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Thursday, September 13, 2001
Flight 93: Passengers vowed to go down fighting
Wife begged her husband not to interfere, but he pledged to do something...and never called her back
By Jodi Wilgoren and Edward Wong
New York Times News Service

Paul Iverson/Caller-Times

Ray Ward, of Visalia, Calif., holds a photo of his son, Tim Ward, his son's girlfriend, Linda Brewton, and the couple's dog. Tim Ward was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, which was hijacked Tuesday and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City.
   They told the people they loved that they would die fighting.
   Threads began to come together Wednesday supporting what the flight path suggested: That the passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, N.J., which crashed into an empty Pennsylvania field instead of possibly a national landmark, had tried to thwart the enemy.
   In cellular telephone calls during their final moments, two young men told their soon-to-be-widows that they would try to overpower the hijackers, and, learning what had already happened at the World Trade Center, they vowed to prevent others from dying even if they could not save themselves.
   Lyzbeth Glick, 31, of Hewitt, N.J., said her husband, Jeremy, told her that three or four large men planned to take a vote about how to proceed, and joked about taking on the hijackers with the butter knives from the in-flight breakfast. She said Glick told her that “three Arab-looking men with red headbands,” carrying knives and talking about a bomb, took control of the aircraft.
   “He was a man who would not let things happen,” she said of her high school sweetheart and husband of five years, the father of a 12-week-old daughter, Emerson. “He was a hero for what he did but he was a hero for me because he told me not to be sad and to take care of our daughter and he said whatever happened he would be OK with any choices I make.”
   Another passenger, Thomas E. Burnett Jr., an executive at a Bay Area medical device company, told his wife, Deena, that one passenger had already been stabbed to death but that a group was “getting ready to do something.”
   “I pleaded with him to please sit down and not draw attention to himself,” Deena Burnett, the mother of three young daughters, told a San Francisco-area television station. “And he said: ‘No, no. If they’re going to run this into the ground we’re going to have to do something.’ And he hung up and he never called back.”
   The accounts revealed a spirit of defiance amid the desperate tragedy. Relatives and friends and a congressman who represents the area around the crash site in Pennsylvania hailed the fallen passengers as the patriots of America’s darkest day.
   “Jeremy and all the other patriotic heroes saved the lives of many people on the ground that would have died if the Arab terrorists had been able to complete their heinous mission,” Tom Crowley, Lyzbeth Glick’s uncle, wrote in the e-mail message circulated Wednesday. “May we remember Jeremy and the other brave souls as heroes, soldiers and Americans on United Flight 93 who so gallantly gave their lives to save many others.”
   Last-minute changes
   Like others on the doomed plane, Glick, 31, and Burnett, 38, had changed their plans at the last minute to board the 8 a.m. flight. Glick, who worked for an Internet company called Vividence, was heading West on business, and Burnett, chief operating officer for Thoratec Corp., was returning home from a visit to the company’s Edison, N.J., office. Lauren Grandcolas of San Rafael, Calif., left an early-morning message on her husband’s answering machine saying she would be home earlier than expected from her grandmother’s funeral. Mark Bingham, 31, who ran a small public relations firm, had felt too sick to fly on Monday, but was racing to make an afternoon meeting with a client in San Francisco.
   The first phone call Bingham made once he settled in seat 4D was to his friend Matthew Hall, who had snaked through traffic to drop him at the airport just a few minutes before the scheduled departure after they slept through a 6 a.m. alarm.
   “He was like, ‘I made the plane, I’m in first class, I’m drinking a glass of orange juice,’ “ recalled Hall, 30, who lives in Denville, N.J.
   Turnaround at Cleveland
   The plane was airborne by 8:44 a.m., according to radar logs, and headed west, climbing to 35,000 feet and flying apparently without incident until it reached Cleveland about 50 minutes later. At 9:37, it turned south and headed back the way it came. This time, Bingham, a 6-foot-5 former rugby player who this summer ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, called his mother, Alice Hoglan.
   “He said, ‘Three guys have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb,’” Hoglan said. “He said, ‘I want you guys to know that I love you very much.’”
   More phone calls were placed from the sparsely populated plane. One passenger barricaded himself in the bathroom and dialed 911, insisting to dispatchers, “This is not a hoax.”
   Grandcolas tried to wake her husband, Jack, begging him to pick up the phone. “We’re having problems,” she said, according to her neighbor, Dave Shapiro, who listened to a tape of the message. “But I’m comfortable,” she said, and then, after a pause, added: “For now.”
   Glick and Burnett dialed over and over, from about 9:30 a.m. until the crash at about 10:10 a.m., telling their wives what was happening, urging them to call the authorities, vowing to fight, saying goodbye.
   Four final calls
   In a television interview with KCBS in San Francisco, Deena Burnett said her husband of nine years called four times — first just saying there were hijackers, then asking her for information about the World Trade Center crashes, then saying three men had overtaken the cockpit and, finally, suggesting the passengers were formulating a plan to respond.
   “I could tell that he was alarmed and trying to piece together the puzzle, trying to figure out what was going on and what he could do about the situation,” she said. “He was not giving up. His adrenaline was going. And you could just tell that he had every intention of solving the problem and coming on home.”
   Crowley’s e-mail message said Glick called his wife shortly after the hijackers took control of the plane, and then added 911 to the conversation. “Jeremy tracked the second-by-second details and relayed them to the police by phone,” Crowley wrote. “Jeremy told the police there were three Arab terrorists with knives and a large red box that they claimed contained a bomb.”
   At the crash site near Shanksville, Pa., a local politician said the wives’ accounts made sense.
   “I would conclude there was a struggle, and a heroic individual decided they were going to die anyway and, ‘let’s bring the plane down here,’ “ said Rep. John P. Murtha, a Democrat who represents the area and serves on the Defense Appropriations Committee.
   An FBI official who spoke on the condition of anonymity noted, “The three other planes carried out their missions and this one did not.” Of Murtha’s theory, he added, “It’s reasonable what he said, but how could you know?”

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