“I saw this photo and I recognized my brother hanging from the windows”: the grief of the family of a victim of the Twin Towers attacks

20 años no son suficientes para understand qué pasó aquel 11 de septiembre de 2001. Mucho menos para sacarse del alma el dolor por perder has a familiar en el atentado that marcó un antes y un después en la historia, pero sobre todo en la vida de thousands of people.

On that fateful New York morning, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives as a result of the impact of the two Boeing 767s and the subsequent collapse of the Twin Towers. Among the victims there were 5 Argentines who worked in buildings, one of them was Pedro Grehan.

Pedro Grehan He was 35, moved to the United States in 1998 to seek a better future, and worked at the Cantor Fitzgerald financial firm, which had its offices on the 105th floor of the North Tower, a few feet above where s ‘American Airlines Flight 11 was embedded at 8:46 a.m. local time at 686 kilometers per hour.

Fate wanted him to be there, because he had returned to work the day before the attack, on September 10, 2001. “In August, he went to Argentina for an operation on our father and on his return, he did everything for his whole family, ”he said in a dialogue with TN.com.ar John Grehan, one of Pedro’s 8 siblings.

John is one of the thousands who were not in New York but who the terrorist attack changed his life forever. Maybe that’s why the emotion and the thoughtful tone of each of his words. He is grateful that his brother was able to take a vacation with his family just before the precipitous end of his life.

Pedro’s wife wasn’t sure she would definitely move to the United States, adaptation in previous years had not been easy. But during this visit to Argentina in August 2001, Pedro managed to convince her and they left with their three children, who at that time they were 9, 7 and 5 years old. To celebrate the reunion, the four took a two-week vacation, which John and the whole family are grateful for.

No one imagined what would come after the break. “A little before 10 o’clock, a brother calls me and says: ‘Hey, a plane hit the tower‘. Immediately I turn on the TV and I see when the second plane crashes, “recalls John, his eyes lost in memory, then adds:” I was watching a movie in the United States where everything is fine, where everything was on fire. they could go down by the fire escape ”.

From there, everything turned into uncertainty. Like everyone else, the eyes of the Grehan family were exclusively on the heart of Manhattan. A few minutes later, the worst happened. At 9:59 am, the south tower fell, the last hit by the plane manipulated by terrorists. Although Pedro was in the North, John admits that by then they already thought “it would be difficult”.

The family’s desperation is now gone knowing if Pedro had gone to work. Logically, he did not answer his cell phone. Doubts were cleared up when a friend in New York confirmed he spoke with Pedro in the morning and was in the office. They knew it was in the north tower on the 105th floor. The plane was embedded between the 93 and the 99.

Finally, in what is perhaps one of the most shocking images in history, the north tower gave way to damage and heat and at 10:28 am local time it was left in rubble. “For me the image of him is there in the air when the towers crumble, that’s where I imagine him,” John is encouraged to recount with emotion on the surface.

Pedro’s body was never found. They brought the family a box with a small femur that they said was theirs. In any case, John Grehan says his family closed “the process with a photo from a magazine where the towers could be seen smoking and many people leaning out of the broken windows looking for air.” Among them, they say, is a person with the same position as Pedro. “We end up with the image that he found himself there, in this windowwhere he couldn’t breathe until he collapsed, ”says John.

This “process” mentioned by Pedro’s brother was not quickly ended. His brothers traveled to New York a few days later in hopes of finding him alive. They hoped he could have escaped and were confused somewhere in the Big Apple. It was difficult to bear the loss, but 10 days after the attack, John was able to understand that “Pedro was not alive, therefore he was dead”, phrasing.

From that moment his life changed. “Out of all the emptiness and pain, love appeared,” she said with joy. Friends near and far, acquaintances, all came together to push the Grehan family. It was, in short, “a tremendous human experience”. “The closest thing was feeling the pain of a mother, it was like she still had it inside and they were pulling it out. Pedro was 35, young to die,” John says. , eyes drenched in love and memory.

Twenty years after the most atrocious attack in American history, John does not forget a day of his beloved brother, with whom he exchanged emails on a daily basis. He does not hide his “desire to feel closer to him, which is present otherwise” either. But above all he admits: “I wish I could give him my hugs”.