Ken Summers, 76, says strangers and even friends have told him to “get over” the September 11 attacks that left him with third-degree burns and a lifetime of pain.
The Long Island grandfather, who survived the fireball that tore through the North Tower lobby, told The Post ahead of the 25th anniversary that dismissive remarks have shadowed him for years. “There are people who tell the survivors of 9/11 that we need to get over it,” he said. “They say, ‘I know your story.’ People don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
Summers, a former Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield analyst who worked on the 27th floor, was in the lobby mailing a check at 8:46 a.m. When American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building. The explosion hurled him backward onto the sidewalk, engulfing him in flames that charred his hands and arms with third-degree burns and seared his face and head with second-degree burns.
He has since endured roughly a dozen skin grafts and surgeries, suffers from PTSD, and was forced to abandon piano, golf, tennis and skiing. “It’s been tough — I’m always in pain. It’s with me every day,” he said.
The glib reactions came quickly. An insensitive friend once blurted out, “Oh, sh-t – we’re going to hear this story for the rest of our lives,” Summers recalled. Others have reduced his suffering to a financial transaction, asking whether the compensation made it worthwhile. “At first almost everybody says, ‘Well, you must have gotten a lot of money,'” he said. “Yes, I’ve got a substantial sum of money, but I’ve also had a substantial amount of pain and recovery. Are you factoring that in?”
Summers, who said he received about one million dollars from the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, now has a prepared response for such encounters. “Do you think I would have liked to have given up piano playing, golfing, tennis and skiing – things I loved?” he asked. He pointed out he can no longer grip a racquet or club, adding, “I can’t feel things like other people.” “Do you think I would have given all that up for money?” he said.
Of roughly 50 people severely burned on 9/11, Summers is among about half who survived past the first year.
Lauren Manning, a Cantor Fitzgerald senior executive who suffered burns over more than 82 percent of her body in the same North Tower lobby fireball, told The Post that some people find survivor accounts difficult to bear. “People gravitate towards stories that are easier to hold,” she said. Manning, a mother of two who has endured years of surgery and physical therapy, noted that “time fades” and “the immediacy of this horrific mass terror attack appears somehow less” for the public.
“Survival is a private struggle. It happens generally out of sight, but it was my own act of defiance. I had one simple goal: I was not going to let the terrorists claim another kill,” she said.
William Rodriguez, a North Tower custodian hailed as a hero for helping first responders rescue people, said fellow survivors feel treated with “disrespect.” Rodriguez, who lost 200 friends that day, said survivors constantly encounter people telling them to “move on, don’t dwell on it.”
“People believe we made off with a lot of compensation money and that’s not true,” Rodriguez said. With “extreme PTSD and survivor’s guilt,” he found himself destitute in 2005, living in a car under the Pulaski Skyway bridge. “I went from national hero to zero,” he said, noting that he was “victimized again – begging for help” to no avail. “Survivors suffer in silence – people have to defend themselves. They have to validate their pain because some people don’t get it,” he continued.
Brian Branco, who worked for software company Baseline on the 78th floor of the South Tower where colleagues died, told The Post that people “get bored” hearing about 9/11’s lasting fallout. “People get bored – they have no interest,” said Branco, a Lyndhurst, NJ father dealing with lifelong PTSD.
The insensitivity surfaced almost immediately. Three weeks after the attacks, a family member challenged his wife, asking, “What are you complaining about? Your husband lived,” Branco added, “People think if you don’t have any physical injury, what’s your problem? But you know what? I left three people behind. I beat myself up about it.”
The survivors’ accounts emerged as NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch this week called for “moral clarity” ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, decrying revisionists who have downplayed the attack or framed it as heroic.
The anniversary ceremonies will take place Thursday in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.