One Hotel's Fight to the Finish; At the Marriott, a Portal to Safety as the Towers Fell

By Jim Dwyer and Ford Fessenden, The New York Times

September 11, 2002

It was only a hotel, a 22-story dwarf tucked under colossal buildings, but in its final 102 minutes, the Marriott Hotel at 3 World Trade Center served as the mouth of a tunnel, a runway in and out of the burning towers for perhaps a thousand people or more.

On this middle ground, a ferocious struggle to live was waged, starting from 9:59, when the south tower collapsed and cleaved the hotel from top to bottom.

In the sundered hotel lobby, those who would die and those who would escape spent the next 29 minutes clawing toward one another, tearing across a tangle of rubble, at first speaking on radios, then coming so close they could hand a flashlight back and forth through pockets of debris.

And some 200 feet above the lobby, at the instant the south tower collapsed, a group of firefighters found that most of the building was suddenly torn away as they searched for stranded hotel guests. On their scramble toward the ground, the second tower collapsed around them.

Even a year later, the dramas inside the hotel are little known, but they make a rich and terrible chapter in the annals of Sept. 11, with all the valor, arbitrariness and heartbreak of the day.

A cadre of unsung Marriott workers, from managers to porters, stayed behind to make sure their guests got out. As hundreds of people fleeing the towers arrived in the hotel, the workers steered them into Tall Ships, the house bar, where an exit took them to police officers on Liberty Street.

By the time the south tower fell, the evacuation had slowed to a trickle, and the lobby was occupied mostly by hotel workers, firefighters and police officers. Part of the lobby turned out to be a safe zone, shielded during the collapses by reinforced beams that had been installed by the Port Authority after the 1993 bombing. Richard Fetter, the resident manager for the Marriott, who led the evacuation effort, was in the protected zone of the lobby when each of the towers fell. “Nicks, scrapes, little bruised here and there, but no bones broken,” Mr. Fetter recalled.

Yet to this day, no trace has been found of Joseph Keller, 31, the executive housekeeper who had helped get scores of people out of the hotel and was just inches away from Mr. Fetter before the first collapse.

The same sharp line dividing those who lived and those who died ran from the top of the building to the bottom. “It was like they severed the building with scissors,” said Firefighter Patrick Carey. “If you were on one side of the line you were O.K. If you were on the other, you were lost.”

No precise number of casualties for the Marriott exists, but it is likely, based on eyewitness accounts analyzed by The New York Times, that no fewer than 50 people inside the hotel were killed. At least 41 of those were firefighters, and the number could be much higher. Besides Mr. Keller, another Marriott employee, Abdu A. Malahi, was killed.

As for guests, 11 of the 940 registered that day were “unaccounted for,” said Cathy Duffy, a spokeswoman for Marriott. It is not known if they died in the building or were elsewhere in the complex.

At 8:46 that morning, landing gear from the first plane pierced the hotel roof and crashed into an office next to the swimming pool on the top floor, where firefighters saw it. That collision set off alarms throughout the building. In the lobby, Mr. Fetter found that firefighters were already arriving, as were Marriott employees, following drills; they met in the lobby near the concierge desk.

They were joined by an elevator mechanic, Robert Graff, who happened to be there and who accompanied firefighters upstairs in elevators. Two Marriott employees with master keys, including Mr. Malahi, began to go room to room. Mr. Malahi, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Yemen, worked as an audiovisual engineer for the hotel. A hotel engineer took firefighters up to the roof, so they could inspect the damage. Other employees swept through the lower floors.

Mr. Fetter tried to print out a fresh copy of the guest registry, but the computer system had already shut down, so he grabbed an earlier printed copy and a set of emergency phone numbers.

As the guests headed for the lobby, people escaping from the north tower were also flooding into the same lobby. The two buildings were adjacent, linked by a door on the north side of the hotel. “There were a heck of a lot of people who weren't staying at our hotel,” Mr. Fetter recalled. Outside the hotel doors on West Street, people and debris were plunging through the glass awning. No one was using that exit.

Instead, those evacuating walked the length of the lobby, to the Tall Ships Bar and Grill at the south end of the hotel. Stationed at the door that opened from the bar onto Liberty Street, a police officer was watching overhead, Mr. Fetter said. He stopped people from stepping onto the street when debris fell. At times, Mr. Fetter said, the queue of people waiting to leave stretched back from the bar and well into the hotel lobby.

Mr. Keller heard from his wife, Rose Keller, who urged him to leave. “He told me that he was evacuating the people, and I, selfishly, said, you get out,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I'll leave here when I can.’”

Because of the Marriott's pivotal location, many of the arriving fire companies ended up in its lobby, although few, if any, had been sent there. On his way to the south tower, Deputy Chief Thomas Galvin recalled, he discovered 10 companies in the lobby, and decided to send some upstairs into the hotel to make sure it was cleared out. Other companies were sent to the north and south towers, and a number later reported that they ended up in the wrong buildings, a misstep that permitted some to escape.

In the lobby, Mr. Keller stood at a bellhop station, an easy place for the civilians to make a wrong turn, and pointed them toward the exits. Mr. Fetter and Mr. Keller thought the evacuation was going well, although it had started to slow. “We're bantering back and forth,” Mr. Fetter said. “We feel confident that we got the people out.”

Then the south tower fell. On the 21st floor, the roar caught the men of Engine 74 in the hallway, walking single file towards the stairwell. Lt. Stephen Nichols, third in line, felt something heavy hit him in the back -- like “Lawrence Taylor at full speed” -- knocking him to the ground. “After the collapse ended, right behind me there was a wall of debris,” said Lieutenant Nichols.

He called roll. The two men in front of him, firefighters Jeff Johnson and Patrick Carey, were accounted for, as was the man behind him, John Breen. But the man behind Firefighter Breen, Ruben Correa -- Marine veteran, firehouse cook and big brother to all the younger firefighters -- didn't answer.

And four other companies were lost somewhere on the other side of the debris wall. After digging in the rubble and getting nowhere, Lieutenant Nichols and his men found their way downstairs, meeting up with another group of firefighters and civilians at the fourth floor.

The radio was nearly silent, as most of those on the channel had died in the collapse, but there was a persistent Mayday from a trapped firefighter. “His Mayday message was that he had fallen many floors,” said Firefighter Heinz Kothe of Ladder 12. He said he was Firefighter Brennan from Ladder 4. “I don't know where I am and I can't get to my PASS [Personal Alert Safety System] alarm,” the missing man said, referring to his locating beeper. He was later identified as Firefighter Michael Brennan, 27.

The group on the third and fourth floors, at least 17 people, listened helplessly, unable to figure out where he was. Finally, three firefighters went back upstairs to hunt for him.

Down in the lobby, another desperate search was under way. Mr. Keller had vanished when the first tower collapsed and sent huge mounds of debris into half the lobby. But Mr. Fetter, after picking himself up, found a radio at the concierge desk.

He was able to reach Mr. Keller, who also was carrying a radio. “He said: ‘Rich, I'm fine. I'm in an air pocket; I'm in a void by the bell stand area,’ which is right where he was stationed. And he goes: ‘I'm on a ledge. There's a big hole and I can see down to the lower levels of the hotel. Shouldn't be able to do that. And there's two other firemen in here with me and they seem to be hurt bad. I can't get to them.’”

The hotel had been turned inside out by the destruction. The firefighters not immediately trapped left the lobby to send back more troops. Lt. Raymond Brown had pulled up outside just as the first tower was collapsing. Told that Lt. Bob Nagel was trapped in the lobby, he collected a power saw and headed inside.

“The best way I've been able to describe it is if you took an accordion and you squished it completely, and then tried to cut a little piece out of it,” Lieutenant Brown recalled. “That was the lobby.”

Lieutenant Nagel, trapped behind the debris, spoke with Lieutenant Brown. “He told us there were two chiefs and there was another company behind them,” Lieutenant Brown said. “I also heard a Mayday from a company on the first floor in the Marriott, and I responded to them and I told them, ‘We're going to get you out,’ then we were starting to cut with the saws.” The rescuers passed a light to Lieutenant Nagel.

Mr. Keller was not trapped in exactly the same area as Lieutenant Nagel, but he could see the activity to free him. “He said, ‘I can see the sparks, I can see where you're working -- you're 20 or 30 feet away from me,’” Mr. Fetter said.

“Then all of a sudden, it got real bad, real quick,” Mr. Fetter said. The north tower was collapsing, and the torrent of debris picked up Mr. Fetter and sent him hurtling along the lobby. A firefighter squatting behind a column grabbed Mr. Fetter as he went past, and hugged him until the storm passed.

Upstairs, the firefighters who had gone to rescue Firefighter Brennan were lost. Mr. Fetter and all the rescuers were able to leave the lobby, some more banged up than others.

When other firefighters returned a day later to the remains of the Marriott, they found the power saws, the pry bars, all the tools that had been used against the rubble. No remains of the people trapped in the lobby have ever been identified.