Retired Pennsylvania State Police Capt. Frank Monaco holds a United Flight 93 cap at his New Kensington home on July 15, 2021. Monaco was one of the first responders near Shanksville on Sept. 11, 2001.
Story by PAUL GUGGENHEIMER
Photos by KRISTINA SERAFINI
Tribune-Review
Sept. 11, 2021
Frank Monaco was too busy to get emotional on 9/11.
Capt. Monaco had been a Pennsylvania State Trooper for over 25 years when United Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Somerset County, killing 40 passengers and crew members on Sept. 11, 2001.
If Monaco felt anything when he arrived at the site and observed the “big steaming hole in the ground,” it was anger that a terrorist act led to a plane crash that killed innocent people so close to home. But he had seen plenty of death and destruction over his quarter-century on the job and nothing was going to faze him.
“When everything goes to hell, you go back to your training,” Monaco said. “We were trained to set up a perimeter. You treat it like a crime scene. There were people trying to take parts of the plane home. We had to keep people out of there.”
Retired Pennsylvania State Police Capt. Frank Monaco was one of the first responders in Shanksville on Sept. 11, 2001.
For the next two weeks, Monaco was in charge of the state troopers at the site. He kept the area secure while unsettling things occurred around him — federal investigators unearthing body parts and family members showing up to see where their loved ones had died.
Nothing bothered him. That is until a slightly built Japanese woman named Yachiyo Kuge approached as he was standing at attention with other state troopers. She was looking for her 20-year-old son Toshiya. It had been his dream to travel to the United States, become fluent in English, and earn a master’s degree in engineering from an American university.
Toshiya, who loved American football and played it in Japan, had been traveling in the U.S. and Canada on a two-week vacation that included a whitewater rafting trip and visits to Niagara Falls and the Statue of Liberty. On 9/11, he was on his way back to Japan. Flight 93 was the first leg of his journey home.
“I still have trouble talking about it,” said Monaco, 71, sitting barefoot in the living room of his New Kensington home.
“The mother came up and she said through an interpreter, ‘Is there any chance he is alive?’ I had to tell her ‘no.’ She asked, ‘Is there any chance he could have parachuted out?’ ”
Monaco, reliving the moment, shook his head.
Then the woman asked if she could have her son’s body. Monaco had to explain that there wasn’t much, if anything, left.
“She was wracked with sobs, she was doubled over. My heart broke for her … her only child. She bowed to all of us and it wiped us all out,” said Monaco, fighting back tears.
“For some reason 20 years later it still bothers me. I try not to talk about it for obvious reasons.”
Judy Colfer remembers the “sapphire blue” sky that framed the Twin Towers of New York City’s World Trade Center. She had never been to the complex located at the southern tip of Manhattan, near the shore of the Hudson River. Colfer, now 69, was working as the acting director for Mine Safety Appliances in Murrysville. Her job brought her to the 55th floor of the North Tower on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I was responsible for parts of logistics and that’s why I was in New York attending a conference on Mexican logistics. It was exciting because I had never been to the World Trade Center,” said Colfer, sitting in the living room of her Hempfield home. “It was a gorgeous structure. It was just beautiful. I got up in the morning and was ready to roll. It was a beautiful day, a perfect day.”
Colfer’s meeting was scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. Before going into the building, she spoke on the phone with her sons, Brian, 13, and Brenden, 10. She told the boys she would see them in the evening at their soccer practice. Her husband, Gene, was also on the phone.
“He said, ‘Whatever you do, walk to the top of the towers and look out. It’s the most spectacular view of New York that you’ll ever see.’ ”
Those words would come back to haunt him.
By about 8:20, Alan “Doug” Rock, a software engineer working for AT&T as a contractor for the Army Budget Office, was leaving his house just outside of Arlington, Va., and heading to the Pentagon. The 54-year-old Munhall native didn’t always have to be at the Pentagon for his job. But his presence was required on Sept. 11 because he was involved in software support related to the budget.
Before he left, Rock said goodbye to his wife, Kathy, a McKeesport native, and daughters Lauren, 3, and Meghan, 3 months. Around that same time, American Airlines Flight 77 was taking off from Dulles International Airport.
About 15 minutes into her conference, at 8:46, Colfer said the North Tower suddenly and violently shook.
“You heard a loud noise and the building was shaking,” she said. “You looked out the window and you saw pieces of glass, pieces of metal, pieces of paper coming down. And the bookcases around us, the projector, just flew across the room. Everything was moving. It shook that hard. The next thing we knew the security guards were in the hallway telling us to get out. And we followed them.”
She and others were led to a stairwell, the only way out of the building where the upper floors were on fire.
“I looked down and saw this mass of humanity,” she said. “We didn’t know what was going on because they didn’t tell us.”
The power went out and the stairwell was dimly lit by lights from a backup generator. Colfer smelled diesel fuel.
“A gentleman’s pager went off and he started yelling ‘a plane hit the building, a plane hit the building!’”
The plane was American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston, headed for Los Angeles.
On his drive to the Pentagon, Rock heard the news on the radio, followed by a report of United Flight 175 hitting the South Tower at 9:03.
Hempfield resident Judy Colfer reflects about escaping from the 55th floor of the World Trade Center when it was struck on Sept. 11, 2011. (Sean Stipp | Tribune-Review)
“At that point, I knew it was an attack,” said Rock, sitting with his wife in their home in Oak Hill, Va. “I called Kathy after that and said ‘Hey, you better turn on the TV and see what’s going on.’ She was going to get more info than I was because once I get into the Pentagon, I’m in a bit of a black hole.”
By shortly after 9 a.m, as Colfer made her way down to the 45th floor of the North Tower, she saw firemen coming up the stairs hauling equipment and sweating profusely.
“A fire lieutenant came around the corner and he grabbed my arm and said, ‘Lady, what floor did you come from? What did you see? What did you hear? What did you smell?’ And I’m looking at this man and he looked terrified. And I’m thinking, ‘If you’re this scared, then I should really be terrified.’”
Colfer said the fireman assured her she would make it out. She wasn’t so sure. Firemen soon began carrying injured people down from the upper floors, including a woman who was covered with oil and was badly burned.
“In between bringing people down, they let us move a little bit. I didn’t think I was ever going to get out of the building. I was praying, ‘I need help God and I need it today.’ I was praying to my parents who are deceased so I could get back home to see my family. ‘Help me get out of here alive.’ ”
Eventually, Colfer made it down to the 35th floor. Firemen passed out bottled water and rolls of brown paper towels. She and the others were told to tear off pieces of paper towel and pour water on it so they could breathe as the smoke intensified.
“We got down to the 10th floor and I thought, ‘Maybe we’re going to get out of here.’ Then we got down to five and I believed we were,” she said.
The sprinkler system had burst, and water flowed down the steps. At about 9:30, Colfer finally reached the bottom floor — the subway area of the World Trade Center. The water was up to her knees.
“People were being led out through a doorway in groups of 10. And you waited and waited. We were soaking wet and it was pitch black except for this fireman’s flashlight on his helmet. There were huge hunks of concrete that he weaved us around. It seemed like an eternity.”
Rock had just arrived at the Pentagon and was settling in for the workday. One of the first things he did when he got to his desk was call his wife. He wanted Kathy to fill him in on what was happening in New York. They talked for about 10 minutes and then Kathy recalled wondering if Washington was going to be targeted.
“I said (to Doug), ‘I wonder how long it will be before something happens here?’ ” she said.
“I kind of shook my head and said, ‘I don’t know,’ ” said Doug. “And then about five seconds later, the plane hit the building. It was a very strange thing that our minds turned to that right before the plane hit.”
At 9:37 a.m., hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the west side of the Pentagon, hitting Wedge 1 of the five sides that make up the building. Rock’s office was located in Wedge 2, closer than he wanted to be.
“It was close enough that the room shook, we could feel a change in pressure. People in the room screamed and thought the windows were going to blow out because they were shaking so much. Many of them hit the deck,” he said. “The sound was like a Mack truck decelerating. If you speed that up and make it much more angry and throw lots of metallic sounds in there … it was very loud and that sound has stuck with me for a long time. For months afterward just hearing that sound would take my breath for a second.”
Because Rock was still holding the phone, Kathy could hear the impact of the plane crashing into the building. “I heard it. I didn’t know exactly how close he really was to it and I didn’t know if the plane was going to explode. I didn’t know if he was going to make it out of there,” she said.
Rock had told her he had to go and hung up. He immediately felt bad.
“Kathy and I have been married almost 31 years now, and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten off the phone with her without telling her I love her, except for that day,” he said. “And I left her hanging. I didn’t give her the reassurance that I was going to be OK, which weighed on her. Unfortunately, I had left my cellphone in the car. Cellphones weren’t a part of your body in 2001.”
By about 9:45, Colfer and others who had been trapped inside for nearly an hour were being led up a ramp to a doorway by a New York City fireman.
“He said, ‘When we get to the top of the ramp, I’m going to throw open this door and I want you to run for your lives,’ ” she said. “And he threw open the door and said, ‘You’re in the lobby of the World Trade Center. Don’t stop! Run!’ And as he opened the door and there’s all this light, all this brightness and you’re taking all this in. It looked like a scene from ‘Dante’s Inferno.’ The elevator shafts were open and there were flames coming out if it. It was hell.”
Firemen wrapped people in bandages while trying to perform CPR on others.
“And everybody kept screaming at us to ‘get out, keep running,’ ” Colfer said. “They knew that the building was going to come down and they just wanted us to get the hell away from it before it did. Sorry for my language.”
A bus and subway entrance stands dust covered after the terrorist attack on the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. (AP)
Once outside, Colfer kept running but couldn’t help looking back. That’s when she saw people falling from the upper floors to escape the flames. As she continued to run she became separated from the group she was with.
“And then you heard this horrible noise,” she said. “Everything just started to rumble and rumble … and the building fell. And you’re turning and you’re looking and your mind is not accepting what you’re seeing. It was like a sandcastle coming down. And then there was a huge white cloud and that cloud was so thick it wiped out all the noise. Everything was totally silent.
“I couldn’t see anything, and I started crying, and I started screaming because all I kept thinking ,‘Oh my God! I died.’ ”
Colfer stood there crying. Then she heard a woman’s voice.
“Put out your hand. Put it out.”
She reached out, not knowing what she was reaching for.
“And I felt another hand around me and held on,” she said, “and we ran.”
Meanwhile, Colfer’s youngest son Brenden, who had just started the fifth grade at Stanwood Elementary School in Hempfield, was in class when his teacher turned on a television so the students could see what was going on in New York. As he watched the North Tower tumble into a pile of rumble, Brenden became hysterical.
He bolted from the classroom and ran to the principal’s office screaming, “Is my mother OK? She’s in that building!”
School officials called his father to come get him.
“Where is my mother? Is she dead?”
Gene Colfer told his son: “‘You know your mother. If there is a way out of that building, you know your mother will find it. She can’t talk to us right now.”
But he was left to wonder if his wife had taken his advice and gone to the top of the World Trade Center.
Back at the Pentagon, Doug Rock was also trying to find his way out of danger. All the jet fuel that had been spilled from the plane had caused a large fire.
“Everybody (at the Pentagon) knew what happened in New York, so they knew what happened here as soon as it happened,” he said. “I started smelling smoke and I was worried. At that point, I was planning on heading out the (National) mall entrance because that was probably the shortest route. Then, I noticed everybody was heading the other way towards the (Potomac) river entrance.”
It took Rock about 10 minutes to get out. But with Pentagon security pushing people away from the building, it took him an hour to get back to his car. As he was making his way, he heard that another plane had crashed — this time in Pennsylvania.
At 10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93, hijacked and headed for Washington, crashed in a field near Shanksville. The passengers and crew fought the four terrorists. The plane went into a nose-dive.
Monaco had been teaching at the State Police Academy in Hershey when he received an email from a lieutenant informing him about what was happening. Monaco didn’t know where Shanksville was, but got in his car and raced to the scene.
“You would have never known what it was when you got there and, like a fool, I went down into the hole myself, inhaling all that jet fuel,” Monaco said. “You don’t know what to do at that point, your mind goes blank. When you’re in shock like that, you go back to your training.”
Judy Colfer was still running through New York, in her 3-inch heels, with the woman who had taken her hand. White dust from the collapsed North Tower had clung to their damp skin, making them look like ghosts. Neither knew exactly where they were going. They ended up on the Brooklyn Bridge. Colfer saw a cab and moved onto the road, waving her arms hysterically.
“Lady, what are you doing here?” the cab driver said. “You can’t be on this bridge, you’ll get killed.”
He picked her up along with the woman and another man. As they started to move, the driver told them about the plane crash at the Pentagon and the one in Shanksville.
“I thought, ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’ ” said Colfer. She told the cab driver she wanted to go to the airport. She wanted to go home. He explained that he couldn’t take her to the airport because flights had been grounded.
As they crossed the bridge, she saw a young man running who was covered in the same dust. “He was ready to fall over,” she said. She told the cab driver to pick him up.
The man, whose name was Mark Figueroa, was grateful, and once he realized Colfer had nowhere to go, invited her to stay at his home in Queens. She took a leap of faith and accepted.
Colfer’s cellphone wasn’t working. She used Figueroa’s landline to call her husband and children.
“Gene said, ‘All I kept thinking is I told you to go to the top of that building. I didn’t think there would be pieces of you left to bury let alone anything else,’ ” she said. “And my sons are screaming to talk to me on the phone. Brenden said ‘Mom, we’re coming to get you and we’re coming right now!’ I told him ‘I don’t think they’ll let you through but you can call me and you can talk to me.’
“Oh my God, it was so good just to hear their voices,” she said.
Colfer hunkered down with Figueroa and his girlfriend. They shared pizza and Jack Daniel’s, watched TV, and celebrated being alive — while also feeling the devastating loss around them.
Doug Rock finally got to his car around 11 a.m. He immediately called Kathy. “I gave her that ‘I love you’ that I didn’t on the previous call,” he said.
Kathy was just grateful to hear his voice.
“I felt relief and sadness for the whole thing,” she said. “It was this feeling where I was elated to hear his voice, which I had wanted that whole time, and then I started feeling guilty for hearing his voice because I knew there were going to be a lot of other people that would not be hearing their loved one’s voice.”
Rock found out later that Teresa Martin, a civilian Pentagon employee he had worked closely with, had died in the attack.
Chuck Wagner, 73, had tried to get to the crash site on 9/11. The Shanksville resident thought maybe he could just walk through the woods from Camp Allegheny, a Methodist church camp where he worked as maintenance director. As he got closer to the site, Wagner had second thoughts. He didn’t want to get into any trouble.
As days went by, the heavy equipment operator felt a desperate desire to help at the site. He received a call the Sunday after the crash. How soon could he be there?
“It felt surreal at first,” said Wagner. “I actually said a prayer and I said, ‘Is this the right thing to do now?’ I knew God was in control of my life and if it was something I couldn’t deal with personally, He would have called someone else.”
When Wagner thinks back to that first day at the site, the thing that stands out in his memory is the smell.
“One thing that was overwhelming was the odor,” he said. “It was a mixture of jet fuel and an organic landfill type smell. And even from the color of the dirt, you could tell when you were in a hot spot” — the term for an area that might hold some evidence — “because it was a darker color. Seats and pieces of carpet from the plane were pulled from the ground and they weren’t burnt because the plane imploded in the ground so quickly.”
Like Monaco, Wagner was doing everything he could to keep his emotions in check.
“One thing I avoided was TV. I didn’t want to learn a whole lot about the passengers. I didn’t want any personal connection to individuals at that point in time. I knew there would be time later on to learn and reflect and get to know them as such. I didn’t want to have an emotional load to carry while I was working there.”
Monaco, meanwhile, was feeling pressure to produce results.
“The whole world is watching what we’re doing here and I can’t screw something up or do something to botch the investigation and make the state police look bad,” he said. “I was in high alert mode. I didn’t get any sleep. I was just going.”
When the black box was found 13 days after his arrival, “it just felt like somebody deflated a balloon. The tension went away and the adrenaline went away.”
Wagner, operating a skid loader at the site, followed the instructions not to touch any of the evidence, which was loaded into bins divided into four categories – “personal effects,” “plane parts,” “mail,” and “body parts.”
One morning, he found a coat belonging to one of the terrorists.
“It just felt good that you were making progress and to be able to help with the investigation.”
Wagner ended up working at the crash site for seven days – from Sunday, Sept. 16, until the following Saturday. He refused to accept any pay.
“They came to me on the last day and asked for my hours and I said, ‘No, I’m good.’ It meant too much to me to be there. It’s almost like I should have paid them.”
When Monaco looks back on his experiences at the crash site, he is also grateful he had the opportunity to be there.
“I was glad to be involved, and I was proud of my people. All the people there were proud to be involved and proud that we were doing something,” he said. “In five more minutes, (the plane) would have been in Maryland. So, it just happened to fall in my lap. The fact that you got to do something, it felt like you were contributing. And the evidence that was found helped somewhat.”
As for Wagner, in the two decades since the crash, he has taken the time he promised back in 2001 to “get to know” the passengers of Flight 93 and to take on the emotional load he once avoided.
Wagner has spent years as a Flight 93 Ambassador, greeting visitors and family members of the passengers at the memorial, going back to when it was a relatively small, makeshift structure.
He has also photographed images in and around the Flight 93 crash site, weaving them with text from quotes from family members of the passengers into a book called “Reflections from the Memorial.” It’s one of two books he has published, along with “Reflections from the Temporary Memorial: Remembering Where We First Honored the Heroes of Flight 93.”
“I’m proud to have helped tell the story of the 40 heroes … and the price they paid for our freedom and this first strike against terrorism here in Shanksville,” said Wagner.
He has grown close to some of the family members, including Yachiyo Kuge. She has attended each annual 9/11 anniversary ceremony, until missing last year due to the pandemic. That will also prevent her from traveling to Shanksville this year.
“She used to bring origami birds and Japanese writing, and put it on the chain link fence (at the temporary memorial),” he said.
Wagner said Kuge also expresses her gratitude to him.
“Because I’m there at the memorial and she knows I’ll be there. And through the years, we just sort of bonded.”
Doug Rock still works at the Pentagon and can’t help being reminded of 9/11.
“As I walk in the building, there’s a huge plaque on the wall with a piece of the fuselage (from the plane that struck the building) in the plaque,” he said. “Many people were impacted in worse ways than I. So, I feel fortunate.”
After 9/11, Judy Colfer continued traveling for work, though going into tall buildings scared her.
“I wanted my children to know that you had to have the courage to go on. That you couldn’t live life being afraid to do things. After all, I was their mother,” she said. “That’s what kept me going. My family kept me going.”
Now retired, Colfer said she still has nightmares about her narrow escape from the World Trade Center and sometimes wakes up screaming.
“For the longest time, I never knew why I was spared when so many people had died. It wasn’t until my husband was diagnosed with cancer that I started putting pieces of the puzzle together,” she said.
In 2004, Gene Colfer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer around Easter. He died that October.
“I thought, ‘OK, that’s why the Lord spared me,” she said, “to bring up my children, to bring up my boys.’”
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