WILKES-BARRE — Struggling to keep her emotions in check at times, Luzerne County Chief Solicitor Romilda Crocamo stood before a crowd outside the courthouse Friday morning and recounted her experience living and working near the World Trade Center in New York City during terrorist attacks 19 years ago.
The first plane hit the center’s North Tower while she was riding the elevator up to the 72nd floor of the Empire State Building, where she worked as an attorney, Crocamo said during the remembrance ceremony.
Coworkers rushed over to tell her what happened when she emerged, but they still thought it may have just been an accident.
With no building evacuations or alerts, Crocamo started preparing to work when a friend in West Hazleton frantically called to check on her whereabouts and inform her the nation was under attack.
Spinning her chair around to face the window at that moment, Crocamo saw the second plane flying into the South Tower.
“I remember I felt I could reach out and stop the plane,” she said.
In the surreal ensuing commotion, she made it to the lobby to face law enforcement officers with their weapons drawn, ordering people to leave the building.
Walking in the direction of the trade center to get home, she saw the South Tower fall, not realizing at the time that her 41-year-old accountant cousin, Gerard (Jerry) Rauzi was inside that tower and among the almost 3,000 who would lose their lives that day.
Walking down Fifth Avenue, Crocamo saw buses hastily unload all passengers so the vehicles could be used to form a wall around the trade center site. Apparatus she never knew the city possessed filled the streets as sirens wailed.
At her apartment in Greenwich Village, Crocamo took her dog for a walk in an attempted act of normalcy. Pausing to talk to a neighbor, the North Tower fell, prompting a “universal gasp and silence,” she said.
Not wanting to be alone, Crocamo headed to a high school friend’s residence in the East Village.
As she was crossing the Bowery, Crocamo encountered a long line of people walking quietly, their eyes “dull and vacant” and their entire bodies covered in white dust — the same dust that repeatedly coated the surfaces in her apartment and inside many other structures after the attack.
She spent the following days at St. Vincent’s Hospital to see if her cousin’s name was on the list of survivors.
He normally would have taken off the day he died to prepare for his mother’s Sept. 12 return from Italy, but he opted to complete the usual pre-arrival cleaning the prior weekend instead, she said.
When his name did not surface as a survivor, Crocamo headed to the New York Armory, which served as the family assistance center, to identify those presumed dead.
Her cousin’s remains were never found, and she later learned from his coworker at the memorial service he had insisted the coworker take his spot on an elevator, saying he would get the next one.
While at the Armory, Crocamo said she sat by a man who told police his missing son worked at the Windows on the World restaurant in the trade center to earn money so he could be the first in his family to go to college.
“We didn’t say anything to each other, but at one point he reached out his hand to me, and we held each other’s hand because there was nothing else that we could do to make it better,” Crocamo recalled.
Although the experience exposed her to the ugliness in humanity, she also was touched by the way Americans united to support each other and the sacrifice of firefighters and other responders willingly facing likely death to provide help.
Thanking Crocamo for sharing her “personal and painful” memories, County Manager C. David Pedri also recalled the post-attack unity among Americans without regard for race or political affiliation.
He also thanked military troops for fighting terrorism, pointing to Army Sgt. Sherwood Baker of Plymouth, a county mental health caseworker who died fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004.
“If 9/11 can teach us anything, it’s to live life to the fullest. No tomorrow is promised to anyone,” Pedri said.