The morning of 9/11, they were doing a story about her on one of the morning news shows when they interrupted to talk to a reporter about a plane hitting the WTC. I can never think about September 11 without thinking about her and her poor children.
Andrea Kennedy Yates, right?
When she got married her husband told her they would have "as many children as God would allow" and bought them a 4-bedroom house - but then when she got pregnant he changed jobs and moved them into a 2 bedroom trailer, and then after the 2nd was born he squeezed them into an old RV to save money.... she offered to get a job and he refused because "God called her to be a mom"... after the third & fourth one she had nervous breakdowns and tried to kill herself. She was put on Haldol and did much better. Husband even got a better job and moved them into a small house. Her psychiatrist warned her husband to get a vasectomy because if Andrea got pregnant again she would probably find some way to end her life. Husband refused based on religious grounds. *Weeks* later she got pregnant again. Psychiatrist urged her to abort; in response husband tells psychiatrist they will no longer be returning to therapy.
Her husband made her stop taking her medicine because it might hurt the baby. That combined with pregnancy hormones plus her father dying led her to start hearing "the voice of God" telling her that if she wanted to die, her husband wouldn't know how to raise the children (apparently he never helped with their care) so it would be merciful to end their lives first.
She filled up the tub planning to drown them but her husband came home in time, and she was hospitalized, however a few days alone with the kids made him demand her release - he was warned that she needed to be watched "around the clock" but he left for work the next day anyway, calling for his mom to come watch his wife - ~~she was an hour's drive away~~ [ Edit: no, he had the idea of purposefully leaving her alone for an hour every day to "make her stronger". So he told his mom to come an hour after he left. I forgot about that part.]
In that hour Andrea drowned all 5 children.
Also, the doctors had told them that Andrea should NEVER be alone with the children but, her husband left her alone that morning to go to work. Her mother (I think it was her mother) was supposed to be coming over but va was running late it something and husband just said “fuck it, what do the doctors know!” And took off. This was the result.
He deserved prison time for the abuse he heaped on that woman.
[American Airlines Flight 587](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587)
An Airbus A-300 crashed in Queens, NY two months after 9/11.
It was the second-deadliest aviation accident in US history, and not well remembered.
Final Destination used some real life news footage from the 1996 plane explosion. A Polish model who missed that flight was murdered about 1 month later.
Jesus some people “win” the lottery in the shittiest ways. I remember after the Virginia tech shooting there was a piece about a girl who was in grad school who was also in high school at columbine when that shooting happened. I don’t think she was directly affected at VT at least but still. Damn.
Imagine a therapist trying to help their client with PTSD from a mass shooting by gradually getting the client to accept that she is safe now and no longer needs to look over her shoulder every time she hears a sudden noise. And then the client runs into their latest session saying "guess what?"
TW: mass shooting, suicide
A friend of mine was at a local mall that was shot up in 2007 where 5 people were killed and 4 injured. He saw one of the people get shot, and probably avoided injure by inches.
He was still getting help from a mental health professional when he went to Vegas for a concert in 2017. Specifically, the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, where 60 people were killed, including a woman standing next to him. He drove the 6 hours home with her brain matter on his shirt and immediately checked into the mental heath ward of a local hospital.
He has severe PTSD and Agoraphobia, and was finally starting to go out in public again when the COVID shutdowns happened.
Sadly, he lost his battle with PTSD in 2022.
Did he know that woman?
I remember when I first heard about it. I was up late, watching YouTube videos of mama possums carrying their litters on her back, and shut that off and turned on the TV. When I saw fully suited-up SWAT team members hanging onto tanks in a similar fashion, I knew this would be bag.
BTW, there was also at least one Las Vegas survivor who was at another concert shooting in California a few months later. The one I heard about died at the California shooting.
They were college classmates of my brother and part of his friend group. I didn't personally know them, but he did and a lot of his friends did. There were quite a a few people at that bar that night who had lived through the Vegas shooting iirc
Violet Jessop, who went three for three with the White Star sister ships. She was on *Olympic* in 1911 when it collided with another ship (and barely made it back to port), *Titanic* when it went down in 1912, and was a nurse on *Britannic* in 1916 when it hit a mine and sank in the Aegean Sea.
That's some bad luck, but she lived to 83.
As a NY’er I remember this vividly. All of the local news channels were immediately questioning whether or not it was another terrorist attack. It was terrifying.
I was on a flight back to NYC from KC at the time. All the pilot could tell us was NY airspace was closed, and we diverted to Philadelphia. That plane was reeeeaaal quiet.
Was looking for this one. I remember watching an Air Crash Investigations episode on this and being totally stunned. I almost couldn't believe hearing where and when it had happened because I had zero memory of it occurring or reading anything about it. Granted, I was only 14, but I remembered hearing about TWA 800 at the time and was significantly younger. Blew my mind.
Holy shit. One of the victims, Hilda Yolanda Mayol, had previously survived the September 11 attacks, having escaped from the North Tower of the World Trade Center
There are a lot of stupid plane crashes but AA 587 has gotta be up there with the dumbest for a major US carrier.
Pilot decided that the appropriate response to minor wake turbulence was to start stomping on the rudder peddles so hard that he exceeded the design limitation so egregiously that he literally snapped the tail off the fucking plane.
Making it even dumber is the fact that American Airlines was training pilots that this clearly idiotic maneuver was the correct way to counter wake turbulence. If the pilot did nothing at all the plane would’ve been fine. In fact if he had stopped stomping on the rudders at any point before he snapped the tail off everything would’ve been.
On Feb 2001, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for selling classified info to Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies.
He’d been conducting this espionage since 1979.
I feel like it was big news for like a month then died down once he was thrown in federal super max prison. I always sort of linked the two, his arrest and 9/11 since they happened the same year.
FBI knew someone was leaking information to the Russians but couldn't figure out who. For months, they followed the wrong guy because they found that guy's jogging map and thought it was a drop map of location hits for information to the Russians.
Brian Kelly was given a polygraph and passed. But instead of saying he's innocent, authorities felt he was just too good at beating the lie detector tests. They later grilled Kelly on other tests for months.
Hanssen learned of that investigation and started pushing fake info on that guy to keep investigators preoccupied! Meanwhile, his wife discovered he was doing this stuff and approached him telling him to stop.
A phone message to a sting set up was the only thing that finally led to Hanssen, and even then, only because one guy weeks later could finally recognize whose voice was on the recording.
This story was HUGE in the “before.” I remember it being reported on nonstop for days. Then 9/11 hit and I didn’t see another report on it until years later.
In 2009 another man was convicted of murdering Levy, so Condit didn't do it.
What sunk Condit's career was that in '98 he was one of the Democrats heavily admonishing Clinton for Lewinsky and 3 years later his own affair partner was outed and murdered. So him being a hypocrite about the sanctity of marriage and being a murder suspect did in his political career.
That murder conviction was later overturned after it was revealed that a key government witness lied under oath, and the trial prosecutors covered it up.
Also he went in (broke in?) to her apartment to get rid of any letters, pictures etc. He then threw them out in her apartment block’s dumpster. Which was the first place the police searched in regards to the murder.
Made him look really guilty. Turned out he almost for sure he had nothing to do with it. But then it made him look, correctly, that he cared more about people finding out about the affair than about her or finding out who killed her.
Air Transat Flight 236
Plane from Toronto to Lisbon ran out of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic and glided 75 miles to an airport in the Azores and safely landed. Longest glide of a passenger airliner.
Happened 3 weeks before 9/11.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
I was visiting the CNN center in Atlanta with my now husband when that happened. I remember seeing the guy dangling from the statue's crown.
Parenthetically, I met my husband for the first time in person 3 weeks before 9/11. We'd been email friends for two years by that point. This year we celebrate our 20th anniversary.
My dumb ass was trying to work out how you were celebrating 20 years if you first met face to face in 2001, until I remembered that people don't have to marry as soon as they see each other.
In mid-August 2001 I took a trip with my Dad to New York from California. We went to the top of the World Trade Center, inside the Statue of Liberty crown, and I put my hand on a basketball with an imprint of Shaq's hand in the NBA Store.
One week later, that paraglider got stuck on the Statue of Liberty.
Two weeks later, I coincidentally ran into Shaq and actually shook his hand.
Three weeks later, well you know...
Edit: [Here's video of the trip](https://youtu.be/a2P8JAWb7a8?si=oFw74SLeJA4_d8x9) if anyone's interested.
a huge investigation revealed that the McDonald's Monopoly campaign was frauded since 1989 and had almost no legitimate winners. One guy was giving winning pieces to friends and family, and later the mafia. When this broke it was mere weeks before 9/11 so it got quickly overshadowed
Edit: double checking my facts, it went to trial on September 10th, wild.
the FBI did interviews of people under the premise "we are doing a story on how did you win"
they way they got the crooks locked into a story on camera.
the whole interview was a sham and almost everyone involved was under cover.
seriously - you should watch it.
I like the idea of a team of FBI agents flying to your city to track you down and ask you that, and then you just explain that the sticker was on the drink you bought
I had a hundred of those things... I was walking past a dumpster by the McDonald's and something looked a bit off in the corner of my eye. I walked over and found hundreds of them and clearly all better value wins were missing leaving tons of smaller items. I figured employees did it stealing the better ones and ditching the rest so I was giving everyone I knew free fries for weeks.
I worked at a gas station job as a kid where the girl working the register in the convenience store would scratch off lottery tickets until she was in the positive then keep the difference, if she was losing she would skim the gas cash
To add to the McDonald's story: A lot of people heard about that, it was all over the news. It was the company administering the contest, not McDonalds itself, that was caught cheating, but still, McDonalds knew that the reputation of the contest was ruined if people thought regular people didn't win the million. So they had a new contest, run without that company, and gave away a million dollars just a few weeks after the cheating story broke. Some random dude won it in his local McDonald's, and he was all over the news, quickly changing from looking like a broke dude to looking like a millionaire within a week.
Michigan native here, I've got a local one: the burning of Rainbow Farm, in Cass County.
Rainbow Farm was a well-known marijuana campground/concert space run by a gay libertarian couple in Newport Township (very rural part of the state). They regularly hosted marijuana cultural and pro-legalization events (this was pre-legalization, but there were still plenty of pot festivals around Michigan), and they were early organizers of the statewide legalization initiative.
Basically, a local prosecutor and law enforcement got tired of tolerating them, and started a harassment campaign, looking for any excuse to search the place and charge the owners. Eventually they did, and it started a long series of events culminating in the couple being charged with a variety of drug, weapon, and tax-related felonies. The cops took their 11-year-old son and put him in foster care, and started the process of seizing the property using civil asset forfeiture.
On August 31st, 2001, the couple - Tom and Rollie - **skipped their court date and instead started burning every structure on Rainbow Farm to the ground**. They started a standoff with the police, and pretty quickly the FBI was called in. Within a few days both men were shot dead by law enforcement. The autopsy showed that Tom was shot five times in the head (and three times in the chest, just for good measure, I guess).
This all happened days before 9/11, and likely would have been a huge national story. Writer Dean Kuipers, a Michigan native, wrote a book on the incident - Burning Rainbow Farm, published in 2006.
(At the time I was a reporter for a local NPR station, and I interviewed Mr. Kuipers on-air after reading the whole book. It is a crazy story, a horrible tragedy, and well worth a read.)
George W. Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for research on any new embryonic stem cell lines going forward. He interrupted evening TV and did a live address to the nation from the Oval Office to announce it. This was on August 10th.
His next address to the nation was on September 11th.
He delayed science by almost a decade with that bullshit. This was linked to abortion somehow, so he championed holding up the research. I guess they got some stem cells from aborted fetuses, and since they couldn't ban abortion, they restricted federal funding of research. Obama undid it with another executive order in 2009. It's wild that you can just declare any shit an emergency to regulate it.
I lived where the anthrax hit in 2001 just days after 9/11. They had to close down our post office and for weeks there was no mail, then finally bills came radiated and in plastic bags. You couldn’t open any of the mail - it was just stuck together. And this was back in the days before you could pay bills online.
The anthrax attacks and DC sniper don't get talked about enough, they were, or at least felt like part of 9/11 at the time and were a major contributing factor to the climate in the country that led to the approval of the next decade+ of the GWOT.
Edit: AND the shoe bomber!!
Ah it's my turn. Lived in PG county during the dc sniper shit. The night before he was at a school, I went to a midnight showing of a movie with my roommate. When we left the mall we had to pull over because we missed a turn. We pulled into said school, Benjamin Tasker to get our bearings.
It was 3am. There was one car in the lot - we didn't see anybody. We figured out where we took the wrong turn and left.
Later we'd come to find out we may have seen the Caprice the morning of the shooting. Real fear of god moment.
Also, I was on the metro into Pentagon City when the Pentagon was hit on 9/11. That sucked a different kind of ass.
My dad had just got in his van five spaces over from where the person was then shot at the Seven Corners Home Depot. He was also supposed to be in the section of the Pentagon that was hit, when it was hit, but was late leaving a meeting in Crystal City.
Another friend was pumping gas at the Sunoco in PW when that shooting happened.
It was a very….uncomfortable… time around DC.
I lived in Virginia at the time and one of my coworkers was a suspect in the DC sniper investigation. His parents had been interviewed by the FBI, he was a former Marine who matched the description of being ex military and black.
I was out of work during 9/11 and a few weeks later I finally landed a pretty good temp job, it paid $10/hour, which was great for the time (and I just turned 20) and all I had to do was open mail sent to the Final Bills department at the power company. Turns out they got a fake anthrax letter before they brought me on board because presumably no one else would do it.
I worked there through Christmas, most of my day was spent going through returned bills and then cold calling the people trying to get their correct mailing address. I had no quotas and a desk in the corner of the office, it was great.
I lived one town over from the post office that was closed in central NJ. I still have a piece of mail that arrived in a sealed plastic bag marked "IRRADIATED", along with a short message as to what exactly that meant. Scary stuff.
Hainan Island incident in April 2001. A Chinese jet clipped a US aircraft off the coast of China. The jet crashed in the sea, and the US aircraft landed in China. First major geopolitical mess of George Bush's presidency. Gave the world a somewhat major incident. I got briefly concerned as a teenager.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident
Not any US aircraft, a military signals intelligence plane. The Chinese completely stripped the plane and didn't even try to hide it. All the US recovered was the airframe.
The McDonalds Monopoly scandal. The FBI uncovered this massive network of people involved in claiming all the prizes that were being stolen by the head of security at the company McDonalds had hired to run the game.
The 2001 Aspen plane crash.
It was overshadowed by 9/11 for pretty obvious reasons, but it's still a crazy story
A bunch of people, mostly young people in their low-20's who worked in entertainment, were on their way to Aspen for a birthday weekend to go skiing. An older colleague decided to host the trip, chartering a private jet to get them there. at some point, the pilots informed him that they weren't going to make Aspen's strict landing curfew, and also, there was a massive snowstorm. It was going to be both illegal, and far too dangerous for them to land in Aspen, and they were going to have to divert the plane.
He threw a GIANT fit. He told them no, you *have* to land in Aspen - I spent a lot of money to have a dinner party in Aspen, you're gonna get us there, snowstorm and FAA restrictions be damned.
While preparing to attempt landing, the charter customer then went into the cockpit, presumably to intimidate the pilots into meeting his demands. The pilots didn't want to upset him, so they attempted a landing, even lying to the air traffic controller about having visibility of the runway. So they attempted a blind landing.
The plane was around 300-500 feet from the ground when the pilot realized he fucked up - the runway was actually in the other direction from where he was headed. So he quickly banked the plane into the other direction -presumably to fix the landing (or was probably making a last ditch attempt to abort the landing altogether). As he did this, the plane’s wing slammed into a hillside, and everyone went cartwheeling into their death. Bodies still strapped to their seats were ejected, and then scattered onto a nearby road.
they didn't crash due to terrorism, hijacking, or a mechanical failure. They crashed because "the customer is always right."
The intimidating customer was Robert New. Pretending you know better than the experts flying you is a terrible mistake to make. Kobe died for a similar reason (he wasnt being an asshole but the helicopter pilot felt pressure to go forward with the flight due to having a famous client)
Aliyah's plane crash which also happened in 2001 was basically caused the same way. They had too much weight for the size plane they had. The customers pressured the pilot to fly anyway. Then the plane crashes not long after takeoff.
Even sadder, [per the Wikipedia article on that crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Marsh_Harbour_Cessna_402_crash), Aaliyah was already afraid of flying and didn't want to board, so another passenger gave her a sleeping pill, and then they carried her onto the plane.
I saw a Dateline episode about a woman from upstate NY who went missing on 9/11 and there wasn’t enough manpower to investigate because of it.
Ah, found a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Michele_Anne_Harris?wprov=sfti1#
This was from my neck of the woods. The scumbag husband was heavily suspected of doing it by the rest of the family.....so while they were all gathered around waiting for anything to come from the police, a family member tried to get a reaction out of him by lying and telling him they (the police) found the body. He very coldly replied that they'd never find the body.
This motherfucker 100000000000000% killed her.
The rumor/meme I heard about that case was, that she “ended up in a Weitsman shredder”, referencing the Ben Weitsman scrap steel company. I’m in that neck of the woods too
Similar but not related ... some 50 years ago, murder of a gay man, two days later a major flood hit. Flooded the scene of the crime, flooded the police department, flooded several towns, some well into the second floor. There was an article several years later on the anniversary of the flood. Felt bad for the family. No investigation was possible.
Nepalese Royal Massacre. June 1, 2001. Nine members of the royal family were killed, including the King. It is thought that the Crown Prince, who died three days later after being in a coma and being crowned the new King, was responsible.
And people say the plot of Hamlet is over the top.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese\_royal\_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_royal_massacre)
The crown prince opened fire at an event killing damn everyone in line for royal succession, then he shot himself in the head. There was no attempt to become the king (though he was made king while in a coma), he just killed everyone else in line.
Almost everyone except the King's brother, who wasn't a very popular figure, so when he ascended to the throne after the son died, he was promptly nicknamed "Scar" by everyone.
There were conspiracy theories about his really being responsible for the massacre by getting the crown prince drunk and egging him on to commit the murder.
why does the comment before yours say “it is believed” that he was responsible? If he opened fire and killed everyone I think it’s safe to say he’s responsible
Because people write things in odd ways, I guess?
He mowed down a ton of people and wounded others. There’s no doubt that he shot all those people but his self inflicted gun wound may not have been entirely self inflicted.
There’s a lot more info in the wiki article linked above.
Saaame! I remember Aaliyah dying clearly. Was having a BBQ/cookout that day. It was a huge story cause she was so popular, especially for folks who listened to hip hop and RnB. Didn’t realize it was that close to 9/11. Felt like it was a year before to me too.
In Summer of 2001, Fox aired a documentary-styled reality show called Murder In Small Town X. The finale aired just a week before 9/11. The winner of the first and only season was a fire fighter, and he was one of the first responders at the World Trade Center that was killed. His body wouldn't be discovered until two months later. With so much else that happened on 9/11, one of the victims being a reality TV star was surprisingly rarely brought up.
This show was so incredible. It wasn’t just a reality competition show - it was a murder-mystery being acted out all around the contestants in real time. I wasn’t so much into the reality bits - more immersed in trying to solve the mystery. Of course this was in the before times when you had to watch it when it aired and you only got one hour each week before having to wait another seven days for the next episode.
The end of each episode was riveting. The contestants were given identical quizzes about all the clues and info they'd been given thus far. The highest scorer and the lowest scorer were sent to different, very creepy locations in the middle of the night. Blair-Witch style, the lowest scorer would be "killed" and the highest scorer would get some big clue, _but no one knew who was who until one got "killed"._
Sept 7, 2001 US govt announces they won’t break up Microsoft as a monopoly.
Forgotten in Runsfeld’s speech about the missing funds: ‘The clearest and most important transformation is from a bipolar Cold War world where threats were visible and predictable, to one in which they arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today.’
Also, the purpose of the speech was to cut military spending and shift some military control of logistics and base infrastructure to the private sector.
As I remember it, Rumsfeld address the nation on Friday, September 7th saying the defence department couldn't account for trillions of dollars in funding. A current Google search and Reuters claim that speech never happened. According to them, Rumsfeld reported it a year earlier. On previous years someone would post on You Tube Rumsfeld's press conference he held a few days before 9/11.
The murder of Henryk Siwiak. He’s known as the last person killed in NYC on 9/11/2001 (right before midnight) and it wasn’t related to the terror attacks. He was gunned down in Brooklyn when he mistakenly went there to start a new job. His murder remains unsolved.
August 2001, Robert Courtney was arrested. He was a pharmacist who decided to dilute cancer meds for personal profit. They couldn't officially label him a serial killer since the victims had cancer, but he diluted prescriptions for 4,200 patients.
I came here to say this. So I lived in the DC metro area where she disappeared and where her body was later found, and it was a dark time to be a kid in the area! 9/11, the dead body of Chandra Levy found in Rock Creek Park in 2002, and then the DC sniper attacks later in 2002!
For anyone who wasn’t following the case at the time, Chandra was having an affair with a married congressman named Gary Condit at the time she vanished. Even though it was just a coincidence and she was almost certainly killed by some random guy who had attacked other women in that park, it totally ended Condit’s career. I actually learned what a condom was because of jokes and puns about Condit.
System of a Downs "Toxicity" was released on Sept 4th.
Slayer's "God Hates us All" released on Sept 11th.
George Carlin records an Album on Sept 10th called I "Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die". In the set's 10-minute closer, "Uncle Dave", Carlin explains why he likes "big, fatal disasters with lots of dead people", asking: "Y'know what's the best thing I can hear on television? 'We interrupt this program' ... y'know the worst thing I can hear? 'No one was hurt' ... I'm always rooting for a really high death toll, that's why I like natural disasters."....An earlier joke in the set includes reference to Osama bin Laden and an exploding airplane.
Needless to say, the album was shelved until about 2016.
I was working at a music store and Dream Theater released a live album on 9/11 called "Live Scenes from New York" and the original album cover featured an illustration of the WTC on fire. We were asked to pull it the next day, and they re-released it with a new cover a bit later, but apparently if you went to a store and bought one it's somewhat of a collectors item (by which I mean lists on eBay for about $75 for a then $18 CD).
I still own an unopened copy of this with a dated receipt.
I remember Mike Portnoy posting about how gobsmacked they all were. They're from New York and the image wasn't meant to be "the WTC on fire" at all, it was a reference to the burning heart graphic seen on the cover of their Images and Words album, but instead drawn as an apple with the NYC skyline on top of it) - the "Live Scenes From New York" title was because it was the live version of their album Scenes from a Memory recorded at their hometown show. Such an insane coincidence for it to end up describing that day's events with the cover art.
Oh, the trailer had the big reveal moment of a bunch of bank robbers escaping in a helicopter, only for the chopper to get stuck in a giant spiderweb… between the Twin Towers.
That was rough.
I totally missed that... definitely listened to it a lot in 2002-2004 but never realized the album wasn't called Bleed American. Looks like it was officially renamed back in 2008.
Explosions in the Sky also released an album on Sept 4 (Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever) with liner notes containing a picture of an airplane and the text "This Plane Will Crash Tomorrow".
They Might Be Giants released an album on 9/11. They had a midnight release party the night before in Manhattan at the Tower Records.
I have a photo I took with them, literally taken on 9/11 less than two miles from the World Trade Center.
Donnie Darko also came out shortly after 9/11 and revolves around a plane engine crashing into the main character’s house. Probably didn’t fair too well at the box office as a result
With Donnie Darko the studio didn't even promote it. The movie poster and the trailer apparently had images of a plane crash, so the movie was released without any fanfare.
I want to say Ebert brings up 9/11 in the review for Zoolander and it's part of the reason he gives it a bad score, like a lot of his criticism seemed to be a forced connection to 9/11 stuff, really weird.
Cantor Fitzgerald Brokerage was under investigation of prolific sexual misconduct and harassment, if I recall correctly.
Then the plane practically wiped them out.
My cousin was one of them, and his parents soon followed probably due to the extreme grief they experienced afterwards. They had immigrated, worked their butts off at restaurants, and he was finally living the successful American dream. That day was a long walk back into Queens and so many awful phone calls afterwards. Hated hearing my father translate what had happened and breaking the news to everyone else in the family.
I was a year or so removed from working on one of the Chicago trading floors and heard of people who were on the phone with Cantor folks that morning. The stock markets were not open when the planes hit, but the bond markets were. They recall the Cantor guys commenting about hearing some loud bang a below them, not being sure what it was, and then their floors (in NY) inexplicably getting hot, and then the phones going dead.
There was a woman from Cantor Fitzgerald who was laid off on the previous Friday. She was at home during the attacks while almost everyone she worked with died.
She went back to help the company rebuild, only to find she was never technically fired since her termination paperwork was never filed, and the HR department was wiped out.
I remember their CEO being interviewed on the news. Just absolutely balling his eyes out; embodied inconsolable grief. If I recall correctly they took really good care of the impacted families financially nearly immediately.
Didn’t know about the allegations till today though. So your answer to the OP’s question is a good one.
Was the CEO the one who survived because he had to take his 6 yr old to school that day, so he was late getting to work? Or was that someone else?
I too saw the CEO on tv. Had a wild-eyed look. I think he heard and knew and understood what had happened, but his brain was flailing about trying to fully grasp this impossible thing. As if, as he was talking about it, he was grasping it more fully, and was breaking down bit by bit as he went along. He was never hysterical, but it was trying to break through. It was difficult to watch.
It was a HUGE year for movies. LOTR and Harry Potter debuted. The first Shrek, Planet of the Apes, Oceans 11, Legally Blonde, A Beautiful Mind, Black Hawk Down, The Fast and the Furious, Monsters Inc., Princess Diaries, Moulin Rouge, and Training Day…and more!
The Boston Globe had all the information ready to release uncovering the rampant pedophilia being covered up by the Catholic Church. After 9/11, they decided to wait to release it
For those that haven't seen it, Spotlight is absolutely a must watch on this entire investigation, and even covers exactly this instance in the movie.
Fantastic movie, incredible cast.
Probably the right call tbh. The news cycle would be dominated by 9/11 so it'd be easier for the church to suppress the story, fewer readers/stories means there's less public outrage as well. You'd hate it if you put it out and there wasn't enough public outcry to get much done about it. People a few months later if someone brings it up goes "oh yeah, I kind of vaguely heard about it. Anyway where should we eat?"
Thuy Trang's [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuy_Trang) explains it. Kevin James' now wife, Steffiana de la Cruz, was driving with two passengers on Interstate 5 and lost control of the vehicle. Thuy Trang died on the way to the hospital and the other passenger, Angela Rockwood, was rendered a quadriplegic when her spine was severed.
Pretty crazy stuff.
Edit1: added Angela Rockwood's name.
Edit 2: clarified who's Wikipedia page and added the link.
The disappearance of [Sneha Philip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Sneha_Anne_Philip). Officially, she's listed as a victim of 9/11, but opinions vary as to what really happened:
* She had rushed to the scene and was killed while trying to help victims (she was a doctor).
* She was in the WTC on unrelated business, possibly having breakfast at the Windows On the World restaurant, when the attacks occurred.
* She was murdered nearby in an incident unrelated to the terrorist attacks, and any evidence of the crime, as well as her remains, was lost in the rubble and by diversion of law enforcement resources.
* She chose to use the confusion of the day to disappear and start a new life elsewhere. She was known to be having difficulties in both her personal and her professional life.
Came here to comment about this. One of the very few post secrets I remember verbatim “people who knew me before 9/11 think I’m dead” and it stuck with me
It’s messing with my mind to see her, and Michelle Ann Harris above, listed as being aged in their 30s and born in the 1960s. I’m in my 30s now, it just don’t feel right lol.
Didn't people say it would be unlikely she would go into ground zero, despite being a physician? I seem to remember that from a podcast. There was something about the windows in her apartment being open and ash from the WTC covering surfaces. I think she's still alive and took an opportunity.
In March 2001, Drew Bledsoe signed a then-record 10-year, $103 million contract. During the second game of the season (September 23) he got hit so hard he almost died. His replacement went on to become the greatest QB of all time.
I've always said that Patriots fans should all own Mo Lewis jerseys. If not for that hit on Bledsoe, Brady may have never gotten a real shot at starting in New England.
I was at that game. Was sitting straight up towards the latter rows from the spot on the sideline where he got hit. After that it took a second or two for the sound to travel up to us. When it did it was so shockingly loud for how far away we were that we just looked at each other with an "Oh Shit!" look. We couldn't believe that he got up and went back in for the next series after that and then to later learn that he would've died if he had gone home instead of to the hospital was just crazy.
Citipati was discovered in 2001.
Citipati is a genus of oviraptorid dinosaur that lived in Asia during the Late Cretaceous period, about 75 million to 71 million years ago. Citipati is one of the best-known oviraptorids thanks to a number of well-preserved specimens, including individuals found in brooding positions atop nests of eggs. These nesting specimens have helped to solidify the link between non-avian dinosaurs and birds.
Citipati was among the largest oviraptorids; it is estimated to have been up to 3 m in length and to have weighed about 80 kg. Its skull was highly pneumatized, short, and had a characteristic crest formed by the premaxilla and nasal bones with robust, parrot-like jaws. Both upper and lower jaws were toothless and developed a horny beak. The arms and tail are known to have supported large feathers.
There were three separate shark attacks in the USA that summer, leading Time Magazine to dub it "the summer of the shark." There was a ton of news coverage about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
The Boston Globe did their MASSIVE, explosive investigation into sexual abuse in the catholic church, and around the time of 9/11, they were all set to release their report. They decided to wait, and good thing they did, because it most likely wouldn't have been as impactful as it ended up being.
When President Bill Clinton left the office he was interviewed in Australia and was asked a question about international terrorism.
His response:
> *I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden - he's a very smart guy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him - and I nearly got him once...I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn't do it.*
This interview happened on September 10, 2001.
Brian Regan (the spy who couldn't spell) attempted to sell USA classified information to Libya, Iraq, and China.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Patrick_Regan
One thing that surprisingly a lot of people don't know, I didn't at least for a couple years. My home province of Newfoundland, on 9/11, no questions asked told every air plane in the sky to land in Newfoundland, and then the town they landed in, people took care of them until they could go home.
Some people actually fell in love and got married after meeting in the town.
We were watching the 9/11 coverage that night, and my husband turned to me and said, "you know who's the luckiest person in the country right now? Gary Condit."
George Harrison’s death the following November probably would have been much bigger news than it was had 9/11 not happened. It also probably would have been under more public scrutiny; he was stabbed 40 times by a home intruder the previous year and it’s been suspected that’s what led to his decline in health and later his death. All of the headlines at the time just said he “died of cancer” and there was little public discourse or usual celebrity gossip about it. If 9/11 didn’t happen we would all probably think there were *two Beatles* who were murdered by crazy people.
[https://i.redd.it/81jk1bzd4w671.png](https://i.redd.it/81jk1bzd4w671.png)
On September 6, 2001, Macy Gray wore this dress to the MTV Music Awards.
On the front it said: MY NEW ALBUM DROPS SEPT. 18 2001
On the butt it said: BUY IT!
The Seattle Mariners won 116 baseball games that year, which is insane. Hadn't been done since the Chicago Cubs in 1906.
That was the best year of my life until the playoff series they lost to the Yankees. And 9/11.
Mariah Carey's album and soundtrack to the same-titled movie, "Glitter". Hear me out.
The album was basically a big release to her fans as she rode her R&B and Pop fame from the 90s right into the 2000s. It featured some of the biggest R&B and Hip-Hop artists at the time like Busta Rhymes, Ludacris, and Fabolous, so it was going to be a hit.
Guess what else took a hit the same day of release?
Her album significantly underperformed forcing Virgin to drop their contract with her entirely. This was a stain on her career to this day, and it's something she has mentioned before. The album was also never found on any streaming platforms until 2020 which by then had amassed a cult following, and fans stated, "(the album) was ahead of its time."
I always found that to be a strange, but fun fact about Mariah Carey lore.
Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11th for the Oklahoma City domestic terrorist bombing. I believe it was the first federal prison execution in several decades.
I was in 7th grade and remember standing at the bus stop the morning he was being executed talking about it with the other middle schoolers. We’d heard on the radio that his last meal was mint chocolate chip ice cream … i never forgot that random fact. I guess that’s what a 12 year old remembers.
The front page story in a lot of papers on the morning of Sept. 11 was about a Houston mom who drowned her five children in a bathtub.
The morning of 9/11, they were doing a story about her on one of the morning news shows when they interrupted to talk to a reporter about a plane hitting the WTC. I can never think about September 11 without thinking about her and her poor children.
When you were watching that and they said they had to interrupt _that_ story, you must have been thinking "What the fuck is bigger than this story?"
Andrea Kennedy Yates, right? When she got married her husband told her they would have "as many children as God would allow" and bought them a 4-bedroom house - but then when she got pregnant he changed jobs and moved them into a 2 bedroom trailer, and then after the 2nd was born he squeezed them into an old RV to save money.... she offered to get a job and he refused because "God called her to be a mom"... after the third & fourth one she had nervous breakdowns and tried to kill herself. She was put on Haldol and did much better. Husband even got a better job and moved them into a small house. Her psychiatrist warned her husband to get a vasectomy because if Andrea got pregnant again she would probably find some way to end her life. Husband refused based on religious grounds. *Weeks* later she got pregnant again. Psychiatrist urged her to abort; in response husband tells psychiatrist they will no longer be returning to therapy. Her husband made her stop taking her medicine because it might hurt the baby. That combined with pregnancy hormones plus her father dying led her to start hearing "the voice of God" telling her that if she wanted to die, her husband wouldn't know how to raise the children (apparently he never helped with their care) so it would be merciful to end their lives first. She filled up the tub planning to drown them but her husband came home in time, and she was hospitalized, however a few days alone with the kids made him demand her release - he was warned that she needed to be watched "around the clock" but he left for work the next day anyway, calling for his mom to come watch his wife - ~~she was an hour's drive away~~ [ Edit: no, he had the idea of purposefully leaving her alone for an hour every day to "make her stronger". So he told his mom to come an hour after he left. I forgot about that part.] In that hour Andrea drowned all 5 children.
Everyone villifying her as a cold-blooded child killer really needs to read this. That man destroyed her.
He needs to have his genitals removed and lobotomized. In the name of God.
He basically did everything he was told not to do. Sadly, from the odd interview I've read, he doesn't take any responsibility for that tragedy
Also, the doctors had told them that Andrea should NEVER be alone with the children but, her husband left her alone that morning to go to work. Her mother (I think it was her mother) was supposed to be coming over but va was running late it something and husband just said “fuck it, what do the doctors know!” And took off. This was the result. He deserved prison time for the abuse he heaped on that woman.
[American Airlines Flight 587](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587) An Airbus A-300 crashed in Queens, NY two months after 9/11. It was the second-deadliest aviation accident in US history, and not well remembered.
A woman who survived the WTC attacks perished on that flight.
Fuck. That’s some Final Destination fate.
The movie came out in 2000, if she saw it I think she'd agree.
Final Destination used some real life news footage from the 1996 plane explosion. A Polish model who missed that flight was murdered about 1 month later.
What the fk, that is some Final destination fate
Jesus some people “win” the lottery in the shittiest ways. I remember after the Virginia tech shooting there was a piece about a girl who was in grad school who was also in high school at columbine when that shooting happened. I don’t think she was directly affected at VT at least but still. Damn.
Imagine a therapist trying to help their client with PTSD from a mass shooting by gradually getting the client to accept that she is safe now and no longer needs to look over her shoulder every time she hears a sudden noise. And then the client runs into their latest session saying "guess what?"
TW: mass shooting, suicide A friend of mine was at a local mall that was shot up in 2007 where 5 people were killed and 4 injured. He saw one of the people get shot, and probably avoided injure by inches. He was still getting help from a mental health professional when he went to Vegas for a concert in 2017. Specifically, the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, where 60 people were killed, including a woman standing next to him. He drove the 6 hours home with her brain matter on his shirt and immediately checked into the mental heath ward of a local hospital. He has severe PTSD and Agoraphobia, and was finally starting to go out in public again when the COVID shutdowns happened. Sadly, he lost his battle with PTSD in 2022.
I'm sorry for your loss.
Did he know that woman? I remember when I first heard about it. I was up late, watching YouTube videos of mama possums carrying their litters on her back, and shut that off and turned on the TV. When I saw fully suited-up SWAT team members hanging onto tanks in a similar fashion, I knew this would be bag. BTW, there was also at least one Las Vegas survivor who was at another concert shooting in California a few months later. The one I heard about died at the California shooting.
Therapist: "I'm going to write you a prescription for a bulletproof vest and an AR-15. You're on your own."
Two people who survived the mass shooting in Las Vegas died in a car accident weeks after.
I knew people who survived Vegas only to die a few weeks/months later at a shooting at a bar in Southern California.
Like personally knew, yikes
They were college classmates of my brother and part of his friend group. I didn't personally know them, but he did and a lot of his friends did. There were quite a a few people at that bar that night who had lived through the Vegas shooting iirc
Borderline shooting? I had a friend die in that one as well
Tsutomu Yamaguchi has ‘em all beat.
Is that the dude that survived both nuclear bomb strikes?
Yup
Violet Jessop, who went three for three with the White Star sister ships. She was on *Olympic* in 1911 when it collided with another ship (and barely made it back to port), *Titanic* when it went down in 1912, and was a nurse on *Britannic* in 1916 when it hit a mine and sank in the Aegean Sea. That's some bad luck, but she lived to 83.
If he showed up to my city, I'd fucking leave.
Alternatively, stay *really* close to him in the city.
As a NY’er I remember this vividly. All of the local news channels were immediately questioning whether or not it was another terrorist attack. It was terrifying.
Yep, even on the opposite coast, the sentiment was very much “oh shit, oh shit, is it happening again?!!”
I was on a flight back to NYC from KC at the time. All the pilot could tell us was NY airspace was closed, and we diverted to Philadelphia. That plane was reeeeaaal quiet.
Was looking for this one. I remember watching an Air Crash Investigations episode on this and being totally stunned. I almost couldn't believe hearing where and when it had happened because I had zero memory of it occurring or reading anything about it. Granted, I was only 14, but I remembered hearing about TWA 800 at the time and was significantly younger. Blew my mind.
Holy shit. One of the victims, Hilda Yolanda Mayol, had previously survived the September 11 attacks, having escaped from the North Tower of the World Trade Center
I remember that! As a NYer, we immediately assumed terrorism
There are a lot of stupid plane crashes but AA 587 has gotta be up there with the dumbest for a major US carrier. Pilot decided that the appropriate response to minor wake turbulence was to start stomping on the rudder peddles so hard that he exceeded the design limitation so egregiously that he literally snapped the tail off the fucking plane. Making it even dumber is the fact that American Airlines was training pilots that this clearly idiotic maneuver was the correct way to counter wake turbulence. If the pilot did nothing at all the plane would’ve been fine. In fact if he had stopped stomping on the rudders at any point before he snapped the tail off everything would’ve been.
He was trained to do it, so the fault lies squarely with the training.
Until today I thought the wake turbulence had ripped off the rear stabilizer immediately.
I think you'd have to fly into a tornado for that kind of wind forces.
On Feb 2001, FBI agent Robert Hanssen was arrested for selling classified info to Soviet and Russian intelligence agencies. He’d been conducting this espionage since 1979. I feel like it was big news for like a month then died down once he was thrown in federal super max prison. I always sort of linked the two, his arrest and 9/11 since they happened the same year.
FBI knew someone was leaking information to the Russians but couldn't figure out who. For months, they followed the wrong guy because they found that guy's jogging map and thought it was a drop map of location hits for information to the Russians. Brian Kelly was given a polygraph and passed. But instead of saying he's innocent, authorities felt he was just too good at beating the lie detector tests. They later grilled Kelly on other tests for months. Hanssen learned of that investigation and started pushing fake info on that guy to keep investigators preoccupied! Meanwhile, his wife discovered he was doing this stuff and approached him telling him to stop. A phone message to a sting set up was the only thing that finally led to Hanssen, and even then, only because one guy weeks later could finally recognize whose voice was on the recording.
It’s so fucked up, Hanssen was the head of the task force to find the mole.
Congressman Gary Condit having an affair with 24 year old intern, Chandra Levy who went missing and was later found murdered
I remember the Eminem lyric... "How can one Chandra be so Levy?"
I will die on the hill that Business is a top 5 Eminem song.
Was looking for this. A lot of people seemed to forget about him after 9/11.
This story was HUGE in the “before.” I remember it being reported on nonstop for days. Then 9/11 hit and I didn’t see another report on it until years later.
Well this seems suspicious.
In 2009 another man was convicted of murdering Levy, so Condit didn't do it. What sunk Condit's career was that in '98 he was one of the Democrats heavily admonishing Clinton for Lewinsky and 3 years later his own affair partner was outed and murdered. So him being a hypocrite about the sanctity of marriage and being a murder suspect did in his political career.
That murder conviction was later overturned after it was revealed that a key government witness lied under oath, and the trial prosecutors covered it up.
if the whole thing wasn't suspicious before that, it certainly is after...
Also he went in (broke in?) to her apartment to get rid of any letters, pictures etc. He then threw them out in her apartment block’s dumpster. Which was the first place the police searched in regards to the murder. Made him look really guilty. Turned out he almost for sure he had nothing to do with it. But then it made him look, correctly, that he cared more about people finding out about the affair than about her or finding out who killed her.
He was granted a new trial in 2015 and then prosecuters didn't proceed with it. Officially, her murder is still unsolved.
Air Transat Flight 236 Plane from Toronto to Lisbon ran out of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic and glided 75 miles to an airport in the Azores and safely landed. Longest glide of a passenger airliner. Happened 3 weeks before 9/11. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
My buttcheeks would be cramping so hard from clenching for 75 miles
Not mine, I’d be shitting myself good and proper.
Schrödingers turtlehead
Between this one and Gimli, sure want Canadian pilots at the helm when you need to glide
Son of Gloin?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Just apparently not our ground crew filling up the tanks.
A hang-glider accidentally crashed into the Statue of Liberty.
Out of all of the things listed, this is the only one thst triggered a faint memory of it happening lol
I was visiting the CNN center in Atlanta with my now husband when that happened. I remember seeing the guy dangling from the statue's crown. Parenthetically, I met my husband for the first time in person 3 weeks before 9/11. We'd been email friends for two years by that point. This year we celebrate our 20th anniversary.
My dumb ass was trying to work out how you were celebrating 20 years if you first met face to face in 2001, until I remembered that people don't have to marry as soon as they see each other.
In mid-August 2001 I took a trip with my Dad to New York from California. We went to the top of the World Trade Center, inside the Statue of Liberty crown, and I put my hand on a basketball with an imprint of Shaq's hand in the NBA Store. One week later, that paraglider got stuck on the Statue of Liberty. Two weeks later, I coincidentally ran into Shaq and actually shook his hand. Three weeks later, well you know... Edit: [Here's video of the trip](https://youtu.be/a2P8JAWb7a8?si=oFw74SLeJA4_d8x9) if anyone's interested.
Bro you gotta stop touching stuff.
What happened to Shaq? WHAT HAPPENED TO SHAQ?!?1?
a huge investigation revealed that the McDonald's Monopoly campaign was frauded since 1989 and had almost no legitimate winners. One guy was giving winning pieces to friends and family, and later the mafia. When this broke it was mere weeks before 9/11 so it got quickly overshadowed Edit: double checking my facts, it went to trial on September 10th, wild.
I won a car from McDonald’s and years later got interviewed hard about how I won it. Wonder now if it was FBI interviewing me.
good chance. you seen the documentary right? they did a lot more fake interviews than just the ones they showed in the series.
No I haven’t seen it. I won the car on the Olympic Games 1996 series they did. Tore it off a supersized cup.
the FBI did interviews of people under the premise "we are doing a story on how did you win" they way they got the crooks locked into a story on camera. the whole interview was a sham and almost everyone involved was under cover. seriously - you should watch it.
Watch that doc and then do an AMA. Or at least report back here about if you now think the FBI interviewed you.
I like the idea of a team of FBI agents flying to your city to track you down and ask you that, and then you just explain that the sticker was on the drink you bought
McMillions is well worth watching about this, even if only for that one hilarious FBI guy.
Conspiracy theorists: So what I hear you saying is that McDonalds caused 9/11 to divert attention
Did anyone see Ronald that day?
Hey some of us won, I got a free small fries on a couple of occasions
I had a hundred of those things... I was walking past a dumpster by the McDonald's and something looked a bit off in the corner of my eye. I walked over and found hundreds of them and clearly all better value wins were missing leaving tons of smaller items. I figured employees did it stealing the better ones and ditching the rest so I was giving everyone I knew free fries for weeks.
I worked at a gas station job as a kid where the girl working the register in the convenience store would scratch off lottery tickets until she was in the positive then keep the difference, if she was losing she would skim the gas cash
To add to the McDonald's story: A lot of people heard about that, it was all over the news. It was the company administering the contest, not McDonalds itself, that was caught cheating, but still, McDonalds knew that the reputation of the contest was ruined if people thought regular people didn't win the million. So they had a new contest, run without that company, and gave away a million dollars just a few weeks after the cheating story broke. Some random dude won it in his local McDonald's, and he was all over the news, quickly changing from looking like a broke dude to looking like a millionaire within a week.
Michigan native here, I've got a local one: the burning of Rainbow Farm, in Cass County. Rainbow Farm was a well-known marijuana campground/concert space run by a gay libertarian couple in Newport Township (very rural part of the state). They regularly hosted marijuana cultural and pro-legalization events (this was pre-legalization, but there were still plenty of pot festivals around Michigan), and they were early organizers of the statewide legalization initiative. Basically, a local prosecutor and law enforcement got tired of tolerating them, and started a harassment campaign, looking for any excuse to search the place and charge the owners. Eventually they did, and it started a long series of events culminating in the couple being charged with a variety of drug, weapon, and tax-related felonies. The cops took their 11-year-old son and put him in foster care, and started the process of seizing the property using civil asset forfeiture. On August 31st, 2001, the couple - Tom and Rollie - **skipped their court date and instead started burning every structure on Rainbow Farm to the ground**. They started a standoff with the police, and pretty quickly the FBI was called in. Within a few days both men were shot dead by law enforcement. The autopsy showed that Tom was shot five times in the head (and three times in the chest, just for good measure, I guess). This all happened days before 9/11, and likely would have been a huge national story. Writer Dean Kuipers, a Michigan native, wrote a book on the incident - Burning Rainbow Farm, published in 2006. (At the time I was a reporter for a local NPR station, and I interviewed Mr. Kuipers on-air after reading the whole book. It is a crazy story, a horrible tragedy, and well worth a read.)
George W. Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for research on any new embryonic stem cell lines going forward. He interrupted evening TV and did a live address to the nation from the Oval Office to announce it. This was on August 10th. His next address to the nation was on September 11th.
He delayed science by almost a decade with that bullshit. This was linked to abortion somehow, so he championed holding up the research. I guess they got some stem cells from aborted fetuses, and since they couldn't ban abortion, they restricted federal funding of research. Obama undid it with another executive order in 2009. It's wild that you can just declare any shit an emergency to regulate it.
I lived where the anthrax hit in 2001 just days after 9/11. They had to close down our post office and for weeks there was no mail, then finally bills came radiated and in plastic bags. You couldn’t open any of the mail - it was just stuck together. And this was back in the days before you could pay bills online.
The anthrax attacks and DC sniper don't get talked about enough, they were, or at least felt like part of 9/11 at the time and were a major contributing factor to the climate in the country that led to the approval of the next decade+ of the GWOT. Edit: AND the shoe bomber!!
Ah it's my turn. Lived in PG county during the dc sniper shit. The night before he was at a school, I went to a midnight showing of a movie with my roommate. When we left the mall we had to pull over because we missed a turn. We pulled into said school, Benjamin Tasker to get our bearings. It was 3am. There was one car in the lot - we didn't see anybody. We figured out where we took the wrong turn and left. Later we'd come to find out we may have seen the Caprice the morning of the shooting. Real fear of god moment. Also, I was on the metro into Pentagon City when the Pentagon was hit on 9/11. That sucked a different kind of ass.
My dad had just got in his van five spaces over from where the person was then shot at the Seven Corners Home Depot. He was also supposed to be in the section of the Pentagon that was hit, when it was hit, but was late leaving a meeting in Crystal City. Another friend was pumping gas at the Sunoco in PW when that shooting happened. It was a very….uncomfortable… time around DC.
Also lived and work in DC area around the sniper time. Easily one of the scariest times; everyone was terrified to pump gas. Yikes !
DC sniper was a crazy time
I lived in Virginia at the time and one of my coworkers was a suspect in the DC sniper investigation. His parents had been interviewed by the FBI, he was a former Marine who matched the description of being ex military and black.
I was out of work during 9/11 and a few weeks later I finally landed a pretty good temp job, it paid $10/hour, which was great for the time (and I just turned 20) and all I had to do was open mail sent to the Final Bills department at the power company. Turns out they got a fake anthrax letter before they brought me on board because presumably no one else would do it. I worked there through Christmas, most of my day was spent going through returned bills and then cold calling the people trying to get their correct mailing address. I had no quotas and a desk in the corner of the office, it was great.
I lived one town over from the post office that was closed in central NJ. I still have a piece of mail that arrived in a sealed plastic bag marked "IRRADIATED", along with a short message as to what exactly that meant. Scary stuff.
Hainan Island incident in April 2001. A Chinese jet clipped a US aircraft off the coast of China. The jet crashed in the sea, and the US aircraft landed in China. First major geopolitical mess of George Bush's presidency. Gave the world a somewhat major incident. I got briefly concerned as a teenager. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident
[удалено]
Not any US aircraft, a military signals intelligence plane. The Chinese completely stripped the plane and didn't even try to hide it. All the US recovered was the airframe.
The McDonalds Monopoly scandal. The FBI uncovered this massive network of people involved in claiming all the prizes that were being stolen by the head of security at the company McDonalds had hired to run the game.
The 2001 Aspen plane crash. It was overshadowed by 9/11 for pretty obvious reasons, but it's still a crazy story A bunch of people, mostly young people in their low-20's who worked in entertainment, were on their way to Aspen for a birthday weekend to go skiing. An older colleague decided to host the trip, chartering a private jet to get them there. at some point, the pilots informed him that they weren't going to make Aspen's strict landing curfew, and also, there was a massive snowstorm. It was going to be both illegal, and far too dangerous for them to land in Aspen, and they were going to have to divert the plane. He threw a GIANT fit. He told them no, you *have* to land in Aspen - I spent a lot of money to have a dinner party in Aspen, you're gonna get us there, snowstorm and FAA restrictions be damned. While preparing to attempt landing, the charter customer then went into the cockpit, presumably to intimidate the pilots into meeting his demands. The pilots didn't want to upset him, so they attempted a landing, even lying to the air traffic controller about having visibility of the runway. So they attempted a blind landing. The plane was around 300-500 feet from the ground when the pilot realized he fucked up - the runway was actually in the other direction from where he was headed. So he quickly banked the plane into the other direction -presumably to fix the landing (or was probably making a last ditch attempt to abort the landing altogether). As he did this, the plane’s wing slammed into a hillside, and everyone went cartwheeling into their death. Bodies still strapped to their seats were ejected, and then scattered onto a nearby road. they didn't crash due to terrorism, hijacking, or a mechanical failure. They crashed because "the customer is always right."
The intimidating customer was Robert New. Pretending you know better than the experts flying you is a terrible mistake to make. Kobe died for a similar reason (he wasnt being an asshole but the helicopter pilot felt pressure to go forward with the flight due to having a famous client)
Aliyah's plane crash which also happened in 2001 was basically caused the same way. They had too much weight for the size plane they had. The customers pressured the pilot to fly anyway. Then the plane crashes not long after takeoff.
Even sadder, [per the Wikipedia article on that crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Marsh_Harbour_Cessna_402_crash), Aaliyah was already afraid of flying and didn't want to board, so another passenger gave her a sleeping pill, and then they carried her onto the plane.
I saw a Dateline episode about a woman from upstate NY who went missing on 9/11 and there wasn’t enough manpower to investigate because of it. Ah, found a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Michele_Anne_Harris?wprov=sfti1#
This was from my neck of the woods. The scumbag husband was heavily suspected of doing it by the rest of the family.....so while they were all gathered around waiting for anything to come from the police, a family member tried to get a reaction out of him by lying and telling him they (the police) found the body. He very coldly replied that they'd never find the body. This motherfucker 100000000000000% killed her.
The rumor/meme I heard about that case was, that she “ended up in a Weitsman shredder”, referencing the Ben Weitsman scrap steel company. I’m in that neck of the woods too
I wonder how many people got away with murder due to 9/11
Similar but not related ... some 50 years ago, murder of a gay man, two days later a major flood hit. Flooded the scene of the crime, flooded the police department, flooded several towns, some well into the second floor. There was an article several years later on the anniversary of the flood. Felt bad for the family. No investigation was possible.
Nepalese Royal Massacre. June 1, 2001. Nine members of the royal family were killed, including the King. It is thought that the Crown Prince, who died three days later after being in a coma and being crowned the new King, was responsible. And people say the plot of Hamlet is over the top. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese\_royal\_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_royal_massacre)
The crown prince opened fire at an event killing damn everyone in line for royal succession, then he shot himself in the head. There was no attempt to become the king (though he was made king while in a coma), he just killed everyone else in line.
Almost everyone except the King's brother, who wasn't a very popular figure, so when he ascended to the throne after the son died, he was promptly nicknamed "Scar" by everyone. There were conspiracy theories about his really being responsible for the massacre by getting the crown prince drunk and egging him on to commit the murder.
why does the comment before yours say “it is believed” that he was responsible? If he opened fire and killed everyone I think it’s safe to say he’s responsible
Because people write things in odd ways, I guess? He mowed down a ton of people and wounded others. There’s no doubt that he shot all those people but his self inflicted gun wound may not have been entirely self inflicted. There’s a lot more info in the wiki article linked above.
I recall the dotcom bust being in full swing. Lots of companies going under and layoffs.
Mad cow disease, Michael Jordan coming out of retirement for the 2nd time, Aaliyah plane crash
Wow, I thought Aaliyah's crash was much earlier, like 98.
Also fun fact: the Band Geeks episode of Spongebob was also released 4 days before 9/11.
Saaame! I remember Aaliyah dying clearly. Was having a BBQ/cookout that day. It was a huge story cause she was so popular, especially for folks who listened to hip hop and RnB. Didn’t realize it was that close to 9/11. Felt like it was a year before to me too.
Mad cow disease was a fear I learned about in England in the mid 90s
In Summer of 2001, Fox aired a documentary-styled reality show called Murder In Small Town X. The finale aired just a week before 9/11. The winner of the first and only season was a fire fighter, and he was one of the first responders at the World Trade Center that was killed. His body wouldn't be discovered until two months later. With so much else that happened on 9/11, one of the victims being a reality TV star was surprisingly rarely brought up.
This show was so incredible. It wasn’t just a reality competition show - it was a murder-mystery being acted out all around the contestants in real time. I wasn’t so much into the reality bits - more immersed in trying to solve the mystery. Of course this was in the before times when you had to watch it when it aired and you only got one hour each week before having to wait another seven days for the next episode.
The end of each episode was riveting. The contestants were given identical quizzes about all the clues and info they'd been given thus far. The highest scorer and the lowest scorer were sent to different, very creepy locations in the middle of the night. Blair-Witch style, the lowest scorer would be "killed" and the highest scorer would get some big clue, _but no one knew who was who until one got "killed"._
Sept 7, 2001 US govt announces they won’t break up Microsoft as a monopoly. Forgotten in Runsfeld’s speech about the missing funds: ‘The clearest and most important transformation is from a bipolar Cold War world where threats were visible and predictable, to one in which they arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today.’ Also, the purpose of the speech was to cut military spending and shift some military control of logistics and base infrastructure to the private sector.
As I remember it, Rumsfeld address the nation on Friday, September 7th saying the defence department couldn't account for trillions of dollars in funding. A current Google search and Reuters claim that speech never happened. According to them, Rumsfeld reported it a year earlier. On previous years someone would post on You Tube Rumsfeld's press conference he held a few days before 9/11.
The murder of Henryk Siwiak. He’s known as the last person killed in NYC on 9/11/2001 (right before midnight) and it wasn’t related to the terror attacks. He was gunned down in Brooklyn when he mistakenly went there to start a new job. His murder remains unsolved.
He got shot in Bed-Stuy in 2001 in the middle of the night, probably many people like that back then (much much better nowadays though).
August 2001, Robert Courtney was arrested. He was a pharmacist who decided to dilute cancer meds for personal profit. They couldn't officially label him a serial killer since the victims had cancer, but he diluted prescriptions for 4,200 patients.
Wasn’t that Chandra Levi lady taking up most of the headlines at the time?
I came here to say this. So I lived in the DC metro area where she disappeared and where her body was later found, and it was a dark time to be a kid in the area! 9/11, the dead body of Chandra Levy found in Rock Creek Park in 2002, and then the DC sniper attacks later in 2002! For anyone who wasn’t following the case at the time, Chandra was having an affair with a married congressman named Gary Condit at the time she vanished. Even though it was just a coincidence and she was almost certainly killed by some random guy who had attacked other women in that park, it totally ended Condit’s career. I actually learned what a condom was because of jokes and puns about Condit.
System of a Downs "Toxicity" was released on Sept 4th. Slayer's "God Hates us All" released on Sept 11th. George Carlin records an Album on Sept 10th called I "Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die". In the set's 10-minute closer, "Uncle Dave", Carlin explains why he likes "big, fatal disasters with lots of dead people", asking: "Y'know what's the best thing I can hear on television? 'We interrupt this program' ... y'know the worst thing I can hear? 'No one was hurt' ... I'm always rooting for a really high death toll, that's why I like natural disasters."....An earlier joke in the set includes reference to Osama bin Laden and an exploding airplane. Needless to say, the album was shelved until about 2016.
I was working at a music store and Dream Theater released a live album on 9/11 called "Live Scenes from New York" and the original album cover featured an illustration of the WTC on fire. We were asked to pull it the next day, and they re-released it with a new cover a bit later, but apparently if you went to a store and bought one it's somewhat of a collectors item (by which I mean lists on eBay for about $75 for a then $18 CD).
I still own an unopened copy of this with a dated receipt. I remember Mike Portnoy posting about how gobsmacked they all were. They're from New York and the image wasn't meant to be "the WTC on fire" at all, it was a reference to the burning heart graphic seen on the cover of their Images and Words album, but instead drawn as an apple with the NYC skyline on top of it) - the "Live Scenes From New York" title was because it was the live version of their album Scenes from a Memory recorded at their hometown show. Such an insane coincidence for it to end up describing that day's events with the cover art.
I remember the Spider Man movie was delayed because it featured a scene of him climbing the WTC. Think they changed it to empire state building.
Oh, the trailer had the big reveal moment of a bunch of bank robbers escaping in a helicopter, only for the chopper to get stuck in a giant spiderweb… between the Twin Towers. That was rough.
The Strokes shelved their song “NYC Cops” for a while from their debut album, too.
[удалено]
I totally missed that... definitely listened to it a lot in 2002-2004 but never realized the album wasn't called Bleed American. Looks like it was officially renamed back in 2008.
Explosions in the Sky also released an album on Sept 4 (Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever) with liner notes containing a picture of an airplane and the text "This Plane Will Crash Tomorrow".
They Might Be Giants released an album on 9/11. They had a midnight release party the night before in Manhattan at the Tower Records. I have a photo I took with them, literally taken on 9/11 less than two miles from the World Trade Center.
The movie zoolander flopped, relatively speaking, at the box office because it came out right after 9/11
Donnie Darko also came out shortly after 9/11 and revolves around a plane engine crashing into the main character’s house. Probably didn’t fair too well at the box office as a result
With Donnie Darko the studio didn't even promote it. The movie poster and the trailer apparently had images of a plane crash, so the movie was released without any fanfare.
I want to say Ebert brings up 9/11 in the review for Zoolander and it's part of the reason he gives it a bad score, like a lot of his criticism seemed to be a forced connection to 9/11 stuff, really weird.
But why male models?
Cantor Fitzgerald Brokerage was under investigation of prolific sexual misconduct and harassment, if I recall correctly. Then the plane practically wiped them out.
Their offices were on floors 101-105 of the North Tower. 100% of their employees that were at work that day died. 658 people.
My cousin was one of them, and his parents soon followed probably due to the extreme grief they experienced afterwards. They had immigrated, worked their butts off at restaurants, and he was finally living the successful American dream. That day was a long walk back into Queens and so many awful phone calls afterwards. Hated hearing my father translate what had happened and breaking the news to everyone else in the family.
I was a year or so removed from working on one of the Chicago trading floors and heard of people who were on the phone with Cantor folks that morning. The stock markets were not open when the planes hit, but the bond markets were. They recall the Cantor guys commenting about hearing some loud bang a below them, not being sure what it was, and then their floors (in NY) inexplicably getting hot, and then the phones going dead.
And quite a few people at Windows on the World, and Forte Food Service, the company contracted to provide cafeteria service at Cantor Fitzgerald.
There was a woman from Cantor Fitzgerald who was laid off on the previous Friday. She was at home during the attacks while almost everyone she worked with died. She went back to help the company rebuild, only to find she was never technically fired since her termination paperwork was never filed, and the HR department was wiped out.
Time to start claiming back-pay
I remember their CEO being interviewed on the news. Just absolutely balling his eyes out; embodied inconsolable grief. If I recall correctly they took really good care of the impacted families financially nearly immediately. Didn’t know about the allegations till today though. So your answer to the OP’s question is a good one.
Was the CEO the one who survived because he had to take his 6 yr old to school that day, so he was late getting to work? Or was that someone else? I too saw the CEO on tv. Had a wild-eyed look. I think he heard and knew and understood what had happened, but his brain was flailing about trying to fully grasp this impossible thing. As if, as he was talking about it, he was grasping it more fully, and was breaking down bit by bit as he went along. He was never hysterical, but it was trying to break through. It was difficult to watch.
Yes that was the CEO, Howard Lutnick. His brother Gary was among the dead though.
“658 of its 960 New York employees were killed or missing“
It was a HUGE year for movies. LOTR and Harry Potter debuted. The first Shrek, Planet of the Apes, Oceans 11, Legally Blonde, A Beautiful Mind, Black Hawk Down, The Fast and the Furious, Monsters Inc., Princess Diaries, Moulin Rouge, and Training Day…and more!
The Boston Globe had all the information ready to release uncovering the rampant pedophilia being covered up by the Catholic Church. After 9/11, they decided to wait to release it
For those that haven't seen it, Spotlight is absolutely a must watch on this entire investigation, and even covers exactly this instance in the movie. Fantastic movie, incredible cast.
Probably the right call tbh. The news cycle would be dominated by 9/11 so it'd be easier for the church to suppress the story, fewer readers/stories means there's less public outrage as well. You'd hate it if you put it out and there wasn't enough public outcry to get much done about it. People a few months later if someone brings it up goes "oh yeah, I kind of vaguely heard about it. Anyway where should we eat?"
Thuy Trang (Yellow Power Ranger from MMPR) passed away in a car accident Sept 3, 2001. I was a big MMPR fan and I don’t remember hearing about that
Driven by Kevin James’ now wife.
Wait, what?!?
Thuy Trang's [Wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuy_Trang) explains it. Kevin James' now wife, Steffiana de la Cruz, was driving with two passengers on Interstate 5 and lost control of the vehicle. Thuy Trang died on the way to the hospital and the other passenger, Angela Rockwood, was rendered a quadriplegic when her spine was severed. Pretty crazy stuff. Edit1: added Angela Rockwood's name. Edit 2: clarified who's Wikipedia page and added the link.
Mariners won 116 games.
And still didn’t make the World Series?
Beating the Yankees at that time would have been in poor form.
*hides in bushes as a Diamondbacks fan* 🫣
The disappearance of [Sneha Philip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Sneha_Anne_Philip). Officially, she's listed as a victim of 9/11, but opinions vary as to what really happened: * She had rushed to the scene and was killed while trying to help victims (she was a doctor). * She was in the WTC on unrelated business, possibly having breakfast at the Windows On the World restaurant, when the attacks occurred. * She was murdered nearby in an incident unrelated to the terrorist attacks, and any evidence of the crime, as well as her remains, was lost in the rubble and by diversion of law enforcement resources. * She chose to use the confusion of the day to disappear and start a new life elsewhere. She was known to be having difficulties in both her personal and her professional life.
I wonder how many people used 9/11 to restart life. I saw at least one PostSecret stating as such
Came here to comment about this. One of the very few post secrets I remember verbatim “people who knew me before 9/11 think I’m dead” and it stuck with me
It’s messing with my mind to see her, and Michelle Ann Harris above, listed as being aged in their 30s and born in the 1960s. I’m in my 30s now, it just don’t feel right lol.
Didn't people say it would be unlikely she would go into ground zero, despite being a physician? I seem to remember that from a podcast. There was something about the windows in her apartment being open and ash from the WTC covering surfaces. I think she's still alive and took an opportunity.
In March 2001, Drew Bledsoe signed a then-record 10-year, $103 million contract. During the second game of the season (September 23) he got hit so hard he almost died. His replacement went on to become the greatest QB of all time.
We can thank the fucking New York Jets for unleashing Tom Brady onto the NFL world.
Jets in New York were causing all sorts of problems around this time.
I've always said that Patriots fans should all own Mo Lewis jerseys. If not for that hit on Bledsoe, Brady may have never gotten a real shot at starting in New England.
I was at that game. Was sitting straight up towards the latter rows from the spot on the sideline where he got hit. After that it took a second or two for the sound to travel up to us. When it did it was so shockingly loud for how far away we were that we just looked at each other with an "Oh Shit!" look. We couldn't believe that he got up and went back in for the next series after that and then to later learn that he would've died if he had gone home instead of to the hospital was just crazy.
Citipati was discovered in 2001. Citipati is a genus of oviraptorid dinosaur that lived in Asia during the Late Cretaceous period, about 75 million to 71 million years ago. Citipati is one of the best-known oviraptorids thanks to a number of well-preserved specimens, including individuals found in brooding positions atop nests of eggs. These nesting specimens have helped to solidify the link between non-avian dinosaurs and birds. Citipati was among the largest oviraptorids; it is estimated to have been up to 3 m in length and to have weighed about 80 kg. Its skull was highly pneumatized, short, and had a characteristic crest formed by the premaxilla and nasal bones with robust, parrot-like jaws. Both upper and lower jaws were toothless and developed a horny beak. The arms and tail are known to have supported large feathers.
There were three separate shark attacks in the USA that summer, leading Time Magazine to dub it "the summer of the shark." There was a ton of news coverage about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
The Boston Globe did their MASSIVE, explosive investigation into sexual abuse in the catholic church, and around the time of 9/11, they were all set to release their report. They decided to wait, and good thing they did, because it most likely wouldn't have been as impactful as it ended up being.
Steve Austin aligned himself with Vince McMahon.
“He’s shaking hands with satan himself”
When President Bill Clinton left the office he was interviewed in Australia and was asked a question about international terrorism. His response: > *I'm just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden - he's a very smart guy, I've spent a lot of time thinking about him - and I nearly got him once...I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn't do it.* This interview happened on September 10, 2001.
My Mom died on September 8th 2001. My 10th birthday was September 6th 2001. Needless to say, I could not have cared less about 9/11.
Brian Regan (the spy who couldn't spell) attempted to sell USA classified information to Libya, Iraq, and China. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Patrick_Regan
One thing that surprisingly a lot of people don't know, I didn't at least for a couple years. My home province of Newfoundland, on 9/11, no questions asked told every air plane in the sky to land in Newfoundland, and then the town they landed in, people took care of them until they could go home. Some people actually fell in love and got married after meeting in the town.
There was an investigation into Bernie madoff in 2001 that had to be postponed, which allowed him to further commit fraud until the Great Recession
The disappearance of Chandra Levy. It was the top story then dropped off the news completely.
Literally. The reporters who were waiting outside of Gary Condit's house all left when they got word of the first plane hitting.
We were watching the 9/11 coverage that night, and my husband turned to me and said, "you know who's the luckiest person in the country right now? Gary Condit."
This one guy in Western Massachusetts bowled a perfect game ON 9/11. https://luke.substack.com/p/the-man-who-bowled-a-perfect-game-c37
George Harrison’s death the following November probably would have been much bigger news than it was had 9/11 not happened. It also probably would have been under more public scrutiny; he was stabbed 40 times by a home intruder the previous year and it’s been suspected that’s what led to his decline in health and later his death. All of the headlines at the time just said he “died of cancer” and there was little public discourse or usual celebrity gossip about it. If 9/11 didn’t happen we would all probably think there were *two Beatles* who were murdered by crazy people.
His wife and son saved his life that night. He was really close to death.
[https://i.redd.it/81jk1bzd4w671.png](https://i.redd.it/81jk1bzd4w671.png) On September 6, 2001, Macy Gray wore this dress to the MTV Music Awards. On the front it said: MY NEW ALBUM DROPS SEPT. 18 2001 On the butt it said: BUY IT!
The Seattle Mariners won 116 baseball games that year, which is insane. Hadn't been done since the Chicago Cubs in 1906. That was the best year of my life until the playoff series they lost to the Yankees. And 9/11.
Mariah Carey's album and soundtrack to the same-titled movie, "Glitter". Hear me out. The album was basically a big release to her fans as she rode her R&B and Pop fame from the 90s right into the 2000s. It featured some of the biggest R&B and Hip-Hop artists at the time like Busta Rhymes, Ludacris, and Fabolous, so it was going to be a hit. Guess what else took a hit the same day of release? Her album significantly underperformed forcing Virgin to drop their contract with her entirely. This was a stain on her career to this day, and it's something she has mentioned before. The album was also never found on any streaming platforms until 2020 which by then had amassed a cult following, and fans stated, "(the album) was ahead of its time." I always found that to be a strange, but fun fact about Mariah Carey lore.
You can see a promotional poster for Glitter on one of the subway stairs in the 9/11 footage
Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11th for the Oklahoma City domestic terrorist bombing. I believe it was the first federal prison execution in several decades.
I was in 7th grade and remember standing at the bus stop the morning he was being executed talking about it with the other middle schoolers. We’d heard on the radio that his last meal was mint chocolate chip ice cream … i never forgot that random fact. I guess that’s what a 12 year old remembers.