Ravi Shukla started the Tuesday morning with a hearing. A sunny day in Syracuse, it was 8 a.m. when he arrived at Tolley Humanities Building, where the administration’s office used to be.

Shukla, finance department chair at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, was waiting to present his testimony to a committee for a student who was involved in a domestic violence case. Sitting in a waiting room on the second floor, he saw staff running to one place, coming back, telling other people that prompted others to go into the same direction.

“I almost felt something had happened in the building,” he said. “But then nobody is telling others what to do.”

Clueless of the commotion happening in the office, he kept waiting for the testimony and testified in front of the committee as scheduled.

As he left Tolley, he immediately noticed something was strange and began to grasp something extraordinary had happened.

“(It was) as if somebody had sucked the life out of campus,” Shukla recalled.

Around 9:30 a.m., a few people were walking hastily as if they were seeking shelter, not making eye contact, Shukla said.

By then, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 had hit the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan in New York City. One hundred and forty-seven people onboard, excluding 10 hijackers, were killed. In total that day, 2,977 people, excluding 19 hijackers, lost their lives.

Going back to his office in Crouse-Hinds Hall, Shukla learned about the events after talking to his colleague and seeing the news on the internet.

As the nation commemorates the 15th year anniversary of 9/11, memories from the date have been indelible for many in the Syracuse University community.

“People did not have to know someone who was involved in the tragedy,” Shukla said. “It was American family tragedy.”

Some professors chose to cancel their classes for the day — although the university did not officially cancel all classes — and Shukla wanted to go home in East Syracuse to be with his family. He was back by 12:30 p.m. The town was eerily quiet as if the day evolved in slow motion without sound, Shukla said.

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Recalled back to Washington

Text messages from a student were what prompted Scott Bernard to suspend class and find a TV.

Bernard, executive professor at the School of Information Studies and a retired military officer, was one of two instructors teaching about 40 graduate-level students in an executive education program at the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel and Conference Center on the morning of Sept. 11.

When Bernard and the students moved to a space outside of the room, a TV screen showed both of the twin towers badly damaged, with orange flames and thick black smoke swirling up to the sky. They had a feeling that this was not an accident, Bernard said.

American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia at 9:37 a.m. and United Airlines Flight 93 smashed onto the field of Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. The south tower collapsed four minutes earlier at 9:59 a.m. At 10:28 a.m., the north tower crumbled into dust.

“We watched the towers fall,” Bernard said. “And that’s when, along with the rest of the world, we went into a deep shock.”

By noon, the iSchool administration made the decision to suspend the class.

The students enrolled in the program were people in the workforce who came to SU to attend a class only for a few days. They came from across the country and a few from abroad, and all flights in the United States were grounded.

Bernard got a new task: How do these students get home?

“We started asking each person, ‘What city did you come from?’ and ‘Did you fly or did you drive?’” Bernard recalled. “And once we figured that out, we got that all listed up on a board and we said to them ‘We’d like to organize a carpool and students were all for it.’”

By early afternoon, students had arranged carpools going all directions: the eastern seaboard, Florida, Texas, Oregon and California.

One of the students in Bernard’s class was Mark Pollitt, who was one of managers at the FBI computer forensic lab in its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Bernard, who was working at a consulting firm in downtown D.C. and living in Falls Church, Virginia, offered Pollitt a ride as soon as he finished taking care of the students. Pollitt accepted the offer, with one condition.

“He said ‘let me drive’ and I said, ‘Why Mark?’” Bernard recalled. “He said, ‘Because we are gonna go fast.’”

Pollitt, an FBI agent who knew how to drive fast, drove Bernard’s 1998 Dodge Caravan well over the speed limit.

“I don’t think that van has ever gone so fast as the day he drove it,” he said.

After Pollitt drove straight to his home in northern Maryland, Bernard made it home in Falls Church where he reunited with his wife by 9 p.m.

Bernard and his wife, a former navy officer who had left assignment at the Pentagon in 2000, had lost about a half-dozen people whom they knew from work in the attack.

Bernard said when he drove by the Pentagon on Interstate 395 the following day to get to work at a consulting firm called Booz Allen Hamilton, he saw the building was still smoking.

“And, again, it was very, very shocking,” Bernard said.

“It was almost more cathartic that way.”

Keith Kobland was out on an assignment for Channel 5 News, sitting his car and listening to ESPN Radio on the morning of Sept. 11.

“(Radio host) Mike Greenberg all of a sudden mentioned they were following a story in New York City, where a plane had hit the tower,” said Kobland, now a media manager for SU. “Both me and the photographer kind of looked at each other and thought: ‘Wow.’”

Kobland and the photographer, Jim Hamilton, who is now a videographer for SU Athletics, soon returned to the newsroom, where they and others from the station watched as the second plane hit.

Local election primaries were being held that day, but as the news continued to develop, they were postponed until a later date.

“That’s when we realized, ‘OK, this is something serious and significant,” Kobland said.

From there, the channel went into continuous coverage of the attacks, alternating between the local station and the national CBS network. That meant no “The Price Is Right” and no soap operas, just the news.

Kobland and others from the station covered candlelight vigils, man-on-the-street interviews and more to tell the story from a central New York angle.

“You get caught up in a story, and at the time you’re not really thinking in the moment about the larger ramifications,” he said. “All you’re thinking is, ‘OK, we have to get over to James Street to get these interviews.’”

Kobland was sent home from the station that night, but he returned the next day and the non-stop coverage continued for about two full days.

“You just go into that work mode,” he said. “And it was almost more cathartic that way.”

FROM THE ARCHIVES

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Universal tragedy

At the British Museum in London, Margaret Hermann heard an announcement: If you are an American, you should go to the nearest pub. Something terrible has happened to your country.

As she went into one of the pubs, TV screens were dominated by the coverage from the U.S., until then-Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke on TV.

Blair said she had been introduced to the event in a different way from those in the U.S.

“When I got back to the United States, what I learned is that this is an attack on America, that we are at war on terrorism,” said Hermann, a political science professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Hermann was in London to attend a political science conference outside of London. Even though she was scheduled to leave the country on Sept. 12, all flight services to the U.S. were suspended and it took almost a week for her to return to the country.

Hermann said she received outpouring support from British citizens who were eager to help stranded Americans.

The hotel she was originally planning to stay for one night made accommodation so that she could stay as long as she needed. People on the street, noticing her American accent, would come to her and expressed their sympathy and asked her what they could do to help her.

“I can’t say enough about how kind the British citizens really were,” Hermann said. “… Because this was something they had not expected either. And they lost people. So they were grieving as well.”

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Hit the nation in the gut

Don Dutkowsky received a phone call from his mother-in-law, asking him whether he had seen the news on the TV.

“My mother-in-law is kind of an alarmist and she is kind of like a doom and gloom person so I thought she was exaggerating,” said Dutkowsky, an economics professor in Maxwell who was sitting at a desk and working on a computer at his house. “She says, ‘No, no, no, no, turn on the TV. Watch.’ Well, I turned on the TV and the first tower was going down.”

Even though his wife was working and his daughter was at an elementary school, they did not come home immediately. Dutkowsky recalled the severity and unusualness of the attack, rendering him into a state of shock.

Dutkowsky kept running errands as usual while hearing the news on background.

“When things are insane, you kind look for sanity,” he said.

When his 9-year-old daughter came back home, he took her to a playground, debating whether to disclose to her what happened.

“I didn’t have the heart to talk to her about it,” he said.

In addition to regular classes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Dutkowsky also held a freshman forum class on Monday. On the following Monday after 9/11, he discarded his original teaching plan and took 15 students in the forum to the Wall of Remembrance where victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing are honored.

There he shared the story of the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland where 35 SU students who were studying abroad were killed, and cried with the students.

“After seeing what (happened) on 9/11, it was hard to believe that life would ever be normal again,” Dutkowsky said. “… It’s reassuring to see that there’s a degree of normalcy that has taken place since then.”

—Asst. News Editor Michael Burke contributed reporting to this article.

Banner photo by Moriah Ratner | Staff Photographer

Published on September 11, 2016 at 11:35 pm

Contact Satoshi: ssugiyam@syr.edu | @SatoshiJournal