Alexandra Minaya, 35, has spoken out about the helplessness she felt as a 10-year-old trapped at P.S. 19 while the Twin Towers fell.
Minaya, now a Brooklyn mother working in emergency healthcare services, was on the school’s outdoor playground in Lower Manhattan when a cloud of white smoke barreled toward her and her classmates on Sept. 11, 2001. The children sprinted inside as teachers shrieked around them, none yet grasping that the towers had begun their collapse just blocks away.
“It was terrifying,” Minaya told The Post. “We all ran screaming into the school building.”
She recalls being “covered in white ash” and how “the air smelled like burning chemicals.” The terror was compounded by her inability to reach her mother. “I was so scared something bad had happened to my mom, but had no way to contact her,” Minaya said. “I didn’t have a cell phone and landline phone service was down. I was helpless.”
The experience of being cut off from family, surrounded by adults who were themselves crying and confused, left marks that persist 25 years later. “You know, as a kid, you look to the adults for support in times of chaos,” she explained. “But the adults surrounding me were crying and just as confused as us kids.” Though never formally diagnosed with a post-9/11 health condition, Minaya remains haunted by the catastrophe.
Diana Bejasa, 42, now living in Hawaii with her three-year-old daughter, endured an even closer vantage point. A senior at Stuyvesant High School mere blocks from the World Trade Center, she felt the concrete quake as the first tower crumbled. “It was a full-body experience. Everything was shaking, lights flickering, then the electricity went out completely,” she said. Administrators ordered students onto the West Side Highway with a single command: “Walk!”
“I remember looking around, seeing people covered in ash. As I was walking, I looked back and saw the second tower fall,” Bejasa recalled. “And I had this sudden feeling of ‘Oh, f–k! What’s going on?'”
The Queens native’s 10-mile trek home to Forest Hills on foot, alone among weeping strangers, became a dissociative blur. “I couldn’t reach my parents on the phone. I couldn’t find any of my friends. I dissociated. I completely shut down,” she said. She has no memory of arriving home, only the knowledge that reuniting with her family mattered. Diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, Bejasa has changed careers multiple times and struggled through a contentious divorce during pregnancy.
For years, she rejected the label “survivor,” comparing her experience to those who developed 9/11-related cancers or lost loved ones. Some of her own teachers and classmates were among the stricken. “For a long time, I didn’t even identify as a survivor because there were people who’d been through so much worse than I had,” she said. Now a public speaker, she has claimed the identity: “It wasn’t until I was much older that I even felt like it was OK to identify as a survivor. I can honor and remember those who died that day, and still consider myself a survivor without discrediting anyone’s experience.”
The psychological toll extended across all five boroughs. Vanessa Collazos, 35, now working in brand marketing, was a 10-year-old at I.S. 73 in Maspeth, Queens, when she spotted the burning towers from her classroom window. “I was so young and innocent. I thought someone had set off fireworks in the buildings,” she said. Her teacher’s reaction shattered that illusion: “His face went pale and he walked right out of the room, left us alone, didn’t say a word, and we never saw him again.”
Alone with her peers, Collazos waited hours for her mother and uncle to return from Midtown, watching repeated footage of people jumping to their deaths. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t process it. I was in a state of shock,” she told The Post. Her family eventually fled to Los Angeles seeking distance from the trauma. Now back in Queens, she still grapples with anxiety and hypervigilance. “I walk around wondering, ‘Is everything going to be OK today? What can I control? Is that an abandoned bag in my subway car? Is it going to explode?'” she said. “I didn’t have airplane anxiety before 9/11, but I do now.”
Lesley Koeppel, a New York City psychotherapist, explained that childhood exposure to unpredictable catastrophe can fundamentally alter one’s sense of safety. “When something catastrophic happens, especially without warning, a child or adolescent can learn that the world is not predictable or safe. That’s destabilizing,” she told The Post. “Years later, that can show up as anxiety, hypervigilance, a need for control, difficulty tolerating uncertainty or a more intense sensitivity to loss and danger.”
The event may be long over, Koeppel added, “but a sense of stability can take much longer to catch up.”
Some survivors have channeled their experiences into service. Bejasa now volunteers to help victims of natural disasters in Hawaii, including recent wildfires in Oahu. Minaya spent 14 years in emergency healthcare, inspired by the first responders she witnessed as a child. “I didn’t always want to be an emergency responder, but I just knew that I wanted to help others in the same way those men and women did during and after 9/11,” she said. “It was an absolute tragedy that I’ll never forget, but it also united us as New Yorkers in a way I’ll never forget, too.”
New York City will mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks with ceremonies at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Lower Manhattan.
