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2002-09-02

Upper St. Clair (Pittsburgh, PA)native witnessed N. Y. attack

By David M. Brown

TRIBUNE-REVIEW (9/16/2001)

Scott Pasquini awoke Tuesday in his Manhattan apartment excited about the start of his new career.

Instead, the next few hours unfolded in scenes of unspeakable horror, forever changing the world around him.

Pasquini, 22, who grew up in Upper St. Clair (Pittsburgh, PA) and graduated from Princeton University in May (2001), looked forward to his second real day on the job as a corporate financial adviser for Merrill Lynch, following a two-month training stint.

"There were a lot of new things going on for me. I had just started to meet everybody that I was going to be working with," Pasquini said Saturday in an interview. The family was reunited late Friday at his parents' home in Upper St. Clair for the first time since the attacks.

An eye-witness to the destruction of the World Trade Center, Pasquini said the experience was etched permanently in his mind--a series of gruesome images as indelible as snapshots from a camera.

Shortly before 9 a.m., he was about to make the seven-minute hike from his apartment building past the twin towers to his office in the adjacent World Financial Center.

"I was getting dressed in my bedroom and it sounded like a loud crash," he recalled. "Then I started to hear debris shower down on the building."

Glancing from the window, he saw debris scattered across the lanes of West Street. A van swerved, jumped the median, and peeled off in the opposite direction.

"This was very strange."

On the way out, Pasquini asked the doorman if a car bomb had exploded.

"Yeah, maybe," the doorman replied. "It must have been a meat truck or something. There's, like, meat all over the place."

Pasquini saw a torso with no arms or legs in the street. Two hysterical women were pointing at a severed human hand on the ground, and a running man quickly covered it with his jacket. Nearby, Pasquini, still thinking it might have been a car bomb, saw a car that was partially ripped open, its rear windshield shattered.

But the scope of the disaster quickly become apparent as he saw a gaping hole, flames shooting from it, in one of the World Trade Center towers.

"In the eight weeks I've lived in New York, everytime I saw the World Trade Center, I thought, "'Man, those things are so impressive. They're so tall and so massive.' I never got used to the height of those buildings and the massive size."

"Now, the north tower was on fire."

Pasquini tried using his cell phone to call his parents, Russ and Karen Pasquini, and his brother Brian in Shadyside to tell them he was OK. After many attempts, he got through.

"Then all of a sudden, I heard the jet engine of a plane coming right over the top of us. It sounded definitely like a full-throttle screeching noise. I was it a split second before it just few right into the building.

"Before I turned and ran with everyone else, you could just see the tail end of the plane and a huge plume of smoke around where the impact was."

Smoke and debris spewed into the sky, falling in the direction of the crowd. Flames were shooting from both towers.

"Debris started falling all around us. People were panicked to keep moving, but they were not screaming or hysterical. They were in shock, I think. It was kind of like a heavy hailstorm, but not that thick. It was more like small particles of glass.

"You could definitely smell the jet fuel or whatever it was. It was a dirty smell, different from anything."

Then he saw people jumping from high up one of the towers.

"Every few minutes somebody would jump. They were tiny images, but you could make out the color of their clothes. A few guys who jumped looked like they were on fire.

"We didn't want to watch it, but everywhere you looked, it was there."

Pasquini didn't become frightened until he saw one of the towers explode in the middle, crashing in upon itself. (He saw somebody jump into the river to escape. Pasquini shielded himself under a medial barrier. He couldn't see or breathe in the heavy cloud. Pasquini removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head. He blindly groped toward glass windows that he remembered. Cupping his hands against the window, he could see people inside pointed the way toward a door. He got inside a restaurant, out of the cloud. Others poured pitchers of water over his face. Taking a tablecloth and water, Pasquini helped to wash away the blood of other people's wounds.) He and others took refuge inside a restaurant to escape the stifling, gray dust.

With a tremendous explosion of collapsing metal, the second tower came down; and the second cloud blotted out the daylight.

As light returned, matter was falling everywhere like a dirty gray snow.

Pasquini and others were evacuated from the Battery Park marina at the tip of Manhattan Island, crossing the Hudson River on a small (overcrowded to near-sinking) police boat to the New Jersey side.

(At this point, he was dirty and displaced among hundreds of other refugees. His brother Brian remembered friends in Jersey City where arrangements were made to take Scott into their home temporarily.)

He expect(ed) to return to work at Merrill Lynch the next week, although officials told him it may be weeks or months before they can return to the World Financial Center.

While Pasquini still looks forward to his new career, the world that was just beginning for him (Tuesday, 9/11/2001) will never be that bright again.

"Undoubtedly, the United States has changed forever."

With a tremendous