9/11 Survivor Still Haunted by Guilt Over Attending Only 23 Funerals

A British survivor of the September 11 attacks has said she still cannot forgive herself for attending the funerals of “only” 23 colleagues, revealing that her “heart remains broken” 25 years later.

Janice Brooks had moved to New York City just 19 days before the atrocity, transferring from London to take up a role as an executive assistant with Euro Brokers.

On September 11, 2001, she was among the thousands suddenly engulfed by the deadliest terrorist attack in history, after Al Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial passenger planes in the United States.

Two of the aircraft were deliberately flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, destroying the offices where the east Londoner had been working.

A third plane struck the Pentagon, outside Washington DC, while a fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The final aircraft is widely believed to have been headed for the White House.

In total, 2,977 people were killed that day, among them 61 of Janice’s colleagues.

Janice survived by making a remarkable escape from the 84th floor of the South Tower.

Her survival is all the more incredible given she had been evacuating her building moments after American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower – only for officials to tell her to head back in because there were too many people gathering on the plaza below.

As she climbed back up the stairwell, the second plane – United Airlines Flight 175 – struck her building, annihilating the floors occupied by her firm.

She was just metres below where the tragic plane burst through the structure and erupted into a fireball.

Scenes of horror engulfed her as she saw scores of men and women wounded by the blast, before enduring a fearful descent down the tower as it burned.

‘I can close my eyes and be back there in a second,’ revealed Janice, 66, who has since returned to the UK.

Now retired, she serves as a guest speaker for UK-based charity Since 9/11, going into schools to share her experiences with young people and help educate them about extremism and tolerance.

Janice – who is returning to New York on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary – hopes the next generation will ‘never forget’ the events of September 11, 2001, noting there are no schoolchildren today who were alive at the time of the attacks.

Casting her mind back, Janice said she had arrived early into the Euro Broker offices and noticed the ‘beautiful blue skies’ over Manhattan that morning.

But the serenity was soon shattered. As she sat typing away on her computer, there was a deafening boom.

Janice did not know a Boeing 767 jet had just struck the North Tower. 

She told Our News Outlet: ‘I looked up and there was paper and dust swirling out of the window. 

‘New York, much like London at the time, had lots of construction work going on, and in the nearly three weeks I’d been there I’d become used to bangs and crashes. 

‘No one ever took any notice, but this one was particularly loud.

‘I went back to my desk, carried on with my work, totally unaware of what was happening.

‘But then we heard a man’s voice, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Everybody out! Everybody out!”‘

She did not know the reason why, but calmly picked up her bag and thought to call her boss, who had flown to London the day before. 

He was not available, but instead spoke to Rob, her former UK manager.

Janice said: ‘He screamed at me down the phone, “f****** hell Janice, a plane’s gone into the building, get the f*** out of there”.

‘As I’m standing there listening to him, his voice was full of shock, horror, it was that kind of a scream. 

‘Here’s a guy 3,500 miles away from me – and he and the whole London office are watching it on the telly – and I don’t know what’s happening 200 yards away from where I’m standing.’

Realising the urgency of the situation, Janice began running towards the exit. 

She met three colleagues, Dan, Dominic and Brian, who tried to reassure her it would be safe to stay as only the building next to them had been hit. 

But two fire marshals, Steve and Jose, actively ‘herded’ her towards the stairs. 

‘My decision to stay or go was completely taken out of my hands,’ said Janice, who acknowledges those few seconds determined whether she would live or die.

Walking down the stairwell, Janice recalled most people had ‘no panic, no concern’. 

But over at the North Tower, thousands of workers were frantically scrambling towards the exits.

There were so many people amassing on the plaza, that officials were forced to tell workers in Janice’s tower not to evacuate – and instead return to their desks because the building was ‘stable’. 

By this point, Janice had walked from the 84th floor down to the 70th. 

Her colleagues Paul and Bobby, standing a short distance away from her, decided they would go back up the stairs. 

‘Paul and Bobby took off almost running,’ she recalled. ‘I shouted out to Paul, “Hey, wait for me.” 

‘Smiling, he waved and said: “Come on old woman!” Then they turned into the staircase – and I would never seen them again.’

At 9.03am, just 17 minutes after the North Tower was struck, Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower, hitting floors 77 through to 85.

Janice, climbing slower than her colleagues, had reached the 76th, very narrowly missing the carnage unfurling on the floors above her. 

Now in a group of around ten people, she recalled hearing a huge explosion. 

‘The lights flickered on and off. A couple of the girls in front fell to the floor and were screaming. I was jostled back against the wall.

‘I could see like the dust and the stuff coming down from the ceiling. In my mind, I was there for at least two hours, but in fact, in reality, it was probably not even five minutes.

‘The building stopped moving and the lights eventually came back on. The girls got up, we dusted them down, everyone was OK.

‘[Bob], a guy from Euro Brokers that I’d been with, and a man with a white shirt came running past me, and started pulling away all the debris from the door we had just walked through.

‘I was about three steps into that corridor. When they opened the door, I peered over their shoulders. And all I could see was darkness and flames – the stairs had gone.

‘Suddenly, I heard this woman screaming. It was one of those horror film screams that will live in my head forever. “Somebody help,” she screamed over and over. There was banging and the door was shaking.”

‘The two men who had cleared the debris previously made their way to the door at the opposite end of the corridor. 

‘As it opened, the first person through was a lady – she had her arm neatly cut from her shoulder to her elbow and [her flesh] was flapping down. I could see the bone. 

‘As she moved, blood was going everywhere. One of the guys had a gym bag. They got a T-shirt out and made a sling for her. 

‘The next guy that came through had big pieces of glass in his chest that everyone was pulling out. Another guy, his whole back was covered with blood and glass.

‘People were coming through with cuts all over their face and were dusty.  

‘The last person to come through was the screaming lady. Her screams had gone on all that time. “I can’t see, I can’t see,” she was saying.  She had a cut on her head that was bleeding down to her eyes. 

‘The same lovely guy with the gym bag found a bottle of water and we cleared her up. She had long, dark hair and as she shook her head, glass and dust went everywhere.’

The group described how ‘a fireball’ had blasted towards them on the stairwell as the glass windows shattered around them into deadly shards.

Janice was struck by the horrifying thought that one stairwell had erupted into flames – while the other had been blasted away. 

She began to fear there would be no way out.

Incredibly the group discovered a third door that opened into a utility stairwell. 

Over the next agonizing minutes, Janice – who had by now removed her high heels – stepped slowly downwards alongside the walking wounded.

She began to notice the woman whose arm had been slashed was also bleeding from her foot, with several of her toes severed. 

Janice recalled ‘walking in her bloody footprints’ as they descended the stairs. 

While she remained physically unharmed, the scenes she had witnessed were beginning to take an emotional toll. 

‘I happened to glance down at my shirt and it was covered with blood,’ recalled Janice. ‘Lots of blood, all zigzagging, all over. I just stood there and I remember pulling my shirt away from me and crying, “I’ve got blood on my shirt. I’ve got blood on my shirt.”

‘My Euro Brokers colleague, Bob, came running up. He held me by the shoulders really tightly and said, “It’s not your blood. We have to keep moving. We have to get out of here.”‘

Emboldened by his words, Janice and the rest of the group finally managed to make their way to the ground level. Bob even carried the woman with the wounded arm down the final ten floors when she could no longer continue. 

She noted that several firefighters, police officers and Port Authority workers were scrambling back into the building as they exited. 

‘The building we had tried so hard to get out of,’ she reflected. ‘They were absolute heroes, these guys.’ 

Once outside, police officers directed Janice towards Brooklyn Bridge. 

‘Don’t look up, don’t look back,’ they warned.

But Janice wanted to head towards her apartment, which was located a ten-minute walk away from the Towers. 

‘As we walked around the corner, I looked up at the buildings for the first time – and where our floor should have been there was instead a huge gaping hole.’

She described her horror at realising the ‘thwacking’ noises she could hear were the sounds of desperate office workers throwing themselves to the ground. 

Janice believed the worst might be over as she returned to her apartment. But only minutes later she witnessed the South Tower – ‘my tower’ as she affectionately called it – falling before her very eyes. A dust plume surged over Lower Manhattan, with the debris even coming into her building. 

She recalled: ‘I don’t think I understood what was happening, I was in a daze. 

‘I don’t know what the gates of hell sound like when they open, but I’m pretty sure  this was it.

‘There was a roaring sound that went on for ages and then bang, bang, bang. I understood later that it was all the floors hitting each other as they fell down.

‘I became aware the building I was in was starting to move. The windows were humming, the crockery in the dishwasher was rattling. I looked up and this huge cloud of black smoke had begun swirling around the windows.

‘Before I knew, it was completely black in my apartment – I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. 

‘And I remember sitting on the sofa, pulling my knees up towards me and just rocking backwards and forwards. This is it. I’m gonna die. I just believed that was what was going to happen.’

In the hours that followed, Janice found herself wading knee-deep through debris that had come into her apartment block, walking along the dust-ridden streets and gradually making her way towards Queens to stay with a colleague. 

She remains thankful to several strangers who helped her onto the subway and ensured she reached her destination safely.

With tears in her eyes, Janice said: ‘Over the years, their faces are kind of blurring in my memory. But without all of them, without every single one of them, I don’t know how I would have got to [my colleague]. I’m so thankful for them. 

‘I always say about September 11th that on the day when I saw the worst of humanity, I saw the best of humanity. I saw the best of New York and I saw the best of New Yorkers. 

‘They won’t know it, but I still say a prayer for them every night.’

Over the next few days, Euro Brokers relocated to a temporary office in Midtown and Janice was tasked with manning a helpline for relatives of missing employees. 

At first there were 80 names on the list, revised down to 60. 

She said gravely: ‘The phones did not stop ringing. There were so many calls, so many desperate voices. And in most cases, there was nothing that we could tell them.’

A colleague, John, who had been found with severe burns, died shortly after bringing the total number of colleagues who died to 61. 

Her directors urged Janice to attend as many of the funerals as she could – but she was still grappling with her own trauma and the sheer scale of the tragedy, as well as the logistics. On some days, there were three or four funerals to attend.

To this day, Janice said she could not ‘forgive’ herself for not going to them all.  

Through tears, she said: ‘To my complete and utter shame, of the 61 funerals I only went to 23. I should have tried harder. I let the families down. I let myself down.

‘I will take this to the grave. It’s something I will never forgive myself for.’

Twenty-five years have done little to dull the memories or the pain – but she acknowledges also how lucky she is to be alive.

Janice, who is set to visit the 911 Memorial this Friday, revealed that inside her bedroom drawers she keeps a small vial of the dust collected from her apartment on September 11, 2001. 

‘Whenever I feel down or get into one of those moods, I get this little thing out and that brings me down to Earth. I think to myself, God how lucky are you to have found the most amazing people to help you that day? 

‘I don’t know how you feel about Him up top, but someone was definitely looking after me that day. 

‘I have nothing to complain about. I know 61 people that would swap in a heartbeat with whatever hard day I’m having.’

She added: ‘I feel grateful and humble to be alive. September 11 wasn’t my day. 

‘My day will come, all of our days will come – but that wasn’t mine.’

To find out more about the Since 911 charity visit www.since911.com