Julie Sweeney Roth still hears her husband’s voice every September.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuLYIn3zSOk
Brian Sweeney, 38, was a former Navy pilot turned defense contractor who had settled on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with Julie after the couple married there. The job let him work mostly from home, and by all accounts the life they built was a happy one. Julie had met him at a Philadelphia bar years earlier, and she would later recall that he stood out from the suited crowd in a cap and denim shirt. She told a friend that very night that he was “the kind of guy [she] would marry.” At six-foot-three, she described him as “a force to be reckoned with.”
That ordinary morning of September 11, 2001, Julie was teaching when her mother-in-law, Louise, pulled her from the classroom. The news was already breaking: Brian was aboard United Flight 175, and it had been hijacked. Julie rushed home. What waited there on the answering machine would become one of the most enduring personal records of that day.
“Jules, this is Brian. Listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you.
“I want you to do good, go have good times. Same to my parents and everybody, and I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there,” he said in the voicemail, recorded on a seat-back phone before the plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum has since preserved the message in its permanent collection. Julie, in a video produced for the museum, spoke about the moment she first played it back. “I’m thankful for it. So thankful for that message. Because at least I know, without a shadow of a doubt, what he was thinking,” she said. She found something unexpected in the recording too — the steadiness of his tone. That calmness soothed her, and she has called the message “very powerful.”
The Sweeney story is one of several last calls that have come to define the human scale of the attacks. Brian had not even been scheduled to make that trip as a regular commuter; his work as a defense contractor had put him on the flight. The hijackers took over United 175 and deliberately crashed it into the South Tower, killing all 65 people aboard plus hundreds in the building. The North Tower had already been hit by American Airlines Flight 11. Together the collisions would bring both towers down and claim nearly 3,000 lives.
In the years since, Julie has rebuilt her life. She remarried, had two children, and now volunteers at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum — the same institution that safeguards Brian’s final words. The message has become an annual touchstone for Americans marking the anniversary, replayed and shared across platforms as both historical document and intimate farewell.
The voicemail’s power lies partly in its specificity: a man addressing his wife by nickname, worrying about her future happiness, sending love to parents he would not see again. There is no panic, only clarity. Julie has carried that quality forward in her own advocacy and remembrance work, ensuring that the voice on the recording stays attached to the full life that preceded it.
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum continues to feature the recording in its educational programming and annual commemorations.