On 9/11, World Trade Center Plaza was home to a daycare. This is its story.

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At 8:46 a.m., when Flight 11 hit the north tower, the daycare was filling up.

On that morning of Sept. 11, 2001, children and teachers were in the middle of drop-off at Children’s Discovery Center, a daycare in Building 5 of the World Trade Center. A couple minutes’ walk across the plaza from the 110-story Twin Towers, the center was a second home of sorts, a nurturing and loving environment where young children were eager to return every morning. But on that late-summer day, as the towers collapsed, airplane parts fell on their building, crushing the roof, causing severe fire and structural damage. The story of the teachers and children who were there that day has not been fully reported—until now, when, for a documentary produced by Retro Report, I tracked down as many of them as I could.

Prior to the first plane hitting, teacher Tara Jones was busy getting several toddlers to sit down to breakfast. A usual day might have included a trip out to the World Trade Center Plaza for fresh air. A little later in the day, and the children might have been there when the attack happened. But the morning had just begun when a sudden loud noise reverberated throughout the area. Jones remembers a “swooshing” sound, perhaps the plane approaching before impact.

When she and her colleagues looked out the windows, which faced west and not toward the towers, they saw a scene of chaos. They saw people running frantically in every direction and workers covering their heads with briefcases, their faces contorted with fear.

When a mother in the center yelled, “It’s a bomb!,” Jones momentarily stood in disbelief. Then she had a highly unlikely response. She recalls going into “robotic mode,” becoming entirely focused on getting the children out of the building. The kids who could walk knew to line up next to her when she yelled, “Emergency, we’ve got to go!” They had been practicing the drills regularly, a result of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As for those too young to walk, she and her co-workers scooped them up and carried them. Purses, wallets, and cellphones were left behind. The only thing that mattered was getting the kids out.

The teachers didn’t have their IDs to swipe through the turnstiles to exit the building, so Jones told the children to crawl underneath. Then the group headed one block east, gathering near St. Paul’s Chapel, the 18th-century outpost of Trinity Church—which miraculously survived destruction and later became a refuge for volunteers. Sitting the children on the ledge of the ancient cemetery, one teacher made a sign with the school’s name on it and held it up. They hoped parents would hear the news and head down to collect their little ones soon.

But as they waited, the horror was unfolding before their eyes. Twenty-five years later, Jones hasn’t been able to shake the image of one man hemorrhaging blood from his head, trying desperately to stanch the wound with his shirt. And then there were the relentless screams; Jones realized that each one signified bodies falling from the building and the crowd responding in horror. “They’d rather jump than burn,” she told me.

Meanwhile, fellow teacher Onica Sarjeant and her nearly 4-year-old son Yavne’el Montano, a student at the center, were running late. They emerged from the subway a few minutes after the first plane hit. Police tried to turn them away from the entrance to building five. But Sarjeant says it never crossed her mind to go home. She looked up and saw a gaping hole in one of the towers. When passersby said it was caused by a plane, she thought, That’s impossible. She remained determined to find the children and assist with their safe evacuation, whatever the cause. She found them outside the cemetery of St. Paul’s Chapel.

Moments later, at 9:03, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower. Montano, now 28, recalls the crash, the loud explosion, and the fireball—and then teachers grabbing the kids any way they could and running. He held on to his mother’s skirt as she and the other teachers held babies in their arms.

Sarjeant and a group headed southeast toward the water; she called it the longest run of her life. All around her, she heard screaming and shouting about terrorists and bombs, then saw the “white soot” raining out of the sky. Eventually they found a supermarket, where they grabbed shopping carts and turned them into transportation for the babies. Men offered the shirts off their backs to cover the children. Remarkably, they covered more than 3 miles in search of shelter and safety, getting as far away as they could from what we later came to call ground zero.

Meanwhile, Jones and her group of two teachers, one parent, and more children than they had arms to carry headed north. Jones found an overturned stroller and considered it an act of divine intervention: “I felt like God blessed me instantly. I took it and put some of the children in.” They ran to City Hall Park. Then, as they sat the little ones on the lawn, the ground began to shake. She heard rumbling. They didn’t know it, but the south tower was collapsing. She recalls a debris cloud coming at them like a “gigantic monster.” Once again, she and her fellow teachers needed to grab the children and run. In the frenzy, the lifesaving stroller was left behind. Her arms were once again clutching two babies. Bigger children were forced to run alongside. Breathless and terrified, they didn’t stop until they hit Chinatown. There, a police officer flagged down a van and a truck and asked them to take the women and children. As they got farther uptown, the atmosphere changed. The city seemed calm. After stopping at the only open establishment they found—a bar—the teachers decided a hospital would be the safest haven. The drivers took them to St. Clare’s, in Hell’s Kitchen.

At the same time, Sarjeant and her group had also been heading north. They began to feel safer too. When her co-teacher spotted a church in the East Village, they decided to go in. Refuge at last. There, they were given food, diapers, and a chance to breathe, Sarjeant said.

News reports told parents to look for their children at St. Vincent’s Hospital, but only a few had ended up there, creating more confusion and terror when parents arrived and didn’t see their children. One daycare mom, Supurna VedBrat, finally found her son around 4 that afternoon at St. Clare’s. She was shocked to hear that hospital officials wanted proof that she was his mother. But finally they said, “Give your mom hugs and kisses,” and he ran to her.

Little by little, the parents were reunited with their children. Some found their babies resting peacefully on cots at St. Emeric’s Church with Sarjeant’s group. Some came to St. Clare’s, where Jones’ group had found refuge. Other kids were brought to St. Vincent’s; in the chaotic escape, one baby was taken home with a fellow parent. In the end, all were reunited. And all the parents, some of whom worked in the towers, survived.

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When looking back on that day 25 years ago, Jones and Sarjeant are strikingly humble in talking about what they did. They did what they had to do, they say. Only if you push them will they speak of the trauma they endured. Sarjeant and her son sought therapy, where, she says, they found healing. But Jones suffered for many years from post-traumatic stress disorder. She was unable to work or leave her home for fear of dying, and she found herself for the first time relying on public assistance to feed her children. When she finally did get a job in a new daycare center in a different state years later, it paid $6.75 an hour, roughly half of what she’d earned at Children’s Discovery. Today both women are back to doing what they love best: teaching. It was never just a job; it was always a calling.

These women dismiss the moniker of hero, although they do try to acknowledge that they did something important. But VedBrat and other parents told me they did more than that. They saved 28 innocent lives.