9/11 REMEMBERED
THE STORY OF RETIRED NYPD DETECTIVE & ESU MEMBER, FRANK DEMASI
Written by Christine Walker
Photo by Gerd Altmann
At 8:46 am on September 11, 2001, America as we knew it changed forever! It has been 20 years since we were attacked on our own soil, but I doubt there is an adult over 35 today that doesn’t remember exactly where they were or what they were doing that morning as vividly today as the day it happened.
For Retired NYPD Detective, Frank DeMasi, every detail of that beautiful September morning turned into a horrific reality that is forever etched into his very soul.
Frank was assigned to the Emergency Service Unit. As he explains it, the ESU was the “Navy SEALS” of the NYPD. They did it all. From SWAT to Bomb detection and diffusion, under water recovery, bridge jumpers, and Search & Rescue. “When someone needs help, they call a cop. When a cop needs help, they call Emergency Service,” Frank said. The ESU consists of just 1% of the over 40,000 NYPD officers. Those 400 officers are assigned to 10 Trucks throughout the five boroughs of New York City.
Officer DeMasi was assigned to Truck 9 in Queens, but that day he and his partner, officer Jimmy Nessenthaler, were on the “fly.” This meant that they would go to whatever truck was short staffed. At 0700 on September 11, Frank and Jimmy were assigned to Truck 8, out of Brooklyn.
That morning at Quarters, Frank ran into Officer Sgt. Rodney Gillis. He had just gotten off shift and was about to head to his second job when a call came over the radio. “Central, plane in WTC.” American Airlines Flight 11 had hit the North Tower at the World Trade Center.
Sarge jumped in his uniform again. Jimmy and Frank had just pulled up to Quarters in an unloaded vehicle they had transported from Queens. Rodney yelled, “Frank… Jimmy… lets go! I have a vehicle here and I’m shooting over the Williamsburg Bridge.”
Frank shot back, “Rodney, what kind of load do you have on that truck?” and Rodney replied, “it’s empty, we’ll get to Manhattan and get equipment from one of the other (big) trucks on the scene.”
“No, Rodney, I don’t wanna go down without equipment, I’d rather have a loaded vehicle, I know when we get there, we’re gonna have the walking wounded coming up to us and I don’t wanna be there with just my dick in my hand. You go ahead to Manhattan, and we’ll be right behind you in Adam car.”
Now normally when a Sergeant gives an order, subordinate officers just do it. But Frank and Rodney came up through the ranks and served together; they were friends, and they had a tremendous amount of respect for each other, so this exchange was just not an issue.
Later, Frank would realize this is just one of the decisions made that day that would save his life.
Driving over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, Frank remembers looking at the tower and couldn’t believe his eyes. The gaping hole, flames and dark smoke coming from the upper floors in the North Tower, he recalls, “We knew in our hearts this was no accident.
As an NYPD officer assigned to the ESU, we were constantly called on to handle accidents and emergencies… but no amount of training could’ve prepared us for the true evil we were about to witness on this day.”
Adam ‘car’ is actually a Ford F550 REP
Arriving in lower Manhattan, Frank and Jimmy parked Adam car at Broadway & Cedar Streets, just on the North side under the South Tower. Truck 8’s ‘Big Truck’ arrived at their location about the same time. Frank made a promise to Rodney that he would meet up with him, so he got on the secure TAC channel calling for Rodney, but he didn’t get a response.
Frank knew he needed his medical bag, so he went to the REP Truck and was bent over starting to remove gear from the bins when the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower. “Holy Fuck, Jimmy! What was that?” Frank said as he could feel the heat of the plane on his neck.
Since there wasn’t a ESU supervisor present, Frank, with his 17 years on duty, became the ‘Senior Man’ for the time being. Someone asked Frank, “where should we go?’
“I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re not going into those towers blindly. We need to be accountable and we gotta get on a roster. If we go in those towers and something happens to us, nobody knows we’re in there. So, we’re gonna make our way to West Street and the first ESU supervisor we come in contact with, we’ll be guided by them,” Frank recalls.
There were five members from 8 Truck, but Sgt. Rodney Gillis was already there. he said, “he was at least 10 minutes ahead of us. So, the four of us started to walk to West Street.”
As they approached West Street and the towers, the only people there on the street were FDNY, but no cops and no ESU.
“Why the hell are they just standing there?” Frank thought.
But then he found out why …
People had been blown out of the building. They were stepping over bodies and body parts and every few minutes they would hear what sounded like small explosions caused by the jumpers from the 98th & 99th floors of North Tower hitting parked cars, rooftops, or the sidewalk.
“We watched countless people who woke up that morning to go to work, who had probably kissed their loved one goodbye, without knowing that it would be for the last time, standing at the broken windows above the 80th floor. I doubt any of them thought as they were leaving their homes that morning, in a few hours I’ll be jumping out of the 98th floor of the World Trade Center to release myself from the hell that was behind me. We were horrified and helpless knowing there was nothing we could do to help these people.” Frank recalls.
Frank and his team continued North. And that’s where they located their guys, who had already mobilized at the corner of West and Vessey Streets, in close proximity to the North Tower and about a block away from the South Tower at the World Trade Center.
They encountered Sgt. Tommy Sullivan along with Sgt. Urban, Lt. Serras, and ESU Commanding Officer, Ronnie Wasson.
“8 Truck, and a few others plus a few guys from 9 Truck connected to Sgt. Sullivan as the ESU supervisor,” Frank remembered.
In the meantime, two officers went back to Broadway & Cedar to get the 8’s Big Truck and bring it to the West & Vessey location so the squad could have the equipment they needed.
Sullivan, Frank, and 8 others were suited up for the Rescue and getting ready to go towards the South Tower, when they heard the most chilling communication come over the radio. “Central, we have confirmation that the Pentagon has been hit.”
Sgt. Sullivan stopped in his tracks, looked at his team and said, “Guys, fuck all this Rescue shit, we’re going (in) tactical!” The team walked back towards 8 Truck to switch out gear and devise a plan.
As they were crossing West Street in their Tactical gear, it was at that moment, that Frank heard what can only be described as the ear-piercing sound of twisting metal echoing through the canyons of Lower Manhattan and then the overwhelming sound like a freight train as the 110 story South Tower came crashing down like a house of cards with a power, intensity, and speed none of them had ever seen before.
The ESU ‘BIG TRUCK’
They ran from the debris cloud that chased them, a dozen or so of the team dove under the ESU ‘Big’ truck. “I remember being consumed by the debris cloud. Etched in my mind is the distinct odor of that cloud and what felt like broke glass hitting my exposed skin.
It became pitch black… the debris was filling my ears and there was a deafening silence. I remember not being able to breath and thought, ‘so the tower didn’t get me, but they’re going to find me suffocated under this truck’.” Frank vividly remembers.
Thinking about his family, Frank thought, “this is not how I’m going to go out!”
Using his ballistic helmet, he covered his face, coughed into it to clear his lungs, and then breathed in whatever air was left over. “We were under that truck for a full 9-minutes, but it felt like 9 hours,” Frank said.
He remembers saying, “Oh my God! How many guys just got killed?”
Frank would later learn that Sgt. Rodney Gillis from ESU Truck 8 and Sgt. John Coughlin from Truck 4 each took a squad of men into the South Tower to help rescue hundreds, if not thousands, of lives that day, but they traded their own lives in the process.
As Frank and the rest of his squad crawled out from under the truck, he remembers that one of the guys was overcome with heat, “we had to get his clothes off and get him oxygen, asap.”
September 11, 2001 ~ Frank DeMasi (Back/Left). - Photo © 2001 Bill Biggart
It was during these few minutes of respite, as the dust began to slowly settle that photographer Bill Biggart caught a shot of Frank and a few of his team members.
And then they heard that demonic sound of twisting metal again… the North tower started to collapse, and this time they ran for their lives towards the Hudson. Frank ducked into the American Express lobby and saw hundreds of terrified people, many wanting to run out of the building. But Frank reassured them that they were safer right where they were.
After the collapse of the second tower, he roamed the streets of lower Manhattan aimlessly, walking through the thirty feet of collective debris of the 220 stories of destruction and death. Radios went silent because the repeaters were on the towers and Frank was on his own. No one would’ve blamed him if Frank got lost in his thoughts, but now was not the time. His job wasn’t finished, it was just beginning.
Frank knew of one place he might reconnect with his ESU squad and started making his way to the Police Memorial located between what was left of the Word Trade Center and the Hudson. It was a good call, the Memorial became a hub for first responders, first 20, then 40 started showing up. It was then that Frank learned he was on the list of the missing.
Payphones were dead, and even though he had a beeper, what he needed was a cell phone. 6 Truck was parked near the Memorial, and Frank’s friend Franco was sitting in the truck talking on the phone.
He approached and said. “You talkin on the phone? Holy Shit! I need to call my wife!”
“I must’ve redialed her number like 20 times, but couldn’t get through, so I handed the phone back to Franco and would try later. He must have redialed again and finally got through. I let my wife know I was OK, but that I’m gonna be here for days.” Frank remembered.
The rest of that day was a blur of regrouping, search and rescue, and beginning the process of dealing with the loss and the city that was now a literal hell on earth.
At midnight, as Frank was finally driving over the bridge toward his home on Long Island, everything hit him at once!
Tears of grief and anger streaming down through the thick dust on his face, Frank thought about all the people hanging out of the broken windows above the 80th floor trying desperately to breathe and hold on to a false hope of being rescued, knowing damn well there was absolutely nothing anyone could do for them, seeing people leap to their deaths with the eventual explosive crash of bodies hitting roofs, cars or the ground. Sullivan giving the order to change to tactical gear, which saved their lives. He thought about his fellow officers and firefighters… how many died today? Will we find any of them alive? And what about the photographer, Bill Biggart who survived the collapse of the first tower, but would die when the North tower fell. How many lives were lost today?
The next day, Frank arrived at Ground Zero at 0600 and would spend the next 18 hours searching for survivors.
“This continued day in and day out for weeks. Search & rescue turned into a recovery operation about 3-4 weeks later, while working 14-15 hours a day until someone ordered you to go home. Personal protection was a joke. When we were working on the piles (of debris), sometimes it took us 15 minutes just to climb up the damn thing... The fires lasted for months, being careful not to step on the hot metal, or it would melt your shoes. Every time an air horn would sound, it meant another building was coming down and we had to climb down to get to a safe zone. We finally said ‘fuck it… if I die, I die.’ And after a while, everything you tasted, tasted like the WTC. And the smell… you just couldn’t get that damn smell out of your nostrils” Frank remembers.
All of this was, in between attending funerals, sometimes 3 a day, with some of them burying an empty casket because they couldn’t find a body.
“Eventually, we went to 12-hour tours, 0700-1900 & 1900-0700 with a mandatory day off. We’d work our normal patrol shifts for two days, then go dig for the other four days, putting in an extra 36 hours a week. In the beginning, nobody was taking days off --- but eventually we were ordered to take at least 1 day,” Frank said.
Meanwhile, the Red Cross set up a huge tent in a nearby parking lot that would become a 24/7 Restaurant for First Responders. People across the country came to help the search, rescue & recovery, providing meals, water, and places for responders to rest. Outback Steakhouse even set up a Tractor Trailer on the FDR.
In a speech written for the 10th Anniversary, Frank writes, “In the months that followed, members of the Police Department would work 24 hours a day at ground zero. Digging, sifting, & raking while looking for the remains of all who were lost that day. People with hopes and dreams – not just remains to unearth. We always thought we would find many more people than we did. There were times when all we would find was a finger and that would be cause for excitement. We felt at least some wife, husband, mother, or father will have some kind of closure. Sometimes it was just and ID card of a WTC working that we’d find and again, we knew there was something we can return to a loved one. Once found, their remains were gently placed onto stretchers, American Flags draped over them, and then one final salute as they were escorted out of ground zero.”
In the 20 years that have passed, there isn’t a day that goes by that Frank doesn’t remember this day and all of his NYPD brothers who lost their lives, like Rodney Gillis and Mike Curtin.
Ret. NYPD Detective & ESU Member, Frank DeMasi
“Three months later, we found Sergeant Mike Curtin in proximity to what would have been the lobby of the North Tower. He had gone in to check the stairwell for people one more time, and it collapsed on him. Of the 14 Emergency Service Unit heroes who died on September 11th, 2001, the bodies of 5 would be recovered, the remaining 9 were gone forever.” Frank disclosed.
Frank, along with every single first responder that day, faced the impossible propagated by sinister evil on what started out as a beautiful September day. And while he has been through the fire of survivor’s guilt and grief, he has learned to live for his brothers, because they can’t.
But even more importantly, Frank remembers their names, remembers their faces, and with him, we will also remember and to never forget.
FRANK’S MEMORIAL HARLEY & TATTOO
* On behalf of AT EASE! Veterans Magazine, We would like to offer our sincere gratitude to Frank DeMasi for taking the time to be so candid about his experience. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and your brothers & sisters of the NYPD & ESU.