9/11 survivor tells harrowing tale

Stanley Praimnath was on the phone when he raised his head and looked out the window of the 81st floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The plane was at eye level and coming closer, and he could hear the engines roaring like they do on the tarmac before taking off. He watched the plane tip sideways as it approached, and then he dived under a desk.

“That big red ball that you saw, I was in the middle of that,” Praimnath said.

He gave his account to members of the Valley Stream Historical Society at the village’s Community Center on Sept. 16. The Valley Stream resident lived in Elmont at the time and worked as an executive for Fuji Bank. He was the sole survivor on the 81st floor.

Praimnath recalled how ordinarily the day began. It was warm and sunny when he got to work. He got in the elevator and reached the 78th floor in 45 seconds. From there, he rode the local elevator to his office on the 81st floor. A coworker asked him how he was doing, and he answered, “Special,” as his pastor had recommended saying to cut through the disinterest typical of New Yorkers. His mother and then his brother called, both asking if he was OK. They didn’t say it, but the first plane had hit the North Tower.

Praimnath was with a young woman as word spread that something had happened. She said she was scared, and they decided to leave. They took the elevator to the ground floor and walked out, but a voice on the intercom instructed everyone to return to their offices. Praimnath’s bosses were in the elevator behind him, holding the doors and telling him to get in, and the young woman again told him that she was scared. He told her to go home and she left. He got in the elevator.

Back in his office, Praimnath got a call from a coworker in another city who told him to leave the building. It was at that moment that he looked up to see the plane heading toward him.

United Airlines Flight 175 flew into the South Tower at a slant, with its wingspan’s impact extending from the 79th to the 82nd floors. When Praimnath looked out from under the desk he used as cover, the office had been transformed into a debris field.

“It looked like a wrecking crew had gone through it,” he said.

The air pressure was sucking things out of the shattered windows, so he held onto furniture to keep from getting sucked out himself. His entire body was bruised, swollen and covered in blood. Seeing no one else and feeling the intensity of the air pressure pulling him toward the open side of the building, Praimnath started to call out in prayer. He asked God to save his life, and suddenly he saw a flashlight waving through the darkness.

The man holding it had been headed up the stairs toward the roof with a group of people, where some had sought refuge during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when he heard Praimnath’s voice and stopped to help. Praimnath moved toward him, but was blocked by a section of drywall that was still standing — “the only thing still standing in that office,” he said.

The man banged on the wall from the other side and told Praimnath to climb over it. Praimnath started to, but something gave and he fell back, and a nail sticking through a piece of wood went through his right hand. He described his injury to the man behind the wall, who told him to hit the piece of wood. He did, and the nail came out. The wound immediately swelled.

Despite the injury, Praimnath punched that hand through the drywall, and he and the man widened the hole until Praimnath could fit through. The man grabbed him and pulled with such force that both men flew back and tumbled down a flight of stairs. Praimnath landed on top of his rescuer. He kissed his face out of relief.

“What are you doing?” the man protested. He got up and extended his hand. “My name is Brian Clark.”

As Praimnath recalled those moments, he gazed down at his hand and started to gently stroke where the wound had been, as he said Clark did in the stairwell.

“Let’s go,” Clark said.

The men followed the luminous paint that was added to the stairs after the 1993 bombing. As they passed one floor, they saw an Italian man that Praimnath recognized lying on the floor with a massive head injury.

“I could see the blood and bubbles coming out of his head,” he remembered. Beside the man was a security guard, uninjured, who told them not to move him because they might cause more damage.

“He kept repeating, ‘Tell my wife and baby I love them, we just got married,’” Praimnath recounted. “Neither of them survived. I hear his voice every night before I go to bed.”

He and Clark made it to the ground floor and got out of the building. They walked to Trinity Church, where they paused. Praimnath gripped the fence as they looked at the South Tower. He saw it sway, and told Clark he thought it was coming down.

“He said, ‘I’m the engineer — steel don’t bend,’ but he stopped short,” Praimnath said. The building swayed again, and collapsed. The church took the brunt of the dust cloud that rolled through downtown Manhattan’s streets like a flash flood.

Through the chaos and confusion, Praimnath made his way to a banking office where he was able to call his wife. She answered, and when he spoke, she responded, “Why are you playing with me like this? My husband is dead.” Praimnath fought back tears as he recalled her words.

Finding transportation was practically impossible, but when he reached a train station, a train pulled up. He entered a car and was the only person there, and as the train continued, he poked his head out and saw no one getting on or off.

“It was like this train came just for me,” he said.

The train took Praimnath to the station where he had left his car, and he got inside. “My first thought was that I have to put my seatbelt on or I will get a ticket,” he remembered.

When he got home, his wife was standing with his two daughters, 4 and 8. When he went to hug his 4-year-old, swollen, bloody and dirty as he was, she said, “Please don’t hug me, you’re not my dad.” His 8-year-old, holding the butter knife she had been using to make a sandwich, told him that if he hadn’t made it, she would have killed herself. Praimnath again fought tears.

As he concluded his talk, one that he has given at colleges, churches, government offices and to the media many times in the 14 years since the attacks, Praimnath said that Clark became the brother he never had, whose kids and grandkids call him Uncle Stan at the family gatherings he gets invited to.

Before he ended, he invited the attendees to join him in a prayer.

Board member Valerie Esposito said Praimnath’s account riveted the audience of about 30 people. “You could hear a pin drop,” she said. “Everybody is still talking about it.”