It started as a normal day 25 years ago. Michael Behrent, an App State professor, woke up at about 7:30 a.m., made some breakfast, and looked out across northwestern Brooklyn — an urban landscape dotted with those distinctive water towers at the time — to the skyscrapers above lower Manhattan.
On that day, the largest structure Behrent could see through his small student apartment kitchen window was the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
About an hour later, his roommate — a fellow grad student at NYU — woke up and sat on the other side of the kitchen table with her back to the window.
“I was having a conversation with my roommate, and I was facing the window and just at a certain point, I looked out the window — a perfectly clear view of the towers — and I saw the smoke coming out of the lawn and I just said ‘Gee, I wonder what’s happening to the World Trade Center,’” he said.
Through the window, a thick column of black smoke was billowing up from the upper floors of the nearest tower. So Behrent checked the news online. Nothing. Behrent and his roommate then turned on the TV, and the morning news show was covering it, but they didn’t know what was happening.
Then the second plane hit.
“I was only a few miles away from the towers, but, like tens of thousands of people, I saw the second tower blow up on a television screen,” Behrent wrote in remembering 9/11 on the 10th anniversary. “I raced back to the kitchen. From the window, across the East River, I watched the explosion in the far tower swell into a bright yellow fireball.”
All he could feel at first was puzzlement. It was hard to register what was happening. He does remember the odd silence that occurred in Brooklyn. But then almost in unison, sirens filled the air.
“I think that what’s striking to me about seeing that is the sheer kind of confusion and ‘ungraspability’ that witnessing an event that you can’t understand brings about,” Behrent said. “The experience of actually looking out the window of the apartment that I was living in at that time and seeing the World Trade Center exploding — it was more just confusion and unreality than anything else. I was looking at it and couldn’t quite believe that I was looking at it.”
The rest of the day felt surreal. Behrent and his roommate sat huddled around the TV and a grad student couple that lived next door joined them.
“Within an hour, the sky was so dense with smog that the towers themselves had become completely invisible,” Behrent recalled on the tenth anniversary. “It was by watching the news that we learned that the buildings had collapsed. From our window, all that could be seen was a thick gray cloud.”
Behrent had other family in the New York area and checked in to see how they were doing. At a certain point — after hearing about Pennsylvania and the Pentagon — Behrent knew that there would be a lot of deaths.
Later that day, Behrent went for a walk. He found seared office paper laying in the middle of the street with what he believed was a law firm’s letterhead. He wondered if that had blown over from the towers, across the East River and to Brooklyn.
This story was originally published for the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. It was one part of a longer story.