This Man's Life
How can you begin to comprehend the enormity of September 11? By understanding just what was lost in one man's tragic death
At 8:53 a.m. Tuesday, September 11, the phone rang in Kierstie Clark's Brooklyn Heights apartment. "What are you doing calling me before 9 a.m.?" Kierstie, a graduate student, asked sleepily. "Don't turn on your TV," said Kierstie's boyfriend, Scott Johnson, 26. "Don't turn on your radio." From her 17th-floor window, Kierstie could see a plume of smoke rising from the twin towers across the East River. Scott calmly explained there had been an explosion. His investment research firm, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, was going to evacuate the 89th floor, but it would take some time. He would call her when he got down.
Scott tried his mother, Ann, but she wasn't home. Scott's brother, Tom, called and told him to get out. Two friends, Steve Selwood and Josh Cain, also phoned. Josh says he could hear panic in Scott's voice. "Are you all right, man?" Josh asked. He had to say it again because Scott's voice was unsteady. "I got to go, man," Scott replied. "I got to go." At 8:59 a.m., Scott left another message for his mom. "They're talking about an evacuation," he said. Around 9 a.m., Scott reached his father at work. "Dad, I'm OK," he said. "It was the other tower that was hit." They quickly got off the phone. Four minutes later, Tom Johnson, 60, watched on television as the second plane flew into the south tower. "I felt in my heart that it had hit him," Johnson says. "I wasn't 100 percent certain that it had hit right at his level, but if it wasn't at his level, it was below his level." It was the last time Johnson would talk to his son.
As the immediate shock of September 11 fades and the nation's attention turns to anthrax and Afghanistan, thousands of families like the Johnsons and tens of thousands of their friends are struggling to cope with the immensity of their losses. There are more than 5,000 tragedies to tell of children left behind, moms who won't see their sons and daughters marry. Fathers, sisters, colleagues, and friends will forever have a hole in their lives, a hole where the surprise phone calls and birthday cards and jokes in a bar after work would have been. Some of the dead are police officers, firefighters, rescue workers--all of whom have been memorialized for bravely plunging into an evolving horror. But floor after floor of the dead are accidental bystanders, office workers who had no idea what was happening to them. They were the often well-paid foot soldiers of the financial community, arriving early to wrestle with the arcana of bond prices, insurance quotes, and company reports and leaving late to catch a train back to the rest of their lives. They were people like Scott Johnson.
Lucky. Scott Michael Johnson grew up in the quiet New Jersey suburb of Montclair, in a large Federal-style home with a white picket fence and a hilltop view of the twin towers 19 miles to the east. I lived a backyard away. As a child, Scott looked like a combination of Dennis the Menace and Richie Rich. "And that kid from Home Alone," one of his friends says. "He was a Macaulay Culkin stunt double."
Sometimes it seemed to Scott's pals and family that he had been born lucky. Scott escaped from a serious car accident his senior year in high school with only a scratch on his chin. A couple of years ago on New Year's Day, Scott walked away basically unscathed after his taxi was hit by a bus. Then there was the archaeological dig at Caesarea, a Roman site in Israel. During the first week, Scott and a team of Trinity College students unearthed a cache of 11 decorated gold pieces. The discovery was so rare (they were expecting to find pottery shards) that his picture made the back cover of Biblical Archaeologist magazine. His professor at Trinity and supervisor on the dig, Martha Risser, says Scott had an uncanny ability to see artifacts before anybody else. "Small fish bones are nearly invisible, but Scott managed to find them and pull them out of the sifter, so we could learn what the medieval inhabitants had been eating," she wrote recently.
After college, Scott tried to figure out a career path. Years before, he had told his old man, the banker, "I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, but for sure I don't want to get up early in the morning and put on a suit, especially not at a bank." He considered archaeology grad school, but that seemed a lonely road. His father put him in touch with Foreign Service members, who encouraged him to gain business experience. Finally, he asked his dad to spring for career aptitude tests. When the results came back, he laughed. You could become a musical performer, he was told, or work in a business that requires cooperation. "Such people," the counselor said, "often do well in a bank."
Scott went out and got a job at the Bank of New York. His father took him to buy a suit. At four stores, he was too tall and too thin (38 extra long) to fit into anything. So Johnson brought Scott to a tailor. "As a result, Scott always looked like a million bucks," he says. The father and son became pals, "a little bit like colleagues," Johnson says. Scott would call his dad to say something had come across the tape about GreenPoint Financial, the company where Johnson serves as chief executive. When his wife was busy at an evening meeting, Johnson would invite Scott out to dinner. The father took tremendous pride in walking down the street and watching women admire his blond, 6-foot-2 son. "I've now been deprived of that pleasure, which was to me a wonderful one," he says.
In 2000, Scott decided to leave the bank to become a stock analyst for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. He had never done equity research, so it was almost like starting over. Within six months, Scott had been promoted from trainee to junior banking analyst. "We put him in the class of rising star," says Tom Michaud, who runs KBW's sales group. Scott never missed the daily 7:30 a.m. meeting. If one of the firm's directors asked for a statistic, Scott would be the first to respond. "People started laughing about it," says KBW equity salesman Will DeRiso, 26. "He always knew the answer."
Scott told his sister, Margaret, that he worked 13-hour days to earn enough money to travel the world. Already he had drunk mojitos at Hemingway's favorite spot in Cuba, toured Luxor and the Nile in Egypt, and walked the battlefields of Vietnam. He still dreamed of joining the Foreign Service, an ambition he discussed with his friend Steve Selwood on the last weekend of his life. "He wanted to be a player on the world level," says Steve. "He just didn't want to be posted in Barbados."
Hope. After watching the plane attacks September 11, Scott's parents and sister went to church. The south tower, Scott's building, had just collapsed. Ann spent the first 24 hours trying to figure out how many floors Scott could have gone by the stairs in the four minutes between his last phone call and the plane crash. She and the family received a glimmer of hope Thursday, September 13. A friend called and said Scott was listed on a survivors site on the Internet. The people at KBW warned that the Web site was "unauthorized," but seeing Scott's name there raised expectations. That evening, 14 friends and relatives gathered around the Johnson dining room table. "Scott, we love you so much," said Tom Johnson. His normally steely banker's voice cracked and became louder. "Lord, we want Scott back RIGHT NOW," he practically shouted. "We want him BACK FOREVER." The phone rang.
Josh Cain, 26, felt it could be a sign that Scott was still alive. "There are those miracles," he thought. But Scott was not on the phone. Five hours later, Scott's friends got up to leave. Tom and Ann Johnson and their son, Tom, 28, hugged each of the young men they had known since childhood. As he entered the elevator, Zach McLarty, 26, looked back at the Johnsons standing 2 feet apart, so alone and crying. "And I remember that's when it really sunk in," he says. Josh was still saying goodbye. "I love you," Tom Johnson said as he passed. "I love you, too," Josh said for the first time to his dead friend's dad.
Ann Johnson wrote Scott's obituary on September 17, her 55th birthday. She sat with her husband and discussed wording for the paid notice, which would appear in the New York Times. He didn't think it was appropriate to call what happened to Scott "the tragic event at the World Trade Center" because "that could apply to an accident." So they settled on a different theme: Scott, they wrote, had died in the "attack on civil society." Tom Johnson explained that in his view the terrorists had attacked "everything that makes sense and is good." They were after America's tolerance, openness, and freedom. "A short summary for that is `civil society,' " he says. Ann Johnson liked it, too, because it showed Scott had died as an innocent. "I told somebody I thought the whole world was weeping for us because we're all vulnerable," she says.
Around the same time, Ann steadied herself enough to go to Scott's apartment on the Upper East Side. Ever the banker's son, Scott had organized his personal papers in an accordion folder, "neat as a pin," says his mother. All his dress shirts, jackets, and suits were lined up in his closet. Everything else was folded in drawers and on shelves. She took his papers and began the grim task of paying Scott's bills and canceling his credit cards and magazine subscriptions. She took an overdue notice to Blockbuster video and closed his account, explaining that Scott would not be coming home anymore.
Courage. Ann Johnson also began to prepare for the memorial service. She selected a quote from South African author Alan Paton for the back of the program: "Give us courage, O Lord, to stand up and be counted, to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves." For the program cover, she chose a picture of Scott at his brother's wedding, where he was the best man three months earlier. "I'll never get to be his best man," Tom had lamented in New York.
The night before Scott's memorial, I came home to New Jersey and joined our friends at Josh Cain's family house. We drank Scott's favorite beer, 16-ounce "Tall Boy" Budweisers, and talked about how amazing it was that five of Scott's close friends were kids he'd grown up with on the same street. Soon we were having the usual bull session about the merits of the Yankees vs. the Mets. (For the record, Scott was a Yankee fan.) We laughed at how Scott would take the bus from New York to the suburbs solely for a $13 haircut at Larry's Barber Shop, where he had gone since he was a baby. We sounded like characters in that boys-night-out movie Diner, but on downers.
At 10 a.m. Saturday, more than a dozen of the guys filed into St. Cassian Church. Never had we arrived so early for an event in our lives. When Scott's girlfriend, Kierstie, walked in and saw us in dark suits sitting silently next to each other, she pictured us as 7-year-olds getting into trouble. "I couldn't believe you had to sit there all neat and pressed and breaking down inside," she said later. By 10:30 a.m., the church was full. Scott's buddies had traveled from as far away as Hong Kong. There were friends from high school and college, parents, colleagues, teachers--in all, more than 1,000 people. At 11 a.m., Tom and Ann Johnson and Scott's siblings, Tom and Margaret, walked in from an anteroom and sat in the front row. During the ceremony, a priest spoke directly to the Johnsons. "You've got to let him go," he said, his voice trembling.
"Lasting image." Eric Kusseluk, 26, took the podium for the final eulogy. "To us, `Scott-O' was the epitome of manners," Eric said. "He was the one you wanted your parents to talk to and your girlfriends to meet." Eric talked about how the guys had assembled in Puerto Rico a few weeks before for a wedding. Scott booked the rooms, found the airfares, "and basically kept the rest of us from sleeping on the beach." The final morning, Eric got up early to go swimming. "The ocean was calm," he said, "and there was not a cloud in the sky. I saw Scott, already up and sitting on the deck of our hotel overlooking the ocean. Legs crossed, paper in one hand, cigarette in the other. Merit Ultra Lights, of course. Once again he was dressed to a T--khaki shorts, a white button-down shirt without a wrinkle, and sandals. There was not an ounce of sand on him, either." They sat and talked about their lives. "He was so content in every facet of his life," Eric said. "Never a complaint, nor feelings of regret. We then lifted our glasses and toasted to our more than 20 years of friendship. What a lasting image to have of Scott."
Back at the Johnsons' that night, the guys congregated in the pool room. We could see the swimming pool outside where we'd have belly-flopping contests, Scott so skinny you half thought he might break his ribs. Trip Hosmer, a Trinity College friend, walked up to Scott's mother and introduced himself. "I'm the one who totaled your car freshman year," he said. She laughed. I flipped through a photo album of Tom's wedding and saw so many pictures of Scott with that vintage smile. Ann Johnson passed by. We could bear to look at each other only for a moment. "That's OK, Jeff," she said, tears in her eyes. "You're all going to grow old and gray, and Scott will be young and beautiful."
I returned to see her the following Thursday. She said she had struggled to decide whether to speak with a Keefe Bruyette survivor about what happened in those final minutes. "Do you really want to know?" her husband had asked her. "Well, I want to know that he didn't suffer," she said. She hoped Scott died instantly from the crash. "I couldn't protect him," she said and began crying. "You raise a child, you want to make sure they are OK. Tom and I said to each other, `Why didn't they take us?' "
The Johnsons are trying to accept that the beautiful days are not his beautiful days anymore. "So frequently I will catch myself enjoying something, and there is an instant pang of guilt," says Tom Johnson. He will think, "Oh my gosh, I lost Scott. I can't be enjoying this. You sort of feel you've compromised the grieving you're supposed to be doing. But then an instant later you realize, Oh no, that's not the case. Scott wouldn't want you to go through your life that way at all." He feels angry and cheated that his son has been taken away. "It's selfish, but it's about what they did to me," he says. "I'm angry looking forward to the times that this family will have together. It's been always so important to us, major holidays. Everything is going to get compromised by this, and I'm angry about that."
Kierstie wishes Scott would come into her mind more. "I've been waiting for him to sit next to me, a little hologram talking to me," she says. "I want something huge and I haven't gotten it. I've been ignoring the smaller things because of it." Her dreams are about death and fighting. "He used to come around in my dreams," she says. "I'm too preoccupied to notice him now." She keeps hoping for a "Road to Damascus" moment, where she will see the light and Scott in heaven. "I thought he'd be sitting on the edge of my bed," she says. "I didn't know in my heart that wouldn't happen. I knew in my head that's not the way life works. That's starting to set in that his presence is subtle."
A couple of weeks ago, Josh and Zach and I decided we had to see ground zero. A friend's father had described it as "looking at the gates of hell," so we thought we were prepared for the worst. Below Chambers Street, we followed the silent crowds down Broadway and stopped at a metal barricade. Two blocks away, the burned out hulks were smoldering. A banner on one of them said, "We will never forget." An Air Force reservist alternately yelled for people to move forward and handed out tissues from a box of Kleenex. "It's worse than I thought, and I thought the worst," Zach said. "There's just so much metal. You think of concrete, but it's so much metal and steel. It's so hard to think that Scott-O is buried under all that rubble." Scott's friend Mike Morris lives the ground zero nightmare all week. "You don't understand what it's like," says Mike, who works in a wine store nearby. "I walk by that thing every day going to work. I cross Chambers, I look down, I see big, burned-out buildings. I blow a kiss, say, `Love you, baby,' I keep walking. I say something to him every day."
This story appears in the November 12, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.