“Vamsi” Vamsikrishna called home and left a message saying he’d be there for lunch.
As boarding continued, thirty-year-old Tara Creamer walked down the aisle and slid into window seat 33J. Tara was a woman who didn’t rattle easily. Years earlier, on a first date, on Valentine’s Day no less, a fellow college student took her to dinner at a red sauce Italian dive called Spaghetti Freddy’s, then to the cannibal-versus-serial-killer movie The Silence of the Lambs. She married him.
Tara had met John Creamer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when she was a vivacious, curly-haired brunette sophomore. John was a shy, blue-eyed football lineman for the UMass Minutemen, named for the Revolutionary War patriots. Tara lived on a dorm floor near some of John’s friends, so he hung around her hallway long enough for her to notice him. After that first date of pasta and fava beans, they were a couple.
Both twenty-three when they wed, Tara and John had scraped together a down payment for a sweet yellow Cape Cod–style house with a screened porch in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where John’s parents lived. They renovated it themselves after long days of work. After one seemingly endless paint-and-wallpaper binge, John lost patience. While he stewed, Tara, several months pregnant, calmly went to their unfinished basement, carrying a wide brush dripping white paint. On a rough gray wall, she painted “Tara
Their son, Colin, arrived in 1997, followed three years later by a daughter, Nora. A fashion merchandising major in college, Tara became a planning manager at TJX Companies in Framingham, Massachusetts, parent firm of the big-box retailer T.J.Maxx. She sang to Colin and Nora on the way to work and spent lunch hours with them in an onsite company daycare center. Tara meticulously updated their milestone books, recording first crawls and first steps, first teeth and first words. When a company supervisor urged Tara to get into the habit of working late, Tara declined. Time with her children came first.
Tara and John never traveled together by air in the years after Colin’s birth. She worried about leaving him, and then both Colin and Nora, in the event of a crash. Tara’s mother died of cancer in 1995, and the loss still ached. But in May 2001, one of John’s closest friends invited them to his wedding in Florida. Before the trip, Tara went on a planning spree, arranging insurance, guardians, and family finances, just in case. She also took the opportunity to explain the concept of death to Colin. He had only one grandmother, Tara told him, because the other one, her mother, was an angel in heaven, looking after him. Colin seemed to understand, but Tara couldn’t be sure.
By late summer 2001, Nora had celebrated her first birthday, and Tara was ready to resume traveling for work. On this trip, Tara had the option of staying in California through the weekend to see a close friend, but she scheduled a red-eye return so she’d be home Friday morning. Packed and ready the night before Flight 11, Tara completed one last task before bed. Fulfilling her self-appointed role as family planning manager, she typed a detailed memo for John. Titled “Normal Daily Schedule,” it was a mother’s guide to caring for their children. It began: “Wake Colin up around 7–7:15. Let him watch a little cartoons (Channel 52). Nora—if she is not up by 7:30—wake her up. Just change her and give her milk in a sippy cup!”
In the seat next to Tara was auburn-haired Neilie Anne Heffernan Casey of Wellesley, Massachusetts, also a TJX Companies planning manager. Two days earlier, Neilie and her husband, Mike, had run a 5K race to raise money for breast cancer research. They ran pushing a stroller with their six-month-old daughter, Riley. In nearby rows were five of their TJX colleagues, also headed to California on business: Christine Barbuto, Linda George, Lisa Fenn Gordenstein, Robin Kaplan, and Susan MacKay.
Susan’s husband, Doug, was an FAA air traffic controller. He’d switched his schedule to an early shift that day so he could attend a nighttime school event for their eight-year-old daughter and make dinner for their thirteen-year-old son. When he got to work, Doug planned to radio American Flight 11’s cockpit to ask Captain John Ogonowski to surprise Susan by saying hi for him.
IN A WIDE leather seat in the first row of first class sat financier David Retik of Needham, Massachusetts, a practical-joking, fly-fishing family man whose wife, Susan, was seven months pregnant with their third child. His colleagues considered David a rare bird: a venture capitalist whom everyone liked. On his drive to the airport, David had spotted a familiar car on the Massachusetts Turnpike. He sped up, pulled alongside, and waved to his surprised father, a doctor on his way to work.
Next to David sat travel industry consultant Richard Ross, whose family in Newton, Massachusetts, counted on him to spontaneously break into Sinatra songs; to raise money for brain cancer research; and to be chronically late. He held true to form this morning, as the last passenger to arrive for Flight 11. A flustered Richard told a gate agent that terrible traffic had made this the worst day of his life. Another agent took pity and upgraded him from business to first class.
One row behind David and Richard sat retired ballet dancer and philanthropist Sonia Puopolo of Dover, Massachusetts, looking elegant with a camel-colored pashmina scarf draped over her blazer. Her luggage bulged with baby pictures and childhood mementos for a visit to her Los Angeles-based son Mark Anthony, whom she called Mookie. A wealthy patron of the arts and Democratic Party politicians, Sonia wore a distinctive wedding band with diamonds embedded in golden columns. The bejeweled shafts looked like the support pillars of a landmark building in miniature.
Nineteen passengers settled into business class, including Paige Farley-Hackel, of Newton, Massachusetts, in window seat 7A. A glamorous spiritual adviser and budding radio host, every night Paige left a five-item “gratitude list” for her husband, Allan, with items that ranged from “justice” to “skinny dipping” to “our happy marriage” to “airplanes.” Paige’s appreciation lists also included the names Ruth and Juliana: her closest friend, Ruth Clifford McCourt, and Ruth’s four-year-old daughter, Juliana, who was Paige’s goddaughter. Paige and Ruth had met years earlier, at a day spa Ruth owned before her marriage, and they considered each other kindred spirits. That morning, a driver delivered all three to Logan Airport after a night in Paige and Allan’s home. Paige, Ruth, and Juliana had planned the trip to California together, but Ruth had mileage points for free tickets on United Airlines. She and Juliana booked a separate flight on United that left Boston at nearly the same time as American Flight 11. When both planes landed in Los Angeles, they planned to drive together to La Jolla for several days at the Center for Well Being, run by Deepak Chopra. Then they intended to reward Juliana with a trip to Disneyland before flying back to Boston.
Behind Paige, bound for home in Pasadena, California, sat humanitarian Lynn Angell and her husband of thirty years, David Angell. David was an award-winning television creator and executive producer of the sitcom Frasier who’d won two Emmys as a writer for Cheers. (By coincidence, in an episode David cowrote for Frasier, a stranger left a telephone message for the title character saying that she’d soon arrive on “American Flight 11.”)
Behind the Angells, in seat 9B, sat a young man with thinning hair in Nike sneakers, jeans, and a green T-shirt who was a star of the new computer age. Daniel Lewin of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had built a business and a fortune before his thirtieth birthday by coinventing a way for the Internet to handle enormous spikes in traffic. But at the moment, Daniel was mired in a rough patch. He was flying west to a computer conference and to sign a $400 million deal he hoped would save his company, Akamai Technologies. Daniel had already seen his formerly billion-dollar fortune plummet as Akamai’s stock fell to about three dollars a share, down from a hundred times that price two years earlier. His brilliant math mind notwithstanding, Daniel defied computer
