People Who Jumped From The Wtc

Molloy: Daily Thoughts of Suicide

ON 9/11, Helaina Hovitz saw more than any 12-year-old should ever see.

Fleeing school for home three blocks from the World Trade Center, she and a schoolmate and his mother became trapped in a maze of terror.

"My 85-year-old grandparents were in their apartment in my building" in the Southbridge Towers, Hovitz said. "We had to get home."

They ran wildly through the streets as the twin towers burned, as people jumped from 90 stories and as the buildings finally collapsed floor-by-floor, sending huge clouds of debris and toxic dust into the air.

"Everybody was running and screaming. The ash came down. It was in our throats and our eyes .?.?.?. [A friend] yelled, 'It's the end of the world! We're going to die!'"

She survived, but she would never be the same.

To this day, Hovitz, 22, is afraid of the sound of a plane overhead. She's had panic attacks on the subway; she wouldn't walk near Ground Zero.

"The slightest scare would make me panic," she said.

She had nightmares for years. Her parents sent her to therapists, but most just prescribed drugs: 10 of them, to match their many diagnoses.

Hovitz started to self-medicate and binge drink.

"During my teenage years, I had severe alcohol problems," Hovitz said. "I was hospitalized six times for alcohol poisoning. I would put myself into dangerous, self-destructive situations. The boys I was running around with were not nice."

She relived that fateful day "over and over. I basically got stuck at the age of 12."

From 14 to 18, Hovitz said, "I contemplated suicide on a daily basis. My mother was really so desperate to help me, but she didn't know what to do.

"My other classmates have had a very similar adolescence. We've engaged in a lot of self-destructive behavior.

"The fear response was always with me. I had no Teflon. I would sponge up everything. I would be devastated by everything."

Then one day, two years ago, a new therapist offered her insight instead of prescriptions. She recognized that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

"We talk," she said. "And I feel like I'm slowly getting my life back."

Now a budding journalist, she's writing a book, "Recovery Effort." Hovitz wrote in the Chicago Tribune on the death of Osama Bin Laden: "I was a victim of a war crime, but now, when I step outside my front door, I see a structure on its way to standing tall. We are well on our way to rebuilding.

Twin Towers evacuated several times in weeks leading up to 9/11 ...

Some were on their way to work in lower Manhattan. Others were already sitting at their desks, checking e-mail, sipping coffee or reading their morning papers. Still others were working in kitchens and garages when they heard and felt the sickening crash. Bathed in soot and shaken to their souls, they are the survivors of what New York City Mayor  Rudy Giuliani  called “one of the most heinous acts in world history.” The life and death drama that followed the twin attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center resembled, said many who lived through the buildings’ destruction, nothing so much as a big-budget Hollywood movie, with bodies falling from the sky, steel and concrete raining down on dazed onlookers, dark smoke billowing for miles and hundreds of heroes tending to the trapped and injured. “It looked like the end of the world,” says  Abdullah Jones , 44, an office assistant who was standing a few hundred feet from Tower No. 2 when it collapsed. “It was a massive inferno, worse than any movie. It was hell breaking loose.” Here are the wrenching firsthand stories of those who witnessed the unthinkable.

Kim White , 32, an administrative assistant at Thebeast, a financial tech company on the 80th floor of 1 World Trade Center, was talking with an office temp when the first plane struck.