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<\/p>\nDeora Bodley was just 20 years old when she was killed aboard United Airlines Flight 93 during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n
Born and raised in San Diego, the Santa Clara University student was the youngest victim aboard Flight 93 and the youngest San Diegan killed in the attacks. This year, Bodley would have turned 45.<\/p>\n
Twenty-five years after 9\/11, her mother, Debby Borza, is sharing memories of her daughter and some of the deeply personal experiences surrounding her death that she had never publicly expressed before.<\/p>\n
Snapshots in a photo book bring decades of memories to the surface in Borza’s living room.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Deora Bodley in a childhood photo. <\/p>\n
Bodley grew up loving animals and the ocean and played basketball at La Jolla Country Day High School. She had a large group of friends and was a role model to her younger sister.<\/p>\n
She had plans for her future as a student at Santa Clara University. But on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Bodley was returning to school after visiting friends and boarded Flight 93 as a standby passenger. Her mother didn’t know she was on the plane.<\/p>\n
“No, I didn’t know. I didn’t know she was getting on that flight. That was not her scheduled flight. She was a standby passenger, and it was headed to San Francisco,” Debby said. <\/p>\n
A series of phone calls, including one from the friend who had dropped Bodley off at the airport, gave Borza her first indication of the horror unfolding on live television.<\/p>\n
Borza was told her daughter had been aboard Flight 93, which had crashed in Pennsylvania. Without proof, however, she held on to hope.<\/p>\n
She made her way to Mary, Star of the Sea Catholic Church in downtown La Jolla.<\/p>\n
“And I walked into the church, and all these people were in the church; I just knelt and asked God where she was,” she described. “And he said, ‘She’s with me’. And then my phone rang, and it was United, Sharon Dewit. She said, ‘Is this Debbie Borza?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Well, I’m sorry to inform you…’ I just dropped my phone. I knew what that meant. I remember screaming and people rushing around me.”<\/p>\n
Phone records and cockpit recordings would later help piece together the actions of the passengers and crew members who refused to allow the hijackers to maintain control of Flight 93. The plane crashed into a rural Pennsylvania field, creating a 15-foot crater, instead of reaching the U.S. Capitol or White House.<\/p>\n
“They did a lot of amazing work on that flight for the last half hour. Listening to the cockpit recording, hearing them break into the cockpit. Trying to save themselves. Get home. That would’ve been a whole different world had those 40 people made it home. It’s hard to think about,” Debby said. <\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Deora Bodley in a photograph provided by her mom. <\/p>\n
As the initial shock gave way to anniversaries of the attacks, Borza became a key voice in the effort to build a national memorial for Bodley and the other victims of Flight 93.<\/p>\n
Borza travels to Pennsylvania every Sept. 11. In 2015, the final phase of the national memorial opened to the public, creating a lasting reminder of those who died aboard the flight.<\/p>\n
Borza has found many ways to honor her daughter, including what can sometimes be a daily decision to choose joy. For her, that has also meant forgiving the hijackers for what they did and what they took from her.<\/p>\n
“Forgive. So I can return to who I know myself to be, and it doesn’t include this anger. I’m not an angry person and for a while there I was angry, so to forgive allows me to return to who I am.”<\/p>\n
Borza said she thinks almost every day about the person her daughter might have become.<\/p>\n
“I’d like to think she’d be a mom with some kids and doing amazing work in child psychology. And driving around in her Jeep, in her tank top, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, just having a great life.”<\/p>\n
Several of Bodley’s friends are joining Borza in Pennsylvania this year for what she calls a celebration to remember her daughter and the many other victims of 9\/11.<\/p>\n
A total of 2,977 victims were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.<\/p>\n
This story was originally reported for broadcast by NBC San Diego. AI tools helped convert the story to a digital article, and an NBC San Diego journalist edited the article for publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deora Bodley was just 20 years old when she was killed aboard United Airlines Flight 93 during the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459549,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[123228,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-459548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-9-11","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}