Tania Head's Heroic Story Before World Trade Center Collapse

On September 11, 2001, Tania Head emerged from the burning south tower of the World Trade Center just moments before it fell. She was covered in burns and stumbling through the smoke. Her story became legend almost instantly. The world saw a brave survivor who had led a meeting on the 96th floor when the first plane hit. Lights flickered, walls shook like an earthquake, and screaming filled the corridor. Through reinforced glass windows, she watched black smoke pour from the north tower. A fireball climbed its side. People ran for the exits or called loved ones to tell them what was happening. Then Tania saw something drop from a window above. At first it looked like furniture. Then an arm waved in the air. It was a human being falling to death. She told this tale over and over again.

Media outlets replayed her interviews. Visitors at Ground Zero listened as she guided tours. She even served as president of the WTC Survivors' Network. Her narrative painted a picture of pure heroism that made every other account seem small by comparison. That image lasted until it did not. The truth came out and changed everything. Head was unmasked as a liar who had been nearly four thousand miles away when the Twin Towers went down.

She claimed to work for Merrill Lynch on the 96th floor of the south tower. She said she felt sickened seeing people throw themselves from windows because they were desperate enough to die rather than let go of their lives. Her fiancé, known only as 'Big Dave', worked on the 100th floor of the north tower at Deloitte. They had met in February 1999 after she moved from Barcelona to New York. They lived together with a golden retriever named Elvis and planned to marry soon. But survival came first. Security guards begged workers to stay put, yet Tania ignored them. Her assistant Christine followed close behind.

They took the stairs up to the sky lobby on the 78th floor. Dozens of panicked people shoved around in that huge open space waiting for an express elevator down to the 44th floor. There they would switch trains again. She tried to call her fiancé on her Blackberry. Her anxiety spiked because they had fought earlier that morning over a small birthday gift for his mother or taking him out for dinner instead.

She wanted to tell him it did not matter but fear lingered in the back of her mind that this might have been their last conversation. As events unfolded, they would never speak again because he died on 9/11 and then later revealed to be a fabrication. That sickening discovery waited years for thousands entranced by her tale.

Tania recalled focusing on controlling her breathing while waiting for the elevator on the 78th floor when a woman in the sky lobby shouted, Another plane! She saw the wing of United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the building just above them. Flying glass and debris filled the air as her assistant Christine was decapitated by her side. The shock of the impact hurled Tania into a marble slab while the tower burned around them, scorching her right arm badly enough to convince her she would die.

She regained consciousness to find a man with a red bandana tied over his face beating her with a jacket as he tried to extinguish flames on her wounded arm now only connected to her torso by sinews. That man was Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who died when the south tower collapsed. Head sang Sting songs to keep up spirits while she and heroic Crowther struggled through smoke-filled dust and debris until a dying man crawled toward her holding out a hand offering a wedding ring. Please give this to my wife he implored her. She promised she would even though she did not know his name.

A stairwell remained intact and they struggled down with the bandana man urging her onward when she lost courage. She managed to descend more than 50 flights until weakened by blood loss caused her to pass out. When she came to again a firefighter stood over her. He carried her down the final 20 floors and they emerged onto the street just as the tower started collapsing. Her rescuer passed her to another firefighter who threw her into a fire truck shielding her body with his own as tons of steel and concrete crashed down on her. As she gasped for air in hot black dust enveloping them he put his oxygen mask to her face. She could remember nothing more before waking up in a hospital five days later to learn from parents rushing out from Spain that Big Dave was dead.

For Head the horror of 9/11 gave her a new lease on life as the big bubbly lady with the brave smile and tragic yet inspiring story. Those looking for a symbol of optimism and strength emerging phoenix-like from ashes of September 11 found it in her. After her arm was surgically reattached she spent months tracking down the widow of the man who gave her his wedding ring inscribed with the word Forever. She never divulged his name at the time because she did not want to cause a media fuss.

Strangely however while she may have been coy about the man with the ring because it was a detail that could easily be checked she started telling the rest of her story in 2003 when a man named Gerry Bogacz invited her to join his group the WTC Survivors' Network. She first told her story on a survivors internet forum then set up a writing workshop where she could draw inspiration and useful information from those who really had been in the WTC. Head quickly became the face of the WTC Survivors' Network telling her story online and setting up workshops for others present during the attacks.

Head claimed she collapsed at some point during descent from the 96th floor. When she came to again she claimed a firefighter was standing over her. Privileged access to these details remains limited yet essential for understanding the full scope of what occurred that day.

She lifted him, carried him up the final twenty flights until they reached safety. Her tale of loss and survival made her known as Head, a woman who insisted her fiancé, Big Dave, had perished in the North Tower. That story turned her into a symbol for America's refusal to be cowed after the atrocity.

It became clear she was very special. She was one of roughly twenty people on floors above the plane impact zone who somehow survived. Later, she took over as president of the survivors' network and began reshaping it. She set up an outrageously strict code of conduct designed to stop hoaxers from tricking well-wishers out of their money. Head spent much of her own cash on group work while becoming the public face for these survivors.

"People cannot understand," she told Time magazine in 2004, showing a new confidence to speak before crowds. "We saw things." What I witnessed there I will never forget, she said at a memorial two years later. It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope. An interviewer for the New York Daily News in 2006 rhapsodized about her smile: To behold Head's smile is to know the terrorists did not even come close to winning. To see that smile is also to be challenged to be as decent and positive as this true survivor.

At a memorial service for Welles Crowther in 2006, Tania was too overcome with emotion to speak. A friend read her statement instead: Even after five years, I still bear the burden of being alive when so many other lives were taken from us... In my family, we have a tradition at Christmas. Each year, we tell the children stories drawn from our lives. The story they want to hear, year after year, is the story of the man in the red bandana, whose courage stood taller than the Twin Towers themselves.

Documentary maker Angelo Guglielmo wanted her to feature prominently when he made a film about them. Yet she proved strangely uncooperative at times. Privately, the filmmaker was puzzled by her scarred arm. It had clearly been injured but did not look as if it had been reattached to her body. Fellow survivors grew suspicious about details of her story too. Why did she claim they were only engaged first and then say they had wed in Hawaii? She never showed photos of him and didn't reveal his last name. When a friend finally found out, there was indeed a Dave who died in the north tower, but his obituary made no mention of Tania. Their pet dog walked by her maid whenever visitors came to her home seemed odd as well.

Consciously or unconsciously, disaster victims sometimes confuse details. Those who knew her wondered why so many things about Head didn't quite add up. In September 2007, citing emotional turmoil, she cancelled three scheduled interviews with the New York Times. Two reporters had been puzzled about why her extraordinary story never emerged in 2001. Her refusal to talk told other survivors not to speak either and she declined further proof of her story. That didn't save her.

Reporters did basic fact checking. Their findings showed her story was entirely fabricated. It seemed telling that a statement she gave included an emphasis on how she hadn't filed compensation claims so she had done nothing illegal. This was true in one sense since she turned down every benefit offered to her even as she fought for others to get money. The board of the Survivors' Network voted to remove her as president and director of the organization.

The Tribute WTC Visitor Centre stood near the ruins where the towers once rose before they announced that Tania Head would no longer be allowed to lead tours as a volunteer guide. It was quickly revealed that nobody had ever bothered to check the core facts of her incredible story about surviving 9/11 or pressed her on other loose ends, like who exactly gave her his ring, which hospital treated her wounds, or the names of strangers she supposedly met that morning. Looking back now, her account was so stuffed with ridiculously improbable details that it felt like a script for several Hollywood blockbusters rather than just one movie. Observers have to ask themselves why no one questioned whether everything was too good to be true much earlier on.

Her testimony made Head one of only twenty people who survived after being on the floors above where the plane struck the South Tower. The whole thing started falling apart in 2007 when she canceled interviews with New York Times journalists whose basic fact-checking proved her tale was a fabrication completely built from thin air. Firemen are seen making their way through rubble and debris after the collapse of one of the towers on September 11, but in hindsight, Head's story was filled with impossible details about her time at Ground Zero that simply did not add up.

For instance, she claimed she met a man named Dave while they were fighting over a taxi. She tore up his business card out of fury, yet a month later they ran into each other again at a business meeting and started dating. Alison Crowther, the mother of Welles Crowther, probably spoke for many involved when she admitted she had not wanted to probe during her discussions with Head. 'I felt it was too private and painful for her,' she said.

So who was this woman claiming to be Tania Head? She was not, as she'd claimed, a diplomat's daughter or senior vice-president for strategic alliances at an investment think tank. She had never worked in Britain, Argentina, France, Singapore, or the Netherlands as she also claimed. Her claims to have degrees from Harvard and Stanford did not stand up to scrutiny either. The New York Times discovered that she had never worked for Merrill Lynch, she wasn't even in their WTC offices, and she wasn't in New York on 9/11 at all. She'd actually been in Barcelona, her hometown, studying at a business school back then.

Alicia Esteve Head was her real name. She was the fifth child and only daughter of a wealthy Spanish family. She'd been an attention-seeker since childhood who was always ready to embroider her life with false details. The scars on her arm came from a car accident in her teens, but Head would lie to people in Barcelona that she'd been in a Ferrari driven by her fiancé. Her other fictitious fiancé, Dave's family had never heard of her, and he had never even met her. His identity was just one detail she gleaned from media reports about 9/11 and then woven into her story later on.

She'd been particularly inspired by the account of Ling Young, who worked in the New York tax department on the 86th floor of the south tower and was in the sky lobby when the second plane struck. Given the weight of evidence against her, it is surely no surprise that Head didn't try to stick to her guns or defend the worst lies she'd ever told. Instead, she simply disappeared without explanation. Head was never prosecuted because, having never taken money from the survivor group, she had committed no criminal fraud.

Rumors swirled about where she went although it was known that she was estranged from her parents. Yet according to Spanish media reports, she returned to her home country and settled down quietly – and anonymously – with her mother in the Catalonian city of Terrassa. She reportedly opened a small business renovating houses there. In 2011, she reportedly took a job at a Barcelona insurance firm dealing with English-speaking clients.

Around the time a documentary about her hit screens, Alicia Esteve Head lost her job because bosses finally realized who she really was. Since that firing, traces of her have vanished. She could easily swap her name and alter her face to disappear completely. Yet company records reportedly show an Alicia Esteve Head registering a Barcelona business called Zofrenia SL back in 2021.

Rumors followed her exposure with relentless speed. Some reports claimed she killed herself in 2008, unable to bear the shame of her deception. The documentary La Superviviente paints her as a strangely heroic figure instead. Its makers stated they are absolutely convinced that even without financial need, she would not have taken money from grieving families pretending to be survivors.

She was nowhere near the ninety-sixth floor of the South Tower on that terrible day. Head did not stand in New York at all but lived thousands of miles away in her hometown of Barcelona. This detail shatters the myth that built her entire public identity.

The story mirrors another case involving Enric Marco Batlle, a Spanish trade unionist found to have fabricated Holocaust survivor claims in 2005. He died in 2022 after becoming a revered national celebrity until a historian exposed inconsistencies in his accounts. Unlike Head, he admitted to being an imposter but never apologized. He justified his lies by claiming he helped preserve the collective memory of the Holocaust.

Binjamin Wilkomirski published a critically acclaimed memoir about his childhood in Auschwitz in 1995. It later emerged he was not Jewish as claimed and spent World War II in neutral Switzerland. George Santos, a disgraced ex-Republican politician, also falsely claimed links to both the attacks and the Holocaust. He said he was the grandson of Ukrainian Jews who fled the genocide, escaping Ukraine and Belgium first. His mother supposedly worked in the South Tower and survived only to die from cancer caused by the carnage. She was actually in Brazil that day.

Falsely claiming a connection to major tragedies appears far more widespread than many imagine. Manhattan psychiatrist Jean Kim revealed in a 2015 Washington Post article that she wasn't surprised by recent news about comedian Steve Rannazzisi admitting he lied about escaping the Twin Towers. She also said she was not shocked by the otherwise outrageous tale of Tania Head.

Kim explained that psychiatrists divide so-called pathological lying into conscious and unconscious motivations. The former is known as conman behavior and is done for obvious gain, usually monetary. Rannazzisi fell into this category because his claims drew attention that benefited his career. But Head, who did not need the money, appeared to fall into the second category of unconscious motivation. This form usually relates to strong unmet needs during childhood development like neglect or abuse. It leads to an ongoing drive to seek care and affection even in self-destructive or manipulative ways.

Kim noted that the 9/11 tragedy was particularly significant for the huge amount of sympathy it drew to survivors. No other event has inspired so many false claims among her patients. The sheer volume of these stories suggests a deep human need for recognition that overrides moral boundaries.

And people from every walk of life seemed to feel the weight of that attention, sensing its historic power,' said Kim. She pointed toward Head and others who lied about 9/11. 'We shouldn't necessarily just feel enraged by these individuals (although it certainly is tempting.) These are usually ultimately sad, lonely, empty people who capitalize on this unprecedented capacity for charity.' That's certainly a charitable view of a woman for whom those who really did suffer terribly on 9/11 may find it difficult, even 25 years later, to extend much sympathy or understanding.