A Decade of Hope (23 page)

Jim Smith is now a retired NYPD police officer, but on the morning of 9/11 he was an instructor of law at the police academy. His wife, Moira, was a patrol officer assigned to the Thirteenth Precinct on Twenty-first Street, around the corner from the police academy, and she responded to the World Trade Center. Moira helped one person out of the South Tower to safety and had returned to help others in the evacuation when the building fell.

 

 

 

I
t's funny, but one of those things that's always indelible is when I first met Moira. I finished work one day and went to a place where I used to hang out, a bar on Barrow Street that a friend of mine owned. Cops would go there off duty. When I walked in, Moira was already there—the blond hair, the big smile, laughing, having a good time at a table with some other people. We were both transit cops at the time, and she had come into District 4 while I was out with a knee injury, so I had never met her at work. It was my first day back after four or five months out on sick leave. I walked over to the table to say hello to my friends. I was wearing a Yankees hat, and she looked up and grabbed it off my head and threw it across the bar—she was a Mets fan. And that was it. We were friends from that moment on.

In the beginning we worked a lot together, including the subway crash in 1991. I was off duty and waiting on the Fourteenth Street Station subway platform for a train home. There was a lot of work going on, jackhammering and that sort of thing, so I didn't even hear the train crash but just felt how loud it was. All of a sudden I saw Moira running, in uniform, and I chased after her. She had thought it was an explosion—two of my friends were actually on the train, transit cops who were working—and had put it out over the radio as an explosion, not realizing that the train at Union Square had crashed. We spent twelve, eighteen hours pulling people out of the wreckage there. The department gave Moira a medal for that work.

As a police officer, there was no backing off for Moira. She liked to have fun at work and wasn't always by the book. She was a regular cop like everybody else, but when it came time to do the job, she was there. A lot of friends of mine are great people, but when it came to being cops, they didn't always do the right thing. Moira always did the right thing, whatever the inconvenience or the danger.

 

We had a sort of Brooklyn wedding, all family and cops, and were living in Bay Ridge at the time. Unfortunately, Police Department policy was to leave it up to the commanding officer to decide whether a husband and wife could work together. There was a captain, now a chief, who told us one of us had to leave, even though we worked different units and hours—she was in street narcotics at the time, and I was doing anticrime. I'm still mad at that guy. He actually wanted Moira to go, but I got an opportunity to teach at the police academy, and I had always wanted to teach law. So I said I would leave, and a couple of weeks later I was in the academy. We were still in the building, so it was convenient, and we often went to work together.

I didn't have much background to be a cop. My older brother, John, had always wanted to be one, but I hadn't given it that much thought—I guess I wanted to be a lawyer. I went to college, and I played rugby, so getting my degree took a little longer than it should have—the broken bones, the partying. In my senior year, however, they were administering the PD test, and because I was going to school in Buffalo, my mother said, “If you take the test, I'll pay for the airfare.”

I took the test on December 15, 1984, and only a month later they started calling. Back then fifty thousand people were taking the test, and the department was putting together huge classes because they were fighting the battle of the times. The economy wasn't that great, crime was rampant, crack was everywhere. It was crazy, and we were losing two thousand people a year.

On September 11, 2001, I was working the four-to-twelve tour, and Moira was doing community policing, which she figured gave her more flexibility with the baby, Patricia, who was two years old at the time. We used to do the switch-off to watch the baby, and sometimes even bring her to work and pass her off there, when I was at the academy.

That day she had to be in by 5:30 A.M., as some planned demonstration was going to be held in the Thirteenth Precinct, and she had to cover it. As she left the house she gave me a little kiss on the forehead and walked out the door while I was still in bed.

I got up with Patricia early in the morning, and we were downstairs watching
Winnie the Pooh
or something on a DVD. I didn't have the TV on so didn't have any idea what was going on. The phone rang upstairs, but by the time I picked up Patricia and got there, it stopped. Then a couple of seconds later it rang again, and it was my sister telling me that Moira had just tried to call me, and that she's down at the World Trade Center. And I said, “So?” She asked, “Aren't you watching?” I put on the TV then and saw what was happening.

I said to my sister, “Okay, they are probably going to need me, so I'm going to bring the baby over, and I'm going to go into work early.” I was sure they would be calling people in. The first tower collapsed while I was getting ready, and it was then that I panicked. I raced to my sister's house—I think Patricia was in just her diaper—threw the baby to her, and drove in at ninety.

It was a mad scene trying to get onto the Long Island Expressway and into Manhattan. Traffic was closed, and you could see who the cops and the firemen were, trying to race in, beeping their horns and finally getting people to move over. I must have hit twenty cars and the rail a few times, but as I was getting over the ramp toward the Midtown Tunnel, I saw the second tower go down. And God—at this point it was terror.

I went directly to the Thirteenth Precinct, and as I walked in I saw a friend of mine was the desk officer. I said, “Joey, where's Moira?” And he said, “She's okay, we heard from her. Everything's okay.” So I said, “All right,” and I relaxed. A guy I trusted told me it was okay, so I went in, got dressed, and let them know I was here. They gave me twenty recruits, the biggest guys, and sent me to Bellevue Hospital. I figured we'd be moving bodies, and maybe help at the morgue, which is just next to Bellevue.

The precinct had set up a command post in the hospital, assuming they were going to be overloaded, which never came to pass. Nobody came in. There were some bomb threats, and we had to secure. My sister would call me and say, I haven't heard from Moira yet. I told her they told me Moira's okay, and that the cell phone antennas might be down. And then I'd call the precinct, and they'd say, Someone saw her over here or heard her on the radio over there, and I was okay. But this went on all day. At midnight we were finally relieved at the hospital, and by now I must have called ten times over to the precinct, and my sister had called me a dozen times. I went back to the precinct house and asked, “Do you know what Moira's doing?” And they said, “She's down at the pier.” I figured she was going to stay a full tour, so I volunteered for another tour and took a bunch of rookies down to the perimeter at Fourteenth Street, below which everything was blocked off. State troopers were there, and soldiers, so we had some assistance. I made a couple of trips down to the site to deliver supplies, water, masks, and stuff to the cops down there, and then I saw the devastation. It was mind-numbing—completely numbing. At about three in the morning the Thirteenth Precinct car came up to me, and I thought I could see Moira sitting in the backseat. So I figure,
Good, Moira's back
. But it turns out it was Mary Young, a sergeant and a friend of mine from college who became good friends with Moira, and who was very similarly built. She came up to me and asked, “Do you know where Moira is?” I said, “You guys have been telling me all day that you knew where she is, and now you're telling me that you don't know where she is?” For all intents and purposes, that moment was the last time I was working for NYPD. I went back to the precinct, where I met one of the guys that I had trained as a rookie. He was now a sergeant, and he was just about to leave, in civilian clothes. He said, “What's going on?” and when I told him they couldn't find Moira, he got dressed again, and we took one of the cars and headed down Broadway. I found out then that Moira had driven the van, and knowing her, I knew she would have taken Broadway to get downtown.

We found the van, got in, and found her hat and memo book. And then I start finding other hats and memo books. I said, “How many cops are missing? And how many of these guys are unaccounted for?” We gathered up whatever we could there, and then we just started looking. For the next three to four days it was nonstop: hospitals; walking around the site; checking who was doing what. Who had seen who, and just trying to figure out where she was. The next six or seven days was all talking to people, trying to find out where she was and where she had last been seen. From the beginning I was hoping that she was over in some hospital in New Jersey with a concussion but okay. But it became clear a day or two later that nobody . . . Everybody who had gotten out was out. Anybody else . . . There wasn't even anything to pick up. The rubble was dust. The first photograph I saw was of a bloodied woman in a wheelchair, with EMS [the Fire Department's Emergency Medical Services] all around her. But behind her, in the background, was Moira's butt, and as soon as I looked at it I said, “That's Moira.” I could tell from the bottle of water in her back pocket, and from the gun—she was one of the few people who still had an old .38. Once we saw that picture of her at the triage area, we had something to go on. We called up a number of the [NYPD] Emergency Service Unit trucks, as we had the truck numbers, and whatever else we got from that picture, to find out who had been where and what had happened to them. We tried to find out what happened to that woman in the wheelchair, to ask if she had seen Moira, and if they had any contact. And then the picture came out in the
Daily News
of her helping a guy from Aon out of the building. His name was Nicholls, and they didn't even have her name in that photo. So we had to jump all over the
Daily News
to try to find out who had taken the picture, and what were the circumstances. Basically, I guess, she had led him out and was photographed at the triage area. And then she went back in. A gentleman who at that time had been coming down the escalators later got in touch with me. He had spoken with her. It had to be early on, because she was directing people out with a flashlight, and he remembered her. He looked in her eyes, and she was like, Keep moving, keep moving, getting them out of the building. So I guess, from that point, the more seriously injured people started coming down, and that's when she took Mr. Nicholls out. And then she went back in, and what we heard was that there was a woman having an asthma attack on the third floor who couldn't go any farther. Moira went up to help take her down. That was the last information we had from the different sources.

And even that took months to find that much out. It was all very chaotic. The first week, when I was down there, it seemed like I couldn't find anybody in charge. Nobody. It didn't seem like anybody was doing anything. The frustration was deep. It penetrated deep.

 

Moira did not consider herself as special. Medals, for instance, were totally meaningless to her. She got one medal for the train wreck. Somebody had to write her up, as she wouldn't even put herself in for a medal. That was the kind of person she was. She wasn't doing it for medals; she did it because it was her job. She was without a doubt the kind of person who was there because she wanted to be a cop. She had always wanted to be a cop. She wanted to do the right thing. I did it because I had college bills to pay, and I needed a job, and this one was staring me in the face. I eventually came to love the job, but I didn't take it for the altruistic reasons that Moira did. For Moira it was just a simple matter of doing what you had to do. What you were trained to do.

After Moira was lost there was a rush of hungry media. The Police Department didn't give out my information but filtered requests; if they thought something was legitimate, they let me know someone wanted to talk to me. But mostly I refused. Joe Dunne, the first deputy commissioner, spent a lot of time with those of us who had 9/11 Police Department losses. Bernie Kerik, the police commissioner, never met with me. The first time I actually met him was at President [George W.] Bush's second inauguration. I had my daughter with me, and I wanted to go up to him and say, “Hi, I'm Jim Smith, and this is Patricia”—a deliberate introduction. Because every time we were supposed to meet with him after 9/11, while we were still looking for the bodies of our family, he blew us off. He'd be doing something else. He'd be on
Oprah
or a book tour somewhere, or changing this or doing that. He never even came over to say he was sorry but would send Joe Dunne, so Dunne was the guy who sat there and consoled twenty-three families.

Dunne is a good man, and I have a lot of respect for him. But his time was split, and I couldn't spend a lot of time with him. But we had John McArdle, the ESU lieutenant who was basically in charge of the site. I met with John daily at Stuyvesant High School, where he had set up an information post for us, and where they were doing the mapping. We'd ask, What are we doing? Where are we at this point? The guy was a straight shooter and didn't pull any punches.

We had two services for Moira, the first on her birthday, February 14. I had talked to McArdle, who told me that by this point they should be done—the whole area would have been excavated, and they'd either have found her or they wouldn't. I then made arrangements. If we hadn't found Moira by the time we had a ceremony scheduled, I wanted it to be big, for her family, and so I arranged to get Saint Patrick's Cathedral. The cardinal said the mass. The governor and mayor were there, and President Bush sent a letter. It was huge. About ten thousand cops showed up, a great tribute. I think we had four busloads of family that the PD shuffled around. I can't say enough about how good the NYPD people were.