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| Jeramy recreates his reaction from 11 years ago with original newspaper and coffee cup. |
When I woke up on September 11, 2012, I checked my facebook news feed over coffee as I always do. After seeing multiple posts regarding the eleventh anniversary of the most horrific terrorist attack ever perpetrated on American soil, I thought to myself, “Ha. Looks like I forgot.” But I didn't. By sheer coincidence, I had watched not one, but two documentaries on the subject the night before. Coincidence may not be the right word, though. I've been at least mildly obsessed with 9/11 since it happened.
That morning, my roommate woke me up screaming. Screaming and coughing. While watching the tragedy unfold live on TV, he was also coughing his lungs up in between giant bong hits. Again, coincidence might not be the right word.
We watched, in what I'm tempted to call shock and awe, for hours. I called my office to find out if there was any point in coming to work, which there wasn't, as most of my job entailed being at the Wake County Courthouse, which was in a state of limbo at the time. Around that time, my girlfriend called me in tears, convinced that Crabtree Valley Mall would be the next logical target. She was outraged that the owners of the art gallery where she worked hadn't sent her home to safety yet.
Somewhere in the course of that historical Tuesday evening, I thought to myself, “Holy Shit! I need to get a paper tomorrow!” This is the ONLY time I've ever thought that to myself. Now, I have no real understanding of what was the impetus behind this thought. The only thing I could come up with was that I vaguely remember my parents showing me the paper that they had saved from the day after the moon landing. I don't remember being especially moved by it, but it must have registered on some level since I've saved that paper to this day.
This was also the tangible genesis of my fascination with 9/11. I've saved magazines, read related books, watched countless documentaries, and even re-watched the live news feeds of that day from any networks that have made them available. This, coupled with the semi-intuitive nature of YouTube and Netflix, is why I'm surprised I haven't been flagged by one government agency or another as a conspirator of some kind. And this year, the day before the anniversary, I watched two particularly compelling docs on the subject.
The first one showed up as a recommendation from one of the sites where I steal my stories, or what the kids call “television programs”, from. It was a British documentary called Escape From the Impact Zone. This piqued my interest both because of it's suggested subject matter and the fantasy that I entertained briefly of a Snake Plitzken cameo.
While, at no point, was Kurt Russell involved, someone who's story is infinitely more fascinating was introduced to me. After all those hours logged watching and reading about the attacks, I had never heard the story of Stanley Praimnath.
As an executive for Fuji Bank, Stanley worked on the 81st floor of the South Tower and was one of only four survivors from above the impact point of the plane crash. All four stories are ultimately incredible and harrowing in nature, but Praimnath has the distinction of being the only person in human history to have witnessed a plane crash into a building he was occupying and living to tell the story.
The film explains that:
“When the North Tower was struck by Flight 11, Praimnath started to evacuate from his 81st floor office in the South Tower, but returned when the building's security guards told everyone that it was not safe to do so. He did not realize, at that point, that a plane had struck the North Tower. Soon after reentering his office, he saw a United Airlines jet heading directly towards him. Right before impact, he dove under his desk and exclaimed "Lord, I can't do this! You take over!" The left wing sliced through his office and became lodged in a door twenty feet from him."
Just rereading that excerpt gives me chills. The very idea of being 81 stories in the air gives me panic. Even while in a solid structure. But, prior to that day, I could have convinced myself that if I had been able to imagine such a scenario, I could have also convinced myself that it was both absurd and impossible. But it wasn't. And it isn't. And Praimnath knows this better than anyone. Ever.
Stanley Praimnath's story is one of the four told in Escape From the Impact Zone, but his was the most fascinating to me, and what's more, so uniquely his own, that I felt compelled to look further into his story. However, while doing so, I found that he had shared his story with just a small handful of documentaries, but in true, attention deficit fashion, I was distracted by another story. This one, is almost as unique, and almost as disturbing, but in an entirely different way.
In the interest of not spoiling the ending too soon, here is a synopsis of the other documentary that I watched about a woman named “Tania Head”:
"It was a tale of loss and recovery, of courage and sorrow, of horror and inspiration. Tania Head’s astonishing account of her experience on September 11, 2001—from crawling through the carnage and chaos to escaping the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby of the burning south tower to losing her fiancé in the collapsed north tower—transformed her into one of the great victims and heroes of that tragic day."
"Tania selflessly took on the responsibility of giving a voice and a direction to the burgeoning World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, helping save the 'Survivor Stairway' and leading tours at Ground Zero, including taking then-governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, and former mayor Giuliani on the inaugural tour of the WTC site. She even used her own assets to fund charitable events to help survivors heal. But there was something very wrong with Tania’s story—a terrible secret that would break the hearts and challenge the faith of all those she claimed to champion."
As the title of the film, The Woman Who Wasn't There, suggests, not only was she in her native Barcelona that tragic day, but her real name was not “Tania Head”, it was Alicia Esteve Head. She never had a fiance at all, and even more bizarre, she wouldn't even visit New York for the first time until 2003.
Watching the footage of“Tania Head” share her completely false account of her experience on 9/11, which, naturally, develops into false accounts of her life and back-story, is as mesmerizing as it is appalling. Her sociopathic desire to share a connection to such a tragedy is mind mindbogglingly pathetic. It becomes easy to hate her. But, for the most part, she didn't profit from her story. If not for money, would extreme narcissism be what made this woman unable to resist the temptation to make a national tragedy about herself in some way?
No matter the explanation, the lady is batshit bananas crazy, and you can't explain that away. But, after watching her story just a few hours after learning of Stanley Praimnath's story, it made me wonder: Do other survivors' know the story of Tania Head? What is their reaction? Are they thankful for the work that she did in raising awareness for various causes and charities, or is a lie just a lie? Even if it helps to do some good?
Since “Head” has been understandably avoiding the press since The Times broke the story of her elaborate ruse in 2007, she hasn't been heard from. However, I'd like to think she's the type of person that would look herself up, ideally seeing some of the comments that “actual” victims have made. As one survivor, Cynthia Shepherd, put it, "I think if Tania had asked me to trade, I would have traded with her. I would have loved her to have my suffering and my pain and I can have her life."
You, personally, can watch these stories at:
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