“It was a real turning point in my life, and it was an awful day,” says Sara Botkin of the 9/11 terrorist attacks
Credit: Sara Botkin; Harry Giglio
NEED TO KNOW
- Sara Botkin was delayed going to her job as a temp at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, so she could buy a Mariah Carey CD, a decision that ultimately saved her life
- The then-24-year-old singer left New York City after the attacks and married her boyfriend two months later
- Now a financial advisor and mother of three, Botkin still revisits the footage from that life-altering day
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the mall beneath the World Trade Center was bustling as usual when Sara Botkin, 24, took a few minutes to purchase a signed Mariah Carey CD before the start of her day as a temp at an insurance brokerage firm.
The seemingly innocuous decision saved the young woman’s life.
While she was waiting for the elevator on the ground floor, she learned that the North Tower had been hit and was able to head back to Queens before her building, the South Tower, was struck by the second plane.
Two months later, Botkin fled New York City and moved back to Pittsburgh, where she married her boyfriend.
“It was a real turning point in my life, and it was an awful day,” Botkin, now 49, tells PEOPLE while marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, including 176 from her company, the Aon Corporation.
Now the owner and president of Botkin Family Wealth Management, Botkin shares three children — two sons, Henry, 16, and Alex, 13, and a daughter, Charlotte, 7 — with her husband, Ovi, who proposed just two weeks after the national tragedy.
She’s filled with gratitude that she survived, but every September, as that haunting date looms, she allows herself to “wallow in the grief of just being an American.”
She watches footage of the towers falling and listens to the desperate 9/11 calls placed that day from the fire-ravaged buildings before some people jumped to their deaths.
“For me, 9/11 is a memory,” says Botkin, “but for so many other people, it’s a nightmare that they haven’t been able to wake up from because they lost people who they loved.”
More than two decades ago, such an atrocity was far outside Botkin’s lived reality. At the time, she was dedicated to her career as a professional singer.
After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1999, the music major moved to New York City, where she secured a range of gigs, from singing with the Lincoln Center’s National Chorale to dressing up as an elf and crooning holiday classics in office lobbies. Like many artists, then and now, she found outside work to sustain herself, mostly through temping.
Botkin had a cozy apartment in Astoria and every Saturday she commuted to the port where her then-boyfriend Ovi’s cruise ship docked. He worked as a waiter and Botkin spent all week waiting to spend those precious few hours with him.
“It was actually pretty romantic,” she remembers.
Credit: Sara Botkin
But their relationship, and Botkin’s career aspirations, shifted after al-Qaeda, the Islamic extremist group, hijacked four commercial airplanes, resulting in the deadly attacks in N.Y.C. and Washington, D.C.
When Botkin stepped out of her apartment that fall morning, she remembers clear blue skies — and that the most pressing thing on her mind was picking up a copy of the Glitter soundtrack, which was being released that day.
Making it even more special, Carey had signed a photo and liner notes for her personally because Botkin knew someone who worked at her label.
The 24-year-old woman eagerly picked up her purchase at the Sam Goody store in the mall that connected the Twin Towers underground before work started at 9 a.m. But she never made it up to the 105th floor.
“I was standing in line for the elevator, holding my new Glitter CD, when the first plane hit,” she remembers.
Credit: Sara Botkin
Botkin heard a large crash, but wasn’t instantly alarmed until she saw people beginning to panic.
“There were security guards saying, ‘Stay in the building. Our building is secure. There’s a fire in Tower 1,’ ” says Botkin.
She watched as two young men in suits pushed past an elderly security guard to flee. “I remember they said, ‘F this,’ and they left,” says Botkin. “So I thought, ‘All right, I’m going to leave, too.’ And when I got outside, that’s when I looked up and saw that hole.”
The “hole” and black smoke that Botkin saw from the center of the complex was the aftermath of the first plane that hit the North Tower.
From Botkin’s vantage point far below, it appeared small. With no way of knowing the reality of what had happened just yet, she wondered to herself, had a flight lesson gone awry?
But her main focus was, “I got to get out of here.”
Botkin jumped back on the subway and had to travel to Grand Central before she could find an empty phone booth. In Lower Manhattan, the payphones had lines 10 people deep.
When she placed a call to her dad’s office in Pittsburgh, she realized that her family was desperate to hear from her.
“The receptionist answered. And when I asked for my father, she just started yelling, ‘It’s her, it’s Sara. Sara’s on the phone,’ ” she recalls. “And I was thinking, ‘Huh. So everybody was waiting to hear from me.’ ”
Her dad told her to head straight home to Queens, and to notify him of when she arrived. It was on the above-ground subway from the island of Manhattan to Queens that Botkin saw that it was no small plane crash that had caused such disruption.
“That was the first time I saw both towers engulfed in flames,” she says.
Credit: Sara Botkin
By the time she arrived home, the direness of the situation started to become fully clear. She played messages on her answering machine, only to hear her mom call repeatedly, tearfully begging her to call back.
“I had all these horrible messages from my mom just crying, ‘Please, Sara, please, please call me. Please let me know you’re all right,’ ” says Botkin.
Still, it wasn’t until she got her mom on the phone and said she planned on calling out from work the next day that she fully grasped what had happened.
“Sara, your tower just collapsed,” Botkin remembers her mom saying.
She entered the other room to turn on the TV and “couldn’t believe” what she saw: Both towers had been decimated.
Credit: Sara Botkin
Botkin had only started the temp job for Aon in July for an employee on maternity leave. The two people she was most familiar with managed to survive.
Her supervisor had a medical appointment that morning. Later that day, she managed to call another coworker, Lucia, who had been traveling on the ferry from Staten Island when the planes struck, prompting the vessel to turn around.
“I was very glad that she was all right. She survived,” says Botkin. “I never saw her again because, of course, we never went back to work again.”
The Sunday after 9/11 was the first day she left her apartment. She went with her choir to sing at The Plaza Hotel, where a communication center had been set up for families of the employees missing from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm housed on the top floors of the North Tower. In total, 658 employees from that organization died.
“We sang a piece called ‘God Be In My Head,’ and it was probably the worst experience of my life,” says Botkin.
“No one was comforted by our singing. It just made them all cry harder,” she continues. “It was mostly women and children just with red eyes, looking exhausted.”
Credit: Harry Giglio
Between the terrorist attacks and the news that Anthrax was being mailed in anonymous letters in the weeks after, Botkin felt “an intense longing” for home. The urge was made even stronger because Ovi wanted to move to Pittsburgh with her.
He thought his girlfriend died until he heard from her mother. Ovi cried when he learned that Sara was safe — and proposed when he first saw her two weekends later.
“9/11 definitely sped up our relationship,” says Botkin.
By Dec. 8, 2001, the couple tied the knot — and 25 years later, they’re still together, bound by a love that became even stronger after that historic and deadly day.
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Although Botkin still has the CD that helped save her life, she rarely listens to it
“I remember thinking life will never be the same. Who’s going to ever care about pop music anymore?” says Botkin. “And of course, we all got through it and life went sort of back to normal.”
Despite the sorrow she feels, she still sings for her family and performs at her church. And as Sept. 11 comes around, Botkin makes a point to share her story of survival with her three children.
“Their lives wouldn’t exist if I would not have made it out that day,” says Botkin.
“I feel gratitude, I feel lucky,” she adds, “and I feel deep sorrow for the people whose lives have never been the same since that day.”
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