This Friday marks 25 years since the September 11 attacks. For those who watched the terror unfold, the day still feels close, a reminder of all that was lost that day.
For Norma-Jean Adams, it feels like only yesterday when she walked into her eighth-grade homeroom in Staten Island and saw her teacher watching the news.
“We have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center,” CNN news anchor Carol Lin said on live television.
Adams’ initial thought was, “Oh, I wonder if my dad is down there. I hope he’s okay.”
Her father, Lieutenant Charles Joseph Margiotta, was a New York City firefighter. That morning, he was driving home across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge from a 24-hour shift in Brooklyn when he saw the first plane hit the tower.
He got off the expressway and drove straight to the nearest firehouse, FDNY Rescue 5, put on his gear and climbed into the truck.
On the way, he called his mother and said, “I’m going down to the Trade Center.”
Rescue 5 traveled through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and arrived at the World Trade Center.
The second tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m.
Back at school, Adams’ classmates were called down to the main office one by one to be picked up, until she and her younger brother were among the last children left in the building.
A few hours later, her father was declared a missing person.
“Those first few weeks were just completely unknown,” Adams said. “As a young kid, you’re just hoping. And back then, there was no service either. So my family was just thinking, he’s not able to contact us. As soon as he’s gonna be able to, he will be able to.”
After several weeks, Margiotta was declared dead. His body was never recovered.
Twenty-five years later, as the country pauses again to count the names on two reflecting pools in Lower Manhattan, Adams is trying to make sure her father is remembered as something more specific and more whole.
Firefighting was never the whole story. Margiotta was, in his daughter’s words, a “renaissance man,” achieving so much in his life that he was set to retire from the FDNY in April of 2002 at the age of 44.
For years, Margiotta also worked as a stuntman, appearing in a handful of films and several episodes of “Law & Order.”
His cousin worked as a stunt coordinator in Hollywood, and Margiotta had planned to take on more film work once he retired from the fire department.
To his two kids, he was a superhero. He coached nearly every sport at their school. He took them both hunting, fishing, and camping upstate instead of to Disney World.
“We loved to go into the wilderness with my dad,” Adams said. “That’s what we did.”
And when it came down to it, Margiotta always rose to the occasion.
“Technically my dad wasn’t on duty. He shouldn’t have even been there,” Adams said. “But he never wanted it to be someone else’s problem. He wanted to be the one to be the hero. He just wanted to help and be there for everybody.”
Each September, Adams attends a ceremony at the Staten Island Ferry terminal, beneath a memorial shaped like angel wings, where the names of Staten Islanders lost that day are read aloud.
In recent years, her own daughter, now eight-years-old, has joined her and reads her grandfather’s name into the microphone herself.
Margiotta never met either of his grandchildren, but when Adams’ daughter was two-years-old, she looked at an old photograph of him and pointed. “Pop Pop,” she said, a name no one in the family had ever used for him.
“She knew that he would have wanted a name of endearment that’s not Grandpa,” Adams said. “She knew just by looking at him that that would have been something he would have loved.”
Margiotta is survived by his family and the stories they share about him, much like many of those who were lost.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks killed 2,977 people and injured thousands at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
More people, Adams noted, have now died from illnesses connected to the recovery effort.
“So many people lost their lives, and all of those people were more than just a person who died on 9/11 — they were somebody’s child, somebody’s parent, a brother, a sister, a cousin. They were loved by somebody,” said Adams.
Adams still returns every September, even if it’s harder to find the sense of unity the rest of the year.
“No matter who you are, what walk of life, what political affiliation you’re with, we still all come together,” she said. “It’s still a very solemn piece in our history. We don’t want to forget.”
Adams is a teacher now, on Staten Island, not far from where she grew up. Every year, she takes her fifth-grade class down to One World Trade Center, to the observation deck, and then to the reflecting pools, where she shows them her father’s name carved into the bronze.