N.J. Hero's Call: I Love You, We're Going to Stop Them
3 passengers likely saved 4th target
By HELEN KENNEDY
Daily News Staff Writer
WASHINGTON
Heroic passengers aboard the hijacked flight from Newark — led by a courageous new father from New Jersey — apparently got together to foil a plot to drive the plane into the White House or Capitol.
They paid for the lives of many innocents with their own.
Passenger Jeremy Glick of West Milford, N.J., called his wife from the plane to tell her they had been hijacked by three knife-wielding Arabs wearing red headbands.
They had turned the Boeing 757 — originally heading for San Francisco — toward Washington by brandishing a box they said contained a bomb, he said.
Glick's wife, Lyzbeth, told him two other hijacked planes had just hit the World Trade Center. At that point, Glick knew he was riding on a flying bomb that could have killed many more than those aboard.
Family members say he put the phone down, then came back to tell his wife the men on board had taken a vote and were going to try to overpower the hijackers.
"He knew that stopping them was going to end all of their lives," Glick's brother-in-law told The Washington Post. "But that was my brother-in-law. He was a take-charge guy."
Before heading forward to sacrifice his life to stop the terrorists, Glick managed to tell his wife he loved her and their 3-month-old baby daughter. Shortly later, after some unusual flying maneuvers, United Flight 93 plunged into an old coal field southeast of Pittsburgh. All 45 aboard were killed.
Government officials believe the plan had been to plunge the jet into the White House, the Capitol or, just outside Washington, Camp David.
Glick was a salesman at Vividence, a small, California-based business software firm.
Vividence CEO Jeff Greenberg called him "a true hero in every sense" and said it was "an incredible honor" to have known him.
Glick was not the only passenger who managed to make a last call. Passenger Thomas Burnett called his wife, Deena, four times to discuss the situation. She told him about the World Trade Center disaster.
He said, "I know we're all going to die. Three of us are going to do something about it," said the family's priest, the Rev. Frank Colacicco.
Burnett, 38, vice president of a California medical devices company and father of three children, told his wife one of the passengers had already been stabbed to death and the rest had little hope of survival.
He ended the call with a last "Love you, honey."
Mark Bingham, 31, who lived in Manhattan's Chelsea area and in San Francisco, was sitting in seat 4D in the rear of the first-class section.
He managed to call his mom, Alice Hoglan, to say goodbye.
"The fact that he was so close to the action, it is likely that he was able to get at these guys," she told reporters. "It gives me a great deal of comfort to know my son may have been able to avert the killing of many, many innocent people."
Bingham, who ran The Bingham Group public relations firm, with offices on both coasts, was a college rugby star who once wrestled a mugger to the ground, his mom said.
Flight 93 was the longest in the air Tuesday — it was the first to take off and the last to crash.
The Boeing 757 took off at 8:01 a.m. from Newark, bound for San Francisco. It flew west until Cleveland, then suddenly turned around and made a beeline for the capital.
The Cleveland control tower said the plane made a sharp 180-degree turn and went to a low altitude. A witness on the ground called 911 to report a large aircraft flying low and banking from side to side.
The plane went down at 10:40 a.m. in rural Somerset, Pa.
At the crash scene yesterday, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former military intelligence officer and the ranking Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Committee, said he was sure rural Pennsylvania was not the target.
"Some heroic individual brought this plane down," he said. "How they avoided hitting a structure is incredible."
http://www.nydailynews.com/2001-09-12/News_and_Views/City_Beat/a-125114.asp
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