She could see the black smoke from Newark on 9/11

Hi, my name is Mary and I live in Bellmead, New Jersey. I will always remember 9-11. I was a young mother with three kids and I had to do my daycare drop-off that morning before heading into Newark where I worked at Prudential. I remember driving in and listening to the radio and I heard a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. And I had read an article a few weeks before about these near-misses near the World Trade Center because sometimes pilots had difficulty with that. I called my husband who was in a lab and let him know what happened so he could go out and listen to the news as well. I went and got my coffee at the local diner and headed up to the floor that I worked on which was the 16th floor or 18th floor. And I went into my boss's office and he had a TV there and that's when the second plane hit. And I stared at his TV and I turned to my boss and I said, we have to shut down the airspace. We're being attacked. My boss stood there in total shock. He said, my best friend is on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center and my wife is now playing golf with his wife and I can't get a hold of her. I left his office and a woman was screaming, running down the hallway, screaming, my cousin is in the World Trade Center. We looked out the window because it's Newark and we could see the black smoke from New York. People were afraid. We got word that the trains were shut down. So since I had driven in, I squeezed five people into my little car that morning and drove each of them home. Streets were eerily quiet and when we got home, there was no noise from any air traffic as we're always used to hearing. My husband picked up my older two children at school and I went and picked up the baby from the daycare. We got home, when my husband picked up the two older boys, they said that the school had been, they weren't allowed to play recess because they were working on spraying the fields so they didn't let the kids out. They were too young to share the news in the school. My toddler does not remember this day at all, but my oldest and middle child do. And my middle child actually wrote a letter to the president after this happened and asked him to help protect our country. My husband, when he was driving my two older, two home from school, broke down in tears trying to explain to them what happened. It was a very sad day. And after that, we felt like we were walking a very numb way through life. About a week or so later, we had to head back to the office. I drove up that turnpike and saw the cavity where those two World Trade Center towers were and I burst into tears. It took me that long to recover from the shock and to cry about what happened. I'll never forget. And every time I go to visit that part of Manhattan and I look at the memorial, I can't say anything, and it just brings back that horrible, horrible day.