Ryan Levy traveled 110 floors to the rooftop
observation deck on the South Tower.
“My brother isn’t good with heights to begin with,”
Marnie Levy said.
Clouds and fog fuzzed the details of the New York
skyline that morning, but observers could look out and
still see the sprawl of lower Manhattan.
Ryan Levy peered over the edge, 1,362-feet from the
ground. He pulled coins from his pocket and slipped
them into the penny press. He squeezed out a flat penny
with the New York Yankees’ emblem and put the
memento in his pocket for good luck. Ryan Levy’s friend
offered to use the last picture in the roll of a disposable
camera to take a snapshot of him, his back against the
white railing. It would be the last picture they would take
that day.
The time stamp on Ryan Levy’s ticket to the observation
deck reads: “09/10/01 09:30.”
Twenty-three hours and 33 minutes later, five
hijackers crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into
floors 77 through 85 on the southern façade of the
tower. Less than an hour after that, the South Tower
would crumble into dust, ash and smoke with an
unknown number of souls lost in the rubble. It would
take just 10 seconds to fall.
“Basically in a nutshell, 24 hours saved my brother’s
life,” Marnie Levy said. “He very well could have been on
top of one of those two towers at the point of impact.”
Ryan Levy was supposed to be on a flight home to
Florida on the morning of Sept. 11. But the day’s events
grounded more than 4,500 commercial and general
aviation flights.
“We had no way of getting in touch with him and
whether or not he was on those planes,” Marnie Levy
said. “At that point, it wasn’t identified which planes were
going where. They just knew at the time two planes
struck the towers and they were commercial airliners.”
Marnie Levy and her family were a nervous wreck
until they realized none of the planes hijacked that day
were scheduled flights to Florida. Phone lines were
jammed and it would take Ryan Levy five days to get out
of the city on a 27-hour Greyhound Bus ride, but his
family knew he was safe. Before he left, Marnie Levy said
he reached as close to Ground Zero as he could to deliver
socks and Gatorade to rescue crews.
“Obviously it was a scary time, but the picture just
tells a thousand stories,” Marnie Levy said. “He was
probably one of the last groups of people to have that
experience of going up on that observation deck and
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