They lived through 9/11. Twenty-five years later, the scars remain.
Twenty-five years after nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, the country observes the anniversary by reading names, laying wreaths and revisiting the same questions about security and loss. For the people whose lives were closest to that day, the questions never ended.
The aftermath has taken different forms over the past two and a half decades: post-traumatic stress, cancers tied to the toxic dust around Ground Zero, a voice that a widow still expects to hear on the phone, and funerals for people who did not become sick until years later. The federal health and compensation programs created after the attacks remain in place, a reminder that the medical and emotional costs are still being counted.
The people in the following profiles have each found ways to move forward without leaving the day behind. Their stories show how durable those scars remain.
Peter Bitwinski: He survived an earlier attack, then helped a coworker escape
Peter Bitwinski had already lived through a terrorist attack at the World Trade Center. On Feb. 26, 1993, he was in the Port Authority’s accounting office on the 69th floor of the North Tower when a bomb planted in the garage below exploded. Six people were killed. Bitwinski waited for evacuation orders as smoke drifted into the office. He thought nothing could come closer than that.
Eight years later, he was sitting at his desk near a window when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. The impact came 24 stories above him. Metal crunched, the building rocked, and Bitwinski was thrown onto his desk.
“One minute you’re sitting there doing your job, the next minute you feel like you’re going to die,” he said.
The office was only partly full that early, but his friend John Abruzzo, a former desk mate who used a motorized wheelchair, was already there. Abruzzo could not manage the stairwell on his own. Bitwinski and nine coworkers put him into an evacuation chair, a device installed after the 1993 bombing to help move immobile people down the stairs. They took turns carrying him down, switching every five floors. More than an hour later, they reached the ground.
In the years that followed, Bitwinski wrestled with survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety. He sought counseling. A therapist’s advice became an anchor: practice acceptance and your life will be better. After retiring from the Port Authority, he volunteered at the now-closed 9/11 Tribute Museum and continues to work with the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
His mission now is to make history feel real to visitors who did not live through it. “There’s no exaggeration. I just let them know what occurred,” Bitwinski said. “I try to encourage kids to live a life where they help people rather than hurt people. That’s what it comes down to.”
Karen Cangialosi: The call she did not reach in time
Karen Cangialosi was getting ready to leave for work on the morning of Sept. 11 when the phone rang. She did not get to it in time. The call was from her husband, Steven, who was at his office at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower.
Soon after, a friend called and told her to turn on the television. Cangialosi watched the coverage and held on to hope. “I was just hoping he was alive,” she said. Steven was among the thousands who did not survive.
In the quarter-century since, Cangialosi has watched her two sons grow into men. They were 7 and 10 when they lost their father. One has become a doctor; the other works in financial technology. She has two grandchildren she adores. She moved to Florida eight years ago and works as an account representative, but she still spends summers in Red Bank, N.J., and plans to move back to the Shore to be close to her family.
Raising the boys without their father meant learning to be both mother and father, she said. Her focus stayed on their schooling, their safety and the kind of men they were becoming.
“Life goes on. You still miss him every day,” Cangialosi said. “But it’s sad. I think their dad would be very proud of them, and instead he is missing out. I think they are well adjusted and very successful. My sons are the image of their father.”
What carried her through the last 25 years came down to resilience. “You have to be a resilient person, show perseverance,” she said. “You were the mom and the dad. And it affected a lot of things — college graduations, birthdays.”
Carlos Garrafa: The dust came home with him
Carlos Garrafa, an EMT from Jersey City, had already spent 15 hours on Sept. 11 treating injured people ferried across the Hudson River when the call went out for more help in Lower Manhattan. Near midnight, he and other EMTs boarded a ferry and landed in a place that barely resembled the city they had left that morning.
White dust hung in the air and coated the streets. Lower Manhattan was mostly silent except for the machinery digging through the World Trade Center wreckage and the hum of generators running floodlights. Garrafa began helping first responders injured in the rescue and later spent 16 hours at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. He returned to Jersey City on the afternoon of Sept. 12 covered in dust so fine that he could feel it inside his boots.
As Garrafa came off the ferry, people gathered at the waterfront cheered. He remembers thinking he had not earned it. “I still feel like I didn’t deserve any of that,” he said. “We didn’t save anyone. We didn’t pull anyone out. But now I know we did all that we could.”
He kept working as an EMT in Jersey City and later for Hackensack University Medical Center. Four years ago, a routine colonoscopy found cancerous polyps. Chemotherapy appeared to eliminate the cancer, but it returned late last year, leading to surgery to remove part of his rectum.
Garrafa’s medical records were sent to the World Trade Center Health Program, which covers colorectal cancer among the conditions connected to the attacks. Scientists rarely can prove that a single exposure caused a particular cancer. But Garrafa and his doctors believe his illness came from the dust he inhaled and swallowed in the days after the towers fell.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that it came from that,” Garrafa said. “A lot of people were injured on 9/11. A lot of people died. We’re still seeing that today. It didn’t stop on 9/11.”
Now 57, Garrafa is not sure he can return to the physically demanding job he once loved. On a spring afternoon this year, he stood with his 6-year-old grandson, Thiago, at a Jersey City waterfront memorial built with steel from the World Trade Center. He told the boy what he had done nearby and in Manhattan. Thiago asked whether he would go back.
“I don’t know,” Garrafa said. “I have you in my life now.”
He hugged his grandson, took a selfie, and began the walk home — the same walk he made 25 years ago.
Charlie Roberto: A fire captain mourns, and finds peace outside
Charlie Roberto was a captain at Engine 58 and Ladder 26 in Harlem, a firehouse known as “The Fire Factory.” The morning of Sept. 11 began quietly there. Around 7 a.m., Roberto stepped outside to get some fresh air. The sky was clear. He remembered thinking, “What a gorgeous day it is.”
“Little did we know it was the worst day of our lives,” he said.
The alarms came before 9 a.m. Early television reports suggested a small plane had gone into the World Trade Center. But the sight of the North Tower’s damaged face told Roberto otherwise. This was deliberate. He expected to be sent downtown; his firehouse had responded after the 1993 bombing. Instead, Roberto organized the recall of the 3rd Division, covering much of Manhattan.
The Fire Department issued a full recall — the first in his career, Roberto said. Firefighters who were off duty, on vacation or out on medical leave reported in. Roberto commandeered MTA buses to carry crews south. More than 200 firefighters came through his division. Two chiefs from his 12th Battalion were killed that day; one had gotten off duty at 9 a.m. but headed to the World Trade Center anyway.
By Thursday, Roberto went to the wreckage, then known as the Pile, to look for firefighters and see what remained. When he saw the ruins, he knew they were gone. Then came the funerals.
He attended services for FDNY Chaplain Father Mychal Judge, one of the first certified victims of the attack. Over the next several months, he went to more than 100 funerals and memorial services for firefighters he knew. One morning on Long Island, after one funeral had ended, Roberto saw an FDNY car pull into the parking lot. Another service was beginning. He stayed.
Roberto had been connected to nature since childhood in Putnam County, N.Y. He took up birdwatching in the 1980s, describing it as “like seeing old friends every year in springtime.” In the difficult months after 9/11, that connection became a way to step outside his own thoughts.
In 2004, he helped establish EagleFest, a winter celebration hosted by Teatown Lake Reservation to mark the return of bald eagles to the Hudson Valley. He retired from the FDNY in 2019 after 41 years on the job, but he still leads nature hikes and gives talks.
“I think nature is good for everybody,” Roberto said. “It gets you out of your head.”
Those four stories cover only small pieces of a much wider ledger. The official record of 9/11 includes thousands of deaths on the day itself, but it also includes the responders and survivors who have fallen ill or died since, and the many more who continue treatment for conditions connected to the attacks. The work of measuring the full consequences will likely continue for decades.
What links these survivors is not just their proximity to a national tragedy. It is the way they have kept going — by telling the story, by raising children, by watching birds, by holding a grandson a little closer. The scars have not disappeared. Neither have they.
This story was reported by Scott Fallon, Joe Strupp and Nancy Cutler of the USA TODAY Network.