Lives Intersected, Lives Lost: Flight 11
Daniel Lee (with hs wife Kellie), Madeline "Amy" Sweeney, Betty Ong
Dan Lee boarded a plane early on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, so he could be at his wife's side in California as she gave birth to their second child.
The 34-year-old Van Nuys man was on American Airlines Flight 11. His wife, Kellie, spent the day praying he had missed his plane. But the set carpenter for the Backstreet Boys tour had not.
The couple had been together 10 years and married for six years, his wife said. He still opened car doors for her and kissed her over the table at restaurants. Although he traveled the world as a roadie for acts including Yanni, 'N Sync and Barbra Streisand, Lee called his wife three to four times a day to tell her he loved her.
Betty Ong, a flight attendant from Andover onboard Flight 11, punched the number 8 on a seatback GTE Airfone and got through to an American reservations agent. The agent called the system operations control center in Fort Worth at 8:27.
"She said two flight attendants had been stabbed, one was on oxygen," said Craig Marquis, the manager on duty. "A passenger had his throat slashed and looked dead and they had gotten into the cockpit."
The flight attendant also said the hijackers had hit passengers with some sort of spray that made her eyes burn. She said she was having trouble breathing.
"Is the plane descending?" Marquis asked.
"We're starting to descend. We're starting to descend," she said.
One of the clearest ideas about what happened aboard the plane came from a call that flight attendant Madeline "Amy" Sweeney, a 35-year-old mother of two from Acton, made to a ground worker in Boston.
Sweeney called American Airlines ground manager Michael Woodward at Logan and spoke calmly to him for 25 minutes until the plane crashed. Her first comment was "Listen, and listen to me very carefully. I'm on Flight 11. The airplane has been hijacked."
Sweeney said she saw only four of the five hijackers believed to be aboard. She described them as Middle Eastern and said they had stabbed two flight attendants.
"A hijacker cut the throat of a business-class passenger, and he appears to be dead," she added. The hijackers stormed the front of the plane and "had just gained access to the cockpit."
The plane is nearing New York City, but the coach section passengers are still quiet, apparently unaware a hijacking is in progress. Woodward asks Sweeney to look out of the window and see if she can tell where they are. She replies, “I see the water. I see the building. I see buildings.” She tells him the plane is flying very low. Then she takes a slow, deep breath and slowly, calmly says, “Oh my God!” Woodward hears a loud click, and then silence.
Betty Ong, on another phone, apparently does not realize what is about to happen. She is repeatedly saying, “Pray for us. Pray for us,” before her phone call comes to a halt.
At 8:46 AM on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the World Trade Center's North Tower. It was a Boeing 767-223ER on a scheduled flight from Boston to Los Angeles, with 81 passengers, nine flight attendants, and two pilots.
Michael Woodward, hearing nothing but static, was still holding the telephone, hoping Sweeney would come through, when his operational manager came into the room and said that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center.
He didn't make the connection immediately. "I almost at that point said, 'Not now, we have a serious situation here,'" he said. But moments later, he realized that Sweeney's flight was the one that hit the World Trade Center.
On Thursday, Danny Lee's wife Kellie gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She gave her the first name the couple had picked out together -- Allison. But Kellie gave her a different middle name, Danielle, to honor her late husband.
Relatives and friends said Kellie had been in shock over her husband's death. Gathered around her in the hospital room were her parents, Tom and Sandy Whitford, and her older daughter, Amanda, 2, who has her father's wavy hair and does not understand that he is gone.
"I told her, 'Daddy isn't coming home,' " Kellie said. "She said, 'Yes he is. In five minutes, he'll be back.'"
Sources:
Newsday.com
ABC News
Boston.com
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