Community Corner

9/11: Ten Years Later

A local mother recalls her experience as a young woman living in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.

Maggie Brooks held her baby close, shaking and staring at the television screen.

“It’s one of the most horrible but vivid memories I have in my head,” Brooks said. “I turned on New York One and saw the first plane hit.”

It was not a movie as she had first hoped. had been hit by two planes just 40 blocks away from her Manhattan apartment in 2001.

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“I just kept thinking it was a movie,” she said. “Then, the announcement came across and I just got physically sick and held onto my daughter. I thought, ‘This can’t happen.’”

She couldn’t bring herself to go outside to see the tops of the towers burn, as she could gaze at them before each day.

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“I was paralyzed,” she said. “All I kept thinking was, ‘I need to call my mom.’”

At 20 years old, Brooks’ daughter was just three days away from turning six months old.

It’s now 10 years later and Brooks, 30, who grew up in the Edgewood area and now lives in Stanton Heights with her partner, , still can’t shake the horrible memories of that day.

Later that afternoon, she left the house for the first time on 9/11 to pick up her ex-boyfriend’s brother, who was 13 at the time, around 4 p.m.

“It was disgusting and sad,” she said. “It smelled like gasoline and burnt flesh. You walked out and it was like a ghost town.”

Brooks moved to New York City in October 1999 and stayed until 2003. She said after 9/11, everything changed, and everyone became a New Yorker.

“You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing people in full military garb,” she said. “It was military, police officers everywhere.”

But while Americans came together more than ever after 9/11 to support each other, Brooks also experienced the racial profiling that came after the attacks while flying home to Pittsburgh for Christmas that December.

“I was flying home with my daughter and she was strip-searched at nine months old,” Brooks said. “We were in the airport coming back and they pulled myself and two other people off to the side. They took her down to nothing and took her diaper off.”

She also said while living in Spanish Harlem, a family of Arabic descent owned a small store across the street from her apartment. Brooks said it remained closed for about seven months after 9/11.

“They wouldn’t come out of their apartment because they were afraid,” she said. “It was sad to see. You can’t hold an entire group of people accountable for a handful of craziness.”

The biggest change she has experienced personally is a new appreciation for her family.

“I have my kids and I am trying to teach them and make sure that they learn and know these prominent things about history,” Brooks said. “In the same sense, my daughter will say, ‘I was there when that happened,’ and I tell her, ‘Yes, you were—and I am so glad that you do not remember it.’”


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