in. And it triggered early contractions in Marshall. She was in St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan for about a week.

“When I first went into the hospital and they admitted me, they wanted me to share a room with a lady who was watching the news continuously,” Marshall recounted. “So apparently I bugged out, pulled the IV out of my hand and started to leave the hospital until security and the doctors and my husband then calmed me down.” Marshall has no recollection of what happened — it was told to her by her husband.

After a week in the hospital, Marshall was released. The next afternoon, the stress overtook her again and sent her into labor. Her husband rushed home, but St. Luke’s said they didn’t have time to drive there, so they sent her to a hospital closer to their home.

The hospital staff was waiting for her when she arrived at around 6 p.m. At 11 a.m. the next morning, her twins Aiden, a boy, and Andree Jr., a girl, were born. The babies were two months early, but were healthy. They will be 10 years old later this month.

Recovery

Marshall had a long road to recovery.

For years, she would get nervous any time she’d hear an airplane. It’s a trait her daughter has picked up as well.

In April, 2002, Marshall moved out to Island Park, where she lives now. She’ll be working from home on Sept. 9 and 12 — Friday and Monday — to make sure she’s home with her kids. She won’t be attending the ceremony at ground zero on Sept. 11, because she didn’t want to bring her kids there on what is sure to be a busy day. But she made a reservation to take her kids through the area on Sept. 30.

“I would think that, two weeks later, the hustle and bustle will have died down,” Marshall said. “So that way I can walk through with my kids, and if they have questions they can ask me and I can answer them in a more calm manner.”

Although she has a new job and a new home — although she has started to move on — Andree Marshall still thinks about that day every time she hears a plane fly overhead.