In their words: Jessi Tamayo

Can you tell us the day of… how that went for you from the morning and how it happened?

It was my first year of law school — it was the second week of class, and I lived in a dorm… I went to Fordham Law School in New York, which is right in Lincoln Center. So in the middle of the city. Fordham undergrad is in the Bronx and the law school is right in the middle of the city. My dorm looked south and I had a view of the Trade Center from my dorm room. I was getting ready for class when one of my roommates, who was also in law school, started yelling that a helicopter had crashed into one of the towers. We went to the window and we looked and we thought it was like a helicopter or like a small private plane. So we were watching the first tower smoking when we saw the second plane go into the second tower. We were watching it, and at that point we were like, “Oh my god how could two planes…” and obviously nothing was in the news so I called my parents, and my roommate Gaby and I were watching.

I called my parents, and we turned the TV on and nothing, nothing, nothing, and then slowly things started coming on the TV — and then as it was coming on we watched the first building… It literally looked like a mushroom the way it expanded before it went down. So we watched one-by-one the towers collapse from our window. Then the phone service got cut off, like the cell service, so we lost cell service. I had a room phone, like a landline, and that got cut off. Then I was just sending emails to my parents being like, “I don’t know what’s happening — two buildings just collapsed.” By that time the news was on, and my roommate freaked out and decided that she was going to run across Central Park to some relatives house on the east side of Manhattan.

I ran to another person in the dorm’s room. We went into the law school, and the law school was just… anybody that was there was just like, “Get out immediately! Leave the building!” So everybody just ran, scattered like mice. That was that morning, and I went back to my dorm by myself and found another kid that was staying in the dorms and we just kind of huddled up and watched the news. I couldn’t get in touch with anybody at that stage. There was just no communication of any sort. My mom finally got me an email and she said, “What if I got a barge to come up the river, can you get to the river to get out of Manhattan?” Nobody knew what the next thing would be. Everyone just thought that buildings were just going to keep coming down.

So I stayed, I stayed in the city. I had nowhere else to go, no family there, I didn’t know anybody there. I had like two friends, one of them was on Wall Street working for a bank and I couldn’t get in touch with her for a couple of days. So, it just… that was that morning… we just kind of wandered… honestly my friend and I just wandered around the city completely aimlessly afterwards because everyone that we knew that had a way to get out of the city got out. We just stayed there because we were new; we just moved there, and we had nowhere to go.

Wow. How far were you location wise? How many blocks were you from the…

Probably… 60 blocks, which is not that far if you think about it. So what was interesting was that we could watch it perfectly from our window and then the smoke started moving up Manhattan.

After the fact, in the weeks after, did your school start immediately? How long was it before they started again?

No. I think we were out for two weeks, if I remember correctly. But not like how it is now [with COVID-19]. There was no telecommuting, no class. It was just, “Get out and take care of yourselves.” So we didn’t have school for two weeks. I think a lot of places were closed. But what was amazing about New York was that people did not stop functioning. I’m from Miami, I went to college in Boston, and that’s when I fell in love with New York. I ended up living there for 15 years after. My daughter was born there. The reaction from people was so survivalist and amazing. It was just so amazing and inspiring. I will never forget — we were walking out of the dorms in the law school and every place would just be plastered with flyers with people my age… their faces on it… that their parents couldn’t find them. They were dead. They died… but you would just walk everywhere and see people that looked exactly like us — like, “Please help us find this person.” We all went to give blood the next day, so September 12th, but they weren’t taking it because there was nobody to give blood to. There were no survivors. So we thought we could give blood to blood banks but there was no point because there was no one to take it.

Earlier you mentioned that you and your roommates thought that it was a helicopter flying into the building, but then you saw the other tower being hit and then you saw them collapse, so at that point did you still think that it was helicopters or did you have any idea of what was going on?

No. We still thought it was… I think we still thought it was helicopters or like small private planes… but the pilot.. Well… sorry… the second plane is when we realized that this was too coincidental for it to be an accidental private plane kind of thing. But I’m not sure that it occurred to us until the news came on. Then we started… What was crazy was that we turned our TVs up against the windows. So the news had just picked up on it before the towers went down. We had the news on one side and were watching it on our window the second. It was a very unique perspective on it.

How did it change your education in law school? Did 9/11 affect the curriculum or the law you were studying?

I think a lot more people... they started developing classes on international law and international relations, a lot of stuff on terrorism… I think it changed our education in the sense that like… our education was being put into perspective in a way that it hadn’t before. For example, constitutional law — which is like fundamental rights offered by the Constitution — that became one of the most integral classes to us because suddenly we are in a world where we are putting people in Guantanamo Bay and not giving them any sort of access to representation, process, etc. So it was real-life happening in our class. The professors taught differently and taught from a perspective of [a nation] under attack. Immigration law exploded and we wanted to know, “How did these people come into our country and train here?”

Uniquely to New Yorkers, it was very personal. It made the law school experience very personalized because you saw your professors as human beings. They would break down in class, you know? So it was just a very different type of experience. Now I’m a law professor at UM. I’ve met a lot of professors since I graduated in 2004, and I actually taught at Fordham. I have this interesting comparison of what normal law school looks like versus what my experience was like. And what it did for us, too, was that as students, it bonded us instantly. We still, to this day — I’m 16 years out of law school — on the anniversary of 9/11 I text my old roommates who I barely speak to. There’s just certain people who we choose to stay in touch with and stay in each other’s loops because we went through that day together.

Less related to your law experience, what do you think was the biggest change when it comes to security in New York, like in airports and things like that — like walking into buildings where they have scanners or metal detectors?

Oh my god there were cops everywhere. The police presence was immense. Any big buildings in downtown suddenly had police outside that were kind of watching what was going on. As far as metal detectors and things like that, I think all the federal buildings suddenly had them and law school did not have them. I’m not sure that any law schools really had them but I was very happy with the increased screening mechanisms, as opposed to many people who were annoyed with airport screening. I, still to this day, am so grateful that they take forever. If they pull people out I’m happy about it. For years I would get on planes, and still do, and I’m like, “Ok. If anybody or anything makes me slightly uncomfortable I will get off the plane.” Anybody that was close to me, I would tell them the same thing every flight they took. “If you have any weird feelings about it, get off the plane.” It creates a whole different mindset I think.

So when we went to New York we talked to an alumna from Ransom who was also in New York at the time, and she explained to us her story. She said that the day after the attacks she had gone and bought her daughter a phone, because she didn’t have one, so I was just wondering if 9/11 and the impacts of it changed your parenting techniques.

100%. Absolutely. A billion percent. My daughter is 9. Her dad lives in New York, and I refuse to let her get on a plane by herself. She’s of the age where she can be an unaccompanied minor traveling with a little thing around her neck, but there’s no way I’d ever let her fly alone. Ever. Never. Until she’s probably around your age. I think that’s like the primary thing. Communication with my parents — my parents got to the phase where it was like if I didn’t answer their first or second phone call it was a panic. We had to have an understanding that communication with everyone was so important, and responding after that day — the lack of communication that day is what changed the way we saw it. My daughter knows about it, so it’s not like I’ve hidden it from her, but I think that I’m so hyper aware of how vulnerable we are and everybody is as a country. It changed your perspective.

You know there’s people out there that will do anything to make a point, and they made their point. I think that it’s influenced the way… I want her to go wherever she wants to go for college, but I need her to constantly be in communication with me. I need to always know where she is. It scares me a little bit to have her someplace that’s detached. that’s the other thing I realized. If you’re stuck on the island of Manhattan and you can’t get out by plane, car, train, unless you’re gonna swim across the Hudson, you’re stuck on an island. That’s what happened to me. I couldn’t get off because they closed the bridges and the tunnels. Since I didn’t have anyone to get me off I was stuck on the island and that was a very scary feeling, to be stuck somewhere.

How many years did it take, even if maybe not yet, for you to feel comfortable getting on a plane again?

No, I still walk in and I am always aware of who might be the federal agent on the plane. I’m like, “Ok, who’s the person here watching everybody come on?” I still get nervous in airports, especially the loading gate looking around at the people that are getting on. I don’t know if that’s ever going to go away. And I, probably like you guys, grew up on planes all the time. I was constantly traveling, so it’s just something I never thought of. Even trains, subways, everything.

What was the biggest change you noticed that affected you the most in terms of airport security — like metal detectors or that you can’t go in without a ticket?

Well, I was very used to my parents walking me to the gate and waiting until the plane took off, so that was an adjustment. But, what I think I’m most aware of now is I pay a lot of attention to the security agents who are doing the screenings, and if they’re not doing a good job at screening I get nervous, like, “You’re not paying attention! You’re supposed to have looked through that person’s stuff.” For me, if the guys who are supposed to search through bags are talking, I just… I think what happens is that I started reacting to people who don’t do their jobs well at airport security. I want to yell at them and be like, “Do this the right way!!”

So you mentioned that you wanted to donate blood at the blood banks and everything and you saw the flyers of children. As a law school student did your community that you were involved with come together in any way for 9/11? What sense of community did you notice in the following days, weeks, months?

Well we all stuck together. We were inseparable. Everyone in the first-year class really stuck it out together and were very accountable for each other and checked in on each other a lot. Honestly, I don’t remember participating in any sort of organized response. I think we were just young and too new. What I did, and I think I put this in an email to your teacher, what I ended up doing my third year of law school, I ended up working for a law firm that represented the families of victims who had died on September 11th, and what my responsibility was, which was the most tragic, was that I was responsible for putting together mini yearbooks almost — or like pamphlets on people’s lives to try to value someone’s life. I would get information — you know, 25-year-old John Smith died in Tower 1 because he worked for [Cantor] Fitzgerald. Then I’d have to go through it and get all the pictures that his family had sent of him. And I’d have to put together this booklet of John Smith’s life to try to create a value on it. Like what did John Smith do? Did he have a fiancé? Did he have a child? Was he a single 25-year-old? Did he just start working? We had to try to create the best picture we could of these people's lives. I spent about a year going through pictures of everybody who had died — well not everybody, but the people that our firm represented for the Victim Compensation Fund. That was my job in the aviation law firm that I worked for. I spent a lot of time fixated, and that was how I felt like in some ways I contributed or paid back. I did what I could, because there was very little in my power to do. But that’s what I did for a year.

How has that affected you? The fact that you had to go through all those pictures and put together the lives of people that had passed. Has that stayed with you or affected you?

There were a couple of people, it was always two people that stuck with me. They were both my age when they died. It was unfortunate because... what I learned from that was that it’s unfortunate that people value other human beings with a dollar sign because the people that got more money were people who were older, more established, had children, had a family. They were essentially valued higher than the guy my age who had just started working and was 23. I remember going through his stuff, and just being like “This is awful. He just started his life.” And we are trying to say why he is valuable. It’s just… it’s just shocking to me. But again, it’s nothing that anyone had control over in terms of what he was or wasn’t going to get. It was just a pretty heavy experience at 23 to be putting together packages of people whose lives were lost. I’m so happy I did it though. I’m proud of the fact that I was able to that because, like I said I feel incredibly connected to the city and to that experience and who I shared it with, and honestly if I pull myself out of it, just the fact that I was there during that time and watched a city survive instantly.

New York was just the most resilient, most amazing… that city is so inspiring. Having lived through that with the city, in a weird way it makes me feel so bonded to the city and indebted to it because it took care of me after a huge… you know, after the city was attacked I still felt supported. I thrived and with law school I bounced back. People kept functioning, and the resiliency of that city is insane. It’s just amazing.

How often would you say that you think about 9/11?

It comes into pop culture a lot, but I will say this. Every single year, on September 11th, I spend the entire day by myself. It’s just my thing. I don’t go to work, I don’t hang out with my daughter, I don’t spend time with my family. I spend the entire day alone. It’s not something I consciously thought to do, it’s just how it played out. I think about it frequently. I mean it’s not something that I think about everyday probably, though I think for a very long time I did think about it everyday. One thing, I don’t know if anyone has pointed you in this direction, the telethon that they had after it, “A Tribute to Heroes,” have you guys watched it?

We watched part of it and talked about it.

If you have a chance... because that’s one thing I did for years afterwards. I bought it on DVD because I watched it live when they first did it the week of… then I bought the DVD of it. For years I would sit and watch it, periodically, like multiple times throughout the year. What you guys might have seen was the parts with music, but in the intro there were celebrities asking for money, but there were also real people asking for their people. When it was aired live, it was the same week as September 11th, so people were still searching for their children or their parents or their sisters. And those people were on film begging, like with a picture or a flyer, saying like, “This is my son John. He is missing. Please help me find him. If anyone has seen him in a hospital or anywhere please tell me.” For the next five years after the attack, I watched the telethon. That was a big part of… it’s just something that I felt compelled to keep in my life, that particular video.