Survivor Janice Brooks Haunted by Inability to Attend All Colleagues' Funerals

Janice Brooks, a British woman who survived 9/11, says she will never forgive herself for attending just 23 funerals among her 61 dead colleagues. Her heart remains broken twenty-five years later. She was ordered to climb back up the stairs of the World Trade Center before the second plane hit her office.

Janice arrived in New York City only nineteen days before the tragedy. She had transferred from London to work as an executive assistant for Euro Brokers. On September 11, 2001, she became one of thousands caught up in the deadliest act of terrorism in history. Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial US passenger planes. Two flew directly into the Twin Towers. The third crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington DC. A fourth was brought down by crew and passengers in rural Pennsylvania after overcoming the hijackers. Investigators believe the White House was the intended target for that last plane.

About 2,977 victims died on that day. Sixty-one of them were Janice's colleagues. She managed to escape from the 84th floor of the South Tower. That moment is etched in memory as United Airlines Flight 175 ploughed into the south tower. Janice was working on the upper floors when it happened.

Her survival seems all the more incredible given what she experienced right before the crash. She had been evacuating her building moments after American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. Officials told her to head back in because too many people were gathering on the plaza below. As she climbed back up the stairwell, United Airlines Flight 175 struck her building. The floors occupied by her firm were annihilated. She was just metres below where the 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. She endured a fearful descent down the tower as it burned. 'I can close my eyes and be back there in a second,' revealed Janice, now 66 years old. She has since returned to the UK.

Now retired, she serves as a guest speaker for a UK-based charity called Since 9/11. She goes into schools to share her experiences with young people. Her goal is to help educate them about extremism and tolerance. Janice hopes the next generation will never forget the events of September 11, 2001. She notes there are no schoolchildren today who were alive at the time of the attacks.

Casting her mind back, Janice said she arrived early into the Euro Brokers offices that morning. She noticed beautiful blue skies over Manhattan. The serenity was soon shattered. As she sat typing away on her computer, there was a deafening boom. She did not know a Boeing 767 jet had just struck the North Tower.

She told the Daily Mail: 'I looked up and there was paper and dust swirling out of the window.' New York then had lots of construction work going on, much like London at the time. In the nearly three weeks she'd been there, Janice had become used to bangs and crashes. No one ever took any notice initially, but this one was particularly loud. She went back to her desk and carried on with her work. She was totally unaware of what was happening until then we heard a man's voice shouting at the top of his lungs: 'Everybody out!

Everybody out!" The command rang through a building that felt like it was holding its breath. Janice heard the words but did not know why they were shouted until seconds later. She calmly picked up her bag and thought to call her boss, who had flown to London just the day before. He could not answer. Instead she spoke with Rob, her former UK manager.

"He screamed at me down the phone," Janice said years afterward. "F****** hell Janice, a plane's gone into the building, get the f*** out of there." His voice was full of shock and horror. It was that kind of scream from a guy 3,500 miles away while he and the whole London office watched it on the telly. She stood there not knowing what happened just 200 yards away.

Realising the urgency, Janice began running toward the exit. She met three colleagues named Dan, Dominic and Brian who tried to reassure her it would be safe to stay because only the building next door had been hit. But two fire marshals, Steve and Jose, actively herded her toward the stairs. My decision to stay or go was completely taken out of my hands, she said. Those few seconds determined whether she would live or die.

Walking down the stairwell, Janice recalled most people had no panic and no concern. But over at the North Tower, thousands of workers were frantically scrambling toward exits. So many people amassed on the plaza that officials forced workers in her tower not to evacuate. Instead they told them to 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 stood a short distance away and 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 she would never see 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 climbed slower than her colleagues and had reached the 76th floor 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. She could see dust and stuff coming down from the ceiling. In her mind she was there for at least two hours but in reality it was probably not even five minutes. The building stopped moving and the lights eventually came back on. The girls got up they dusted them down everyone was OK.

[Bob], a guy from Euro Brokers that I had 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. All I could see was darkness and flames because 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 with her arm neatly cut from her shoulder to her elbow and flesh flapping down. I could see the bone. As she moved blood was going everywhere. One of the guys had a gym bag.

Years later Janice revealed she will never forgive herself for only attending the funerals of 23 colleagues. Her heart remains broken even now, 25 years on. A dress shirt with silver cufflinks worn by her on September 11, 2001 is covered in dust dirt and the blood of others. That shirt has been donated to the 9/11 Museum in New York.

They fashioned a sling from a T-shirt for an injured woman. The next man through had massive shards of glass embedded in his chest that everyone pulled out. Another victim's entire back was soaked in blood and covered in broken glass. People streamed past with cuts across their faces, coated in dust. The last person to arrive was the screaming lady. Her screams had echoed for so long. "I can't see," she cried. She had a cut on her head bleeding down to her eyes. A kind guy carrying a gym bag found water and cleaned her up. She had long dark hair that tossed glass and dust everywhere as she shook her head.

The group described how a fireball blasted toward them in the stairwell while glass windows shattered into deadly shards around them. Janice feared one stairwell erupted into flames while the other blew apart. She began to panic about having no way out. Incredibly, they found a third door leading to a utility stairwell. Over agonizing minutes, Janice stepped slowly down alongside the walking wounded after removing her high heels. She noticed the woman with a slashed arm was also bleeding from her foot, with several toes severed. Janice recalled walking in her own bloody footprints as they descended.

While she remained physically unharmed, the scenes she witnessed took 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." She stood there pulling her shirt away and crying out that she had blood on it. Her colleague Bob came running up holding her by the shoulders tightly. He said, "It's not your blood. We have to keep moving. We have to get out of here."

Bob carried the woman with the wounded arm down the final ten floors when she could no longer continue. Several firefighters, police officers, and Port Authority workers scrambled 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 directed Janice toward the Brooklyn Bridge. "Don't look up, don't look back," they warned. But Janice wanted to head to her apartment just a ten-minute walk away from the Towers. As they walked around the corner, she looked up at the buildings for the first time. Where their floor should have been there was instead a huge gaping hole.

She described her horror realizing the thwacking noises were office workers throwing themselves to the ground in desperation. Janice believed the worst might be over as she returned to her apartment. Minutes later, she witnessed the South Tower falling before her very eyes. A dust plume surged over Lower Manhattan with debris even entering her building. "I don't think I understood what was happening," she said. "I was in a daze." She compared the sound to the gates of hell opening. There was a roaring sound that went on for ages followed by bangs and more bangs. She later learned those were floors hitting each other as they fell down. The building she was in started moving. Windows hummed while crockery in the dishwasher rattled violently.

A massive cloud of black smoke began swirling around the windows before Janice could look away. In seconds, her apartment plunged into total darkness. She could not see her own hand held up in front of her face. Sitting on the sofa with her knees pulled tight to her chest, she rocked back and forth until certainty took hold. This is it, she thought. I am going to die. That was what happened in that moment.

Hours later, she found herself wading through knee-deep debris inside her building while walking along streets coated in dust. Her only goal was to reach Queens to stay with a colleague. Several strangers came forward to help her board the subway and guide her safely to her destination. With tears streaming down her face, Janice spoke about how their faces blur together over time. Without every single one of them, she would never have reached that safe place. She remains deeply thankful for each person who stepped up.

On September 11th, the day she witnessed humanity at its worst also showed it at its best. She saw the finest version of New York and its people. They will not know this now, but she still prays for them every night. Euro Brokers moved to a temporary office in Midtown within days. Janice was assigned to man a helpline for relatives searching for missing employees. The list started with 80 names before it was revised down to 60.

The phones did not stop ringing. There were countless calls and so many desperate voices. In most cases, there was nothing she could tell them. A colleague named John had severe burns when he was found. He died shortly after his rescue, bringing the total death toll among colleagues to 61. Her directors urged her to attend as many funerals as possible. She struggled with trauma and the sheer scale of the tragedy while also managing logistics. On some days, three or four funerals needed attending.

To this day, Janice says she cannot forgive herself for missing several services. To her complete and utter shame, out of 61 funerals, she only attended 23. She should have tried harder. She let the families down. She let herself down. This burden will stay with her until death. It is something she will never forgive herself for.

Twenty-five years have done little to dull the memories or the pain. Yet she acknowledges how lucky she is to be alive. Janice plans to visit the 911 Memorial this Friday. Inside her bedroom drawers, she keeps a small vial of dust collected from her apartment on September 11, 2001. Whenever she feels down or enters one of those moods, she takes out this little thing. It brings her back to Earth immediately. She thinks to herself that God must be looking after her because so many amazing people helped her that day.

She does not know how others feel about Him up top, but someone was definitely watching over her. She has nothing to complain about. She knows 61 people who would swap places with whatever hard day she is having in a heartbeat. Janice feels grateful and humble to be alive. September 11 wasn't her day. Her day will come eventually, as will all of ours, but that specific tragedy was not meant for her. To learn more about the Since 911 charity visit, go to www.since911.com