Alex Hunter Sr. @foreright240 - Twitter Profile

My mom narrowly survived 9/11. Several of her friends and coworkers were tragically killed. I don’t normally share this level of detail on Twitter, but given what’s I’m seeing, I feel compelled to share her story (with her permission). My mom, a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union who came to New York in 1976, came to this country to escape persecution and for a better life. As it turns out, Socialists and Communists hate Jews. Shocker. My mom started working at the World Trade Center as a Mainframe Programmer at Morgan Stanley in 1987 (Morgan Stanley Dean Witter on 9/11). My mom was working on the 67th floor of the 2nd Building during the 1993 WTC bombing. Thankfully, she survived, though it left a lasting mark on her. My mom was working on the 56th floor of the 2nd Building during 9/11. They had just moved her team to that floor a few weeks prior. She had finished a meeting and was working when she looked out the 56th floor window and saw that the 1st Building had been hit. She thought it was an electrical explosion or something since they were always doing some work in the buildings. She saw paper and debris flying everywhere, and thick smoke pouring out. No one really knew what was going on, but remembering the 1993 bombing, her gut instinct was to get out of there. My mom grabbed her small pouch that had some spare cash in it, grabbed a few of her coworkers, and they started going down the building. When they had reached the 22nd floor, the 2nd plane hit the 2nd Building. She knew she was on the 22nd floor because of a massive column in the center of the building, and they felt the whole building shake. Her and the people with her began sprinting down the stairs to get out. My mom didn’t know what was going on, but seeing the smoke and knowing that it was toxic to breathe in, wanted to get as far away as possible. She just started walking, trying to get to Queens. She made her way through Chinatown, and out of a gut instinct, went into a store and bought a disposable camera with the emergency money in her pouch. She took many photos of the buildings, and was able to get them developed. I don’t know think any documentaries have ever gotten ahold of them, but I’ll share a few here. My mom kept walking. Walking to Queens. By the time she had made it to the 59th St Bridge, someone she was passing by told her that The Twin Towers had collapsed. “What do you mean? I was just at work a second ago — that doesn’t make any sense.” My mom was ironically, in 2006, one of many laid off as Morgan Stanley offshored many of their programming jobs to India. My mom, every year on 9/11, remembers. Every year on 9/11, my dad would tell me: “wish your mother a Happy 2nd Birthday”. As a kid, I never really understood, but my dad would say, “it’s a day to celebrate that she survived, to be here with us.” My mom survived. Not one, but two terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I am forever blessed and count myself as one truly lucky New Yorker. Many were not. Everyone knows someone. 9/11, for New York City, was a New Founding. A transformative moment. This tragedy, and our subsequent grit and tenacity, is woven into the DNA of every real New Yorker. For someone running for MAYOR of New York City to have such little understanding of this core truth, to go as far as to try to leverage it in a POLITICAL COUNTER-MESSAGE OF SHAMING AND RALLYING, is to admit that they are fundamentally disconnected from the reality of what it means to be a New Yorker and thus, be Mayor of New York City. If you’re a New Yorker, you know this to be true. You know we cannot have Mamdani in office. If we want our city to continue to survive and thrive, we simply cannot.

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