Surviving 9/11, pregnant and in heels

“I worked for Merrill Lynch, which was located on the 23rd floor of the south tower. I was shopping at a drug store in the lobby of the tower. It was a Tuesday, and I was scheduled to start maternity leave on Friday. I was pregnant with twins.”

That is how Island Park resident Andrée Marshall began her 9/11 tale of horror and heroism.

Having picked out a few things at the drug store, Marshall was planning to take the PATH train to New Jersey, where Merrill Lynch had other offices. Standing on line at the checkout, she heard a loud boom, and noticed smoke coming out of the air conditioning vents. The woman at the checkout said that the air conditioning sometimes made noises, but not this loud, and she had never seen smoke.

“I looked out the windows and saw people running,” Marshall recalled. “There was a woman in front of me, she was maybe five feet tall, and I’m 5-10. We open the door to the store and see people running, zooming by. One man yells, ‘A plane hit one of the towers — we’ve got to get out of here.’”

Marshall started toward the PATH trains, but the shorter woman grabbed her and said, “No you’re not.” The smaller woman was tugging at Marshall — tall, pregnant and 210 pounds — trying to drag her out of the building, but Marshall wanted to get on the train and go home, so she tried to fight her off. “She was so persistent — she would not let go of me,” she said.

They finally left the building, and both women turned back to look. What Marshall saw did not register at the time. Large things were hitting the ground. It was only later that she realized they were bodies. “They go ‘boom’ and bounce,” she said, “It was a lot like a Bruce Willis movie.” Papers were flying everywhere, people were running and screaming, things were falling, and there was fire high above. Some images stayed with her, she said: A couple who had come down holding hands; a man who had obviously tried to tie curtains and window shades together, but they weren’t long enough to reach the ground.

While Marshall wanted to sit and rest, the short woman kept pulling her until they reached an office at Broadway and Vesey Street. It was there that Marshall learned that the short woman was named Barbara Joe, or BJ, and began to understand that she had saved her life. Today, Marshall says, not a week goes by that they don’t talk.

Eventually, Marshall was able to call her mother to let her know she was OK. It was then that the second plane hit. “Just as I hung up the phone, the plane went by,” she said. “It was so low you could feel it. You could feel it in your chest.”

Marshall was watching from a window as the plane hit the south tower. “Everyone was screaming to get away from the window,” she said, “and then someone grabbed me and shoved me under a table.” She needed help getting back out.

Hours later she was escorted out of the office as the south tower imploded. “Some people hid in crevices,” she said. “When they turned around, they were clean on one side and covered with dust on the other.”

A fire captain directed a member of his crew to fit Marshall with an oxygen mask, and found someone to get her to the Brooklyn Bridge, where she got a ride across in a car driven by some New York City police detectives. In Brooklyn, hours later, he husband picked her up. She got home at 9:30 that night.

Marshall was experiencing some pain three days later, and went to Saint Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital. At one point she was taken into a room where a woman and some children were watching a replay of the attacks on TV. She had not seen the video, because her family wanted to keep her from reliving her experience, but now she was face to face with it, and it was more than she could take.

When planes began flying around New York again, she had a hard time dealing with the noise.

She eventually delivered a boy, Aiden, and a girl, Andrée.

As it happened, Marshall was living in Belle Harbor, Queens, when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed there on Nov. 12, 2001. Once again, papers went flying everywhere, and when she saw that, she calmly told her mother, “A plane just crashed.”

When they were around 11, Marshall took her children to ground zero. All three were crying as she explained to them what she had seen and what it had been like.

Aiden Colleran, (Marshall divorced after the twins were born) now 14 and a student at Long Beach High School, has been in Scouting since he was 6, and he has dedicated himself to earning the highest rank in Boy Scouts, Eagle. He is in the process of refurbishing the Tony Perez Memorial Square at Radcliffe Road, in Island Park.

His twin sister, Andrée, is on the honor roll at Long Beach High, and is a cheerleader. She has earned her Girl Scout Silver Award.