Original subtitles

Just before 8:30,

I got a phone call, and it was Dave,

and he said that that he just wanted to go

and get some coffee,

and he asked me if I wanted to meet him,

and... I said that I was just about to go into the,

into a meeting, and that I couldn't, I couldn't do it,

and I said, "I love you and talk to you later".

And that was the last time I ever spoke to him.

It was amazing, and you know,

it was that kind of crazy love story where we would finish

each other's sentences...

We were so alike,

like but some people say opposites attract,

but for me, it was different.

It was like he and I were almost the same person.

Sometimes he was explosive, but it was,

it was definitely a love story.

That day, I didn't just lose Dave.

I lost myself.

How are you?

I get hot when they do this.

We have like...

I don't know, eight? Eight left?

It's the morning of September 11th,

and we're all gonna go to the official ceremony at the site,

and we hope to make it there by the first moment of silence at 8:46.

It's one of the hardest experiences of my life

to go down that ramp every anniversary,

but I do it for Dave because I, I knew he,

he wants me to be there, but let me show you something.

Dave and I met outside the World Trade Center

when he stole my cab.

So, every year when I go to the site,

I bring a New York City cab with me,

and I put it in the reflection pool

so that he knows that I remember that day.

Some of my co-workers had families,

they that had little kids, and they died, and I didn't.

So, why?

Why? Why am I special? Why, why was I spared?

Why didn't they make it? Why was, why did I make it?

Was it God? Was it faith?

Was it because we have something to do?

Was it because we were sheltered by the elevator machinery?

It just makes you go crazy.

You go crazy asking yourself why, why, why?

People kept saying how blessed I was,

and I didn't feel blessed at all.

I felt like it was a curse.

Survivor guilt made me feel that,

made me actually go from the question,

"Why did I survive?"

to "Why did I have to survive?"

I don't know how to describe it.

It, it's sort of a pain in my, in my, my, gut, you know,

and I remember actually doubling over realizing,

"Oh, my God, those three people were all on my side,

and I didn't get them out".

It's so hard to get past being alive

when all these people aren't, and I've had people say to me,

you know, "Oh, you're so lucky.

You got out of there. You must feel great".

You don't.

I woke up thinking about 9/11, went to bed thinking about it,

dreamed about it, just couldn't get out of it.

I mean, I just kept replaying that day over and over

and over again.

Before I met Tania, I had talked to, you know,

a couple of professional people,

and it really wasn't helping me.

I searched online,

and I joined the support group that they had for survivors.

We started as an online peer support group

where you could go into a Yahoo group

and connect to other survivors 24 hours a day.

So, one day, you were having a bad day,

and you would post it online, and within 30 minutes,

you'd get 40 replies of people saying,

"I know what you feel," you know.

"It's okay to have those feelings.

I'm here for you.

Just call me. Anything you need".

Many people were having economic problems,

health problems, just a lot of that sense of parallel reality

that people were heavily living through, and I think,

to a large degree, still do, and I think it was just,

just being with other people

and talking about this stuff helped.

I had many conversations with Tania,

just one-on-one conversations,

but she gave me a lot of support like nobody else had.

I admired her from the very beginning

how strong she seemed, and at the same time,

once I started to get to know her,

then I realized this whole strength thing that she shows

is really a facade.

She's really in pain.

She's, she was, she seemed to be really in pain...

and really, really distraught, and, and I, and I said,

"Well, of course.

How could she not be?"

When I first heard Tania's story,

she did not talk about it much, and then one day,

she just wrote it out in its entirety,

and it blew me away.

I mean, you know, we had all been through horrible things,

but Tania's was just, just head and shoulders

above anything else that any of us had gone through.

I started seeing these flames, and I was like,

"Something's happening in the other tower".

And I started thinking about Dave right away.

I, the first thing I did was starting to count floors

down from, from the top.

He was on the hundredth floor, and I was like,

"Oh, my God, his floor is one of the floors that has been hit".

A woman started screaming, "There's another plane coming.

There's another plane coming".

The first thing I felt was,

was the, the air was sucked out of my lungs like a,

like a change in pressure.

I, then I was flying.

I was flying through the air from the impact.

I was just flying.

I remember very well the pain of hitting the wall,

the marble wall, and then I,

then I remember the warmth from,

from the explosion, and then I passed out.

My back was, was on fire and my arm, and I was,

I was smelling my own skin burning.

I remember Welles Crowder, the man with the red bandanna.

He had some type of cloth,

and I felt him use that to, to put the flames out,

and um, he hugged me, and he said...

"Just stay awake. Stay awake. Help is coming".

I was, I was in the hospital until Thanksgiving,

November, 2001, and my back was really burned

and my arm was burned and I couldn't walk.

So, I was in a wheelchair.

I couldn't even pull myself on the wheelchair

because I only had one good arm.

So, you know, between the wheelchair, the trauma,

the loss, I didn't know where to start.

It was just too hard.

It was like looking at a mountain

that was 20,000 feet tall.

My story was so insignificant

to what she went through that my first reaction

writing to her was, "That's horrible,"

and, "I don't belong in this group,"

and a lot of people wrote that, and she was very supportive,

saying, "No, you do.

You know, what we all went through was equally important".

She was fabulous.

Here's this person who went through so much

that who in the world could possibly survive this,

yet she's a survivor.

Here she is. She's a survivor!

I think you find that by talking to other people

and helping others, getting involved,

it helps carry your own burden,

and I think that's how you mask it.

You, you kind of, um hide your pain

by getting involved helping others.

I became aware of Tania,

and I was very curious as to how she got through all that.

It was a story that pulled you in, obviously.

But I did notice that her arm was, looked like it had been,

I don't know, it almost looked like skin grafts

on her right arm,

and I remember thinking that it didn't look like

it had been burned.

I had felt mad at myself for even thinking

that there was something amiss,

but I often wonder why I was even asking the question.

I first encountered Tania Head

on the Internet group.

We began having an email conversation,

and she shared her story with me,

and I shared my story with her,

which is kind of normal for survivors to do.

I was struck by how dramatic her story was.

It was pervasive.

It was this idea of this person who had gone through so much,

and, and people try to protect her a lot,

and I think I probably had a protective feeling

right from the start.

I had met Gerry Bogacz,

and Gerry was also meeting with survivors.

He had started having dinner with people in his office

who were interested in meeting and discussing

their September 11th experience.

I had the idea for the Survivors' Network because,

again, I had this feeling of having a hole I needed to fill

about 9/11 in me.

I suggested that she come to a meeting

of the Survivors' Network as a way of bringing,

bringing these two groups together,

and that was the first time I had met her in person.

We ended up going for coffee that same day,

and we started to unite forces,

and we formed the World Trade Center Survivors' Network.

I was driven. I'd been working non-stop.

I'd been working at my work, for, for my work.

I'd been working for the Survivors' Network, for the,

for Dave's foundation, for the widows' group.

I mean, I had just been working 24 hours a day

non-stop for different things,

and that's how my anger was channeled

because of this obsession that I had to,

to really not be like the hijackers.

I think Tania's presence

made the docent program that we had envisioned possible.

Her story kind of fit into that kind of all-encompassing

survivor and a hero and, you know, a widow

and everything that kind of 9/11 came to represent on that day.

So, her story was incredible.

I would call her just an energetic booster

for the needs of the survivor community.

She genuinely wanted recognition for the Survivor Network

and the survivor community to recognize not only

what they had gone through and attest to that,

but to provide a venue for them to feel like this is theirs.

And from there, I started going down on my own.

I've seen Sting, because I love Sting.

We didn't have access to the site,

so that initial ability to actually go into the site was,

was a very powerful experience,

and it was very much appreciated that Tania

was able to make those arrangements.

It was amazing that she survived.

So, you were just thankful, you know, to look at her

and see people recover and heal

and do amazing stuff with their life.

She had a tremendous sense of humor

and laughed a lot

and always wanted to plan another event

and do important things,

and one couldn't help but be drawn into that.

Tania, you did a great job.

Thank you.

Are you comfortable?

Hey Tania? Walk, walk...

I think these reporters are waiting for you.

No.

You don't, don't have to.

After we finished the tour,

we were getting ready to leave,

and a group of reporters came towards Tania.

They wanted to get an interview.

Tania started having a lot of anxiety.

She was like out of control...

...and actually led up to a full-blown panic attack.

Just go, walk quick, Tania, walk quick.

Okay.

Like totally breaking down, crying,

shaking, and I had to tell the reporters to leave her alone,

and I had to get her out of there.

If you don't wanna talk, we don't talk.

One day I came home from work,

and what I found was rose petals leading from the door

to our dining room, and I followed the rose petals,

and I found Dave standing there

with a coconut bra and a grass skirt,

dancing to Hawaiian songs, and I was like, "Oh, my God".

And he had, even cooked this really disgusting Hawaiian food,

recipes that he had found on the internet.

and on the dining table were two,

were two tickets to Hawaii leaving the next day.

He'd planned this whole amazing trip

because she was busy working, and he wanted to take her away

and had her measurements sent and made her this beautiful,

white dress, and her parents came from California over there

to witness the ceremony.

It wasn't a, a, a legal ceremony.

It was like a just a ceremony of a wedding.

I walked outside,

and there were these four huge Hawaiian warriors with torches

waiting for me outside, and they, I'm like,

"What's going on?"

And they're like, "No, we're escorting you down the,

down the garden aisle".

And I go I'm like, "Okay".

So, I followed them, and we went all the way to the beach,

and there was Dave standing in the middle

of a circle of orchids.

And the next morning,

we started calling all our friends and families,

telling them we had gotten Maui-ed,

not married but Maui-ed.

Whenever she talked about Dave,

she never showed any pictures or anything.

We never met Dave's family.

So, the thought crossed my mind,

"What if she's one of these people

who just never tells the truth,

and she just made everything up?"

You know, the, the thought crossed my mind,

but I didn't think it was possible.

So, what I did was, I was about to go to bed that night,

and I figured, "You know what?

Let me just look online,

do a little research on part of her story,

make sure there was a connection and see the story's true,

go to bed".

And he existed.

He was where she said he was, and, you know,

he died on that day.

There were a lot of newspaper articles, message boards.

He's a very popular guy,

but there was one thing that wasn't there,

any mention of Tania anywhere.

No mention of a fianc�, no mention of the trip to Hawaii

that she talked about the month before,

I mean, just no mention of anything that she said.

She was in love with American people and the United States.

Okay, come on.

Come on.

You're a good boy.

Yes, you are a good boy, and you love your cookies,

and it shows.

Bang.

Okay.

That's not totally dead, but.

Well, he's been wearing a red bandanna

since we've had him, really.

When we lost Welles, we put it on him,

and he's always wear, worn, worn one.

Yes, you have. Yes, you have.

You're a good boy.

I first heard the name Tania Head

when a friend of ours who we'd gotten to know,

a very lovely woman who volunteers down at Ground Zero,

called me and said, "Alison, I think I've,

I've, I've, I've met someone,

I've heard of someone else who Welles saved.

This woman at Ground Zero was leading the tour,

and she started sharing a story about how

the Man in the Red Bandanna saved her.

I said, "Oh, oh, that's wonderful.

You know, we would love to, to meet her".

Tania, I remember the first time we talked about it.

I asked her, "Do you know that guy with the red bandanna

that they were talking about?"

And she said, "Yeah, he saved my life".

And then she came to me, and she said,

"Well, she's a little reluctant to meet with you.

She's had some unfortunate experiences with other families

being very angry that she survived

and their loved ones didn't,

and she would like to meet with you but very privately.

It has to be very privately".

I said, "Well, fine". You know, "We'll meet.

We're members of the Princeton Club and have dinner there".

She seemed very grateful, and we were, you know, very pleased.

It was a beautiful thing.

We were, we were very moved that she, she'd been saved,

and, and obviously, it meant so much to her.

I find that family members

of people who were killed, they wanna know what happened,

but I just, I just don't wanna put those images

into their, their heads.

They don't, they don't, they don't have to know.

They don't have to know how their loved ones died.

I think it's, it's better if, if they just don't know

because I saw so much suffering on that floor to the,

to the degree where it's just, it's just something that I,

I don't wanna share with anyone.

I'm just kind of been keeping it to myself.

It's, it's a secret that you carry with you, it's, and,

and it becomes a burden because you can't really share

with a lot of people out there.

Who, who wants to, who wants to talk about body parts

and blood and carnage?

There's nobod...

there's not that many people you can talk to about that.

My head was covered.

But when the second plane crashed,

I had to run for my life.

Okay, this was tower number two, the South Tower,

the second tower to get hit.

They were 110 stories each.

They were so tall that sometimes the people

who came into work that worked on the upper floors

looked down at the clouds.

This is one of the most important things that I do

with my life.

I'm a survivor from September 11th,

and I finally found a purpose.

I know why I'm here,

and it's to talk to people like you that come

and wanna hear our stories.

So, that's very important to me.

This is Tania.

Tania's also a survivor.

She's also Spanish speaking.

So, she has offered to help.

Okay.

She's also a survivor,

and she's also one of my best friends.

I met Tania...

Tania and Linda were like sisters.

They just, every time we had any kind of event,

whether it was, you know, like an official meeting

or any time we went out socially,

those two were always together.

Let's show him what regular people

at the U.S. Open do.

You ready?

Yeah.

Let's show him now what survivors

do when they go to the U.S. Open.

Checking out for planes

taking off from LaGuardia.

We're watching the planes take off from LaGuardia.

That's good.

Tania taught me how to live life with grace,

with courage, with the strength to overcome, to me,

some of the scariest things that I've ever faced

in my entire life.

I don't wanna live my life based on

what happened to me.

I wanna live my life like Tania's living her life,

like going out and helping other people and doing something good

with my really horrible experience.

We had a very beautiful bronze sculpture

of a phoenix bird rising from the World Trade Center

with our message that, you know, good will prevail,

that, that good will rise from the ashes like the phoenix

and prevail.

So, we were dedicating that sculpture at church,

and we invited Tania to come.

Tania was on that 78th Floor sky lobby,

and she's here with us today, thank God,

and I'm gonna ask her now if she would speak a little for you.

I remember when we got to his service,

Tania was a nervous wreck.

She couldn't get up.

She couldn't read the piece, and she had asked me to read it.

When Alison and Jeff asked me to speak today,

I sat down staring at a blank screen, and I cried,

unable to find the words, the right words to say.

What exactly do you say to the family of the man

who saved your life and gave his in the process?

Welles was my hero, too, because he saved Tania.

And I found myself flying through the air

and I eventually crashed against the marble wall.

It was all part of this beautiful service

that was filled with love and hope and just,

we were so moved, really moved.

Hey, Welles, I'm prepared.

I was almost paralyzed.

The things they were saying about our son, Welles,

were so beautiful and so powerful,

and they said over and over again,

"You have no idea, truly, what your son faced".

We believe that good, that the good of the human spirit is

far more powerful than the evil that happened that day.

Now that Dave is gone,

because we were gonna have that wedding on October 12,

we never really filed the marriage certificate

here in New York.

So, in the eyes of the laws, we weren't married.

There was no need for us to file it because we were gonna

get married here October 12.

So, when he died, that was a huge problem for me,

but I was able to solve that with the help of a lawyer,

and a judge... ended up marrying us posthumously,

which was the saddest thing in the world to become a widow,

you know, like that, but it's strange.

Tania, this year, was very, very distant

from all of us.

And she had been in denial for years about her husband dying.

There was times when I was concerned

that she would hurt herself,

maybe commit suicide because she would sometimes say

that she wanted to die,

and a couple of the other board members and I

would talk about that,

and we were concerned at times that she might

take her own life.

Tania was in the middle of doing

this very intensive therapy called flooding

to face Dave's death.

You would tell your story to a therapist,

and you would record it,

And you have to keep reliving over and over again

the experience of the tragic or traumatic event

that went through your life.

She tape recorded her experience from September 11th.

I heard the engines.

I saw people pray.

You knew that you were gonna die,

and I was just praying, please don't let this hurt.

Please don't let this hurt.

I would be behind her,

and she would start circling around,

and the tape would play, "Oh, my God.

Oh, my God, the plane is coming.

The plane is coming," and it would literally crash.

And I could tell you, I could visualize the stuff,

listening to her talk about it.

She would recount how her assistant was decapitated,

how everyone around her was, was burnt.

She told me that her arm was completely severed,

that there was just one little piece of skin right here

that where it was hanging off,

and some man started tugging on her arm,

and she was screaming and crying because she was afraid

that this man was gonna pull her arm off,

and she told me that she took her arm,

and she tucked it into her coat

to keep it from falling off her body.

And she'd start crying harder and harder,

and she would just, she'd be a wreck,

and I would be trying to hold her up,

like I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do.

Right now, even talking about this,

I get so worked up that I start going

into so much anxiety over this,

but I did this for her because she was gonna get better.

The nightmares were so bad.

In fact, they were worse.

I started incorporating what she had told me on the tape

into my nightmares, and there wasn't almost a night

that I didn't have a building collapsing on me.

When I finally told her,

"Tania, I've got to stop doing the flooding exercise with you,"

she told me that I was a horrible friend,

and I was so selfish.

How could I be such a selfish person?

Didn't I realize what she went through?

Didn't I realize that the trauma that she had sustained

was so much worse than the trauma I had sustained?

I mean, how can, how can I live with that?

I actually became very worried about Linda

because I know Linda's still working through her own stuff.

So, I was worried that Linda would be that much involved

with someone whom I came to realize

was not doing well at all and, and seemed to be getting worse.

Okay, folks, welcome everyone

to our walk today that's gonna be recognizing

all the members of the 9/11 community,

the victims and their families,

the rescuers and recovery workers.

The walk has been organized by the World Trade Center

Survivors' Network.

It's an amazing organization in that

there's no real hierarchy to it.

Everybody just gets together and does the work,

and I do wanna recognize the coordinators of this,

Tania Head.

Tania began to tell me

that people in the network were saying that they had

had some concerns with things that I was doing.

There were people who had told her

that I was not representing survivors aggressively enough.

Then, the board of the, of the network basically called me in

and told me what their concerns were.

A primary person in that whole conversation was Tania.

It was Tania who was basically running this meeting.

Tania was frightened of Gerry,

that he was a hard worker,

and, he started the Survivors' Network,

and I think she knew that she couldn't manipulate him.

So, she kind of manipulated everybody else to go

against him so that she could get him out.

She had me thinking that Gerry was bad

for the organization.

Yet, in my heart, I adore Gerry.

I, still to this day, I adore and love Gerry.

He's such a good person, but you have to sometimes

separate yourself from you as a person

and you as part of an organization,

and that's what we had to do.

And... personally, I'm very proud of,

of this organization and the people who are in it.

They've done a great deal of work...

We were having our annual elections for the board,

and the night before the election meeting,

Tania called me and started to talk to me about,

"You don't really wanna come to this meeting, now, do you?"

You know, that type of thing, and I started talking.

I said, "Yeah, no, I'm, I, I wanna be there,"

and so forth, and then I realized

through the conversation that what she was really saying

Is that I wasn't going to be elected to the board,

or re-elected to the board.

I even said it to her.

I said, "You're telling me I'm not gonna be re-elected,"

and she was kind of quiet, and I said,

"Well, I'm still gonna be there".

The next day, I went to the meeting,

and, in fact, I wasn't re-elected to the board,

and I left at that point.

I remember standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus home,

and, you know, having a physical reaction to it,

just feeling shaken, totally shaken but not in a,

in a psychological way, a physical way,

actually shaking and just wondering

how I had managed to alienate all those people,

you know, and, and, and part of me was sort of beginning

to rebel against it.

There was some anger there, too, like,

what, what, what just happened?

But it was mostly self-doubt.

It was mostly like, what did I do here?

How, how did this happen?

The next day, they came out with a press release,

which described the new board with Tania as the president,

offices we didn't have before.

So, there was this mysterious quality to it, too.

I just couldn't put all these pieces together

and figure out why did it come out this way.

And I haven't really been active with the network since.

I'm like, "Oh, my God.

I, I can't believe I'm seeing this".

And it's like now wait a minute.

I keep trying to find one more website

that will confirm her story,

and I'm checking and checking and checking... Nothing.

Needless to say, I didn't get any sleep that night,

but I sat on this information.

These people were so important in my life.

They brought me back.

You know, they, they made me into a human being again.

I don't what would have happened if I'd never met them,

and I did not wanna lose that, you know.

I, I just could see her making all these people go away,

and I just, I couldn't do it.

I knew deep down that I was gonna tell eventually.

You know, I just knew, but I didn't wanna do it.

I mean, I was just too scared because I knew the power

that she had over people.

It was a couple of days before the sixth anniversary,

Tania came over to me.

She was frantic, and she said that a New York Times reporter

was going to do a story on her.

They really just wanted to do

a really nice story on her.

Six years later, where is she?

You know, that she went to Harvard and Stanford,

she's doing all these wonderful things.

She agreed to it, which I was really happy about.

As time went on, as time went on,

she kept pushing back,

and she was acting very strange about it.

He was asking a lot of personal questions

that she did not wanna answer,

and he was going to write a lot of lies about her.

They were supposed to meet,

but she said that she had another appointment

and was gonna be late.

So, they had to cancel that.

So, he called her up, and she got very upset

and hung up on him.

She called me and said, "He's asking me these questions,

and why is he asking me all these questions?"

And I say, "Well, you don't have to answer them.

It's okay".

We got a call from a reporter, David Dunlap,

at The New York Times, and he said, "Hi".

And he said,

"I'm writing this story about Tania Head,

and, you know, we just need,

there's a couple things we can't quite put into place here".

My immediate reaction to his call was,

"Why are you harassing this woman?

She's been through so much".

I started to answer their questions,

and about a quarter of the way in,

I realized that this wasn't just a piece.

This was an investigation.

As The New York Times was harassing Tania

with phone call after phone call,

she told me that Merrill Lynch had arranged

a family conference at the St. Regis.

There were 11 co-workers that had died with her,

and these families wanted to know how their loved ones died.

She was so afraid.

There were people that she told me

had stalked her over the years.

She called me that morning hysterically crying, and said,

"Linda, I need you to come in now.

These people are so mean to me.

They're screaming at me".

I ran out of my apartment. I hailed a taxi.

I went right into the St. Regis Hotel,

and I found her laying on the side of the hotel,

and she kept repeating,

"I tried to get these people out.

I tried to save them.

I tried to save them all,"

and she was crying and shaking and a mess.

She kept telling me over the past six months

that she was gonna try to kill herself,

and I figured, this is the day that she's gonna kill herself.

And I helped her up, and I said,

"Let me bring her inside to the, to the hotel.

They probably know exactly. They we're probably there.

They probably arranged it, and when I went inside,

and I begged them for a quiet place for us to sit,

they didn't even know what I was talking about.

After a little while, she pulled herself together,

and she asked to go the Marsh McLennan Memorial

where her husband Dave's name was.

And we were just touching Dave's name over and over again,

and she was crying, but she was calming down

because I felt like, you know, Dave was calming her down.

Dave was calming her down.

And all of a sudden, she was like,

"You can go home now, Linda,

It's okay. I'm gonna be all right".

She begged me to call the reporter

and tell him to stop.

I called up, and I left a message saying,

"I understand you're doing a story on her.

She does not wish to have a story written on her.

Please respect her, her request, her wishes".

And that was it.

And after I hung up, she started yelling at me,

telling me that I probably just made it worse

by telling him that.

If he writes lies, you can just verify.

All you have to do is just get Dave's parents to speak up

and all his friends.

I called him up, and I said,

"You know, this is a really difficult time of the year.

Can you please wait until after the anniversary?

See, she said that she would do the interview then".

He was screaming on the phone to me one day.

He's like goes, "Why can't you just answer the questions?"

She was driving us absolutely crazy.

She would call us constantly several times a day

to talk about this stuff, and, of course,

everybody kept saying,

"Just talk to The Times already.

What is your problem?"

I remember the night before

September 11th anniversary.

She always had a barbecue at her house.

And Tania seemed to be having

a lot of difficulty with something.

You know, she was crying,

running out of the barbecue and everything.

"The Times keeps calling me.

The Times keeps calling me," or whatever.

She was no longer even connected to us as friends.

She was so caught up in her own mania.

She was sitting outside with Janice,

crying hysterically, saying,

"They're, they're asking all these questions.

They're fact checking.

They're questioning my story".

And I remember thinking to myself

what horrible people they are.

I'm thinking, "This guy's on to her,"

because there's no reason why she should be

so uncomfortable about this.

Here's Linda, supposedly, this is the,

this is, this is the sixth anniversary.

Linda should be in her own stuff,

and she's worried about Tania crying.

I begged her.

I begged her to give me something,

a piece of evidence that I could go to to The New York Times.

I begged her, "Give me the name of the firefighter

that carried you out that morning, the one that was,

that you were handed off to

and threw you underneath that fire truck

when the tower came down right on West Street.

You told me that story a million times.

You and that firefighter survived".

Everybody else in Tania's story had died.

I begged her for the name of that firefighter,

and she wouldn't give it to me.

She would not give me the name of that firefighter.

She wouldn't.

I had suggested to her to get an attorney.

I said, "Why don't you get yourself an attorney?

This way then you know what your rights are".

As we were going up in the elevator, she says,

"Okay, Janice, I'm gonna tell you my story.

I'm not a U.S. citizen.

That's why I can't say anything to the reporters".

So, I said, "It doesn't matter to me

you're not a U.S. citizen, you know.

That's okay.

I don't think anybody will mind that

you're not a U.S. citizen".

So, we went into the lawyer's office,

and the lawyer said that I didn't have

client privilege rights,

so that if, if it was okay, for me to wait outside.

And I says, "Absolutely.

I'm here just to, you know, as her friend".

I sat outside for two hours, and the lawyer calls me in.

She started saying things back to Tania

that they had spoke about in the meeting,

and as she was saying back to Tania, you know,

"It's okay that you only knew Dave a few months,"

and now here the story I had known was that

she was married, and, you know,

they had this long relationship.

My life was perfect.

And it's okay, Tania,

that you were only here for the, in the building for the day.

I worked in the World Trade Center.

She died, and I didn't.

And I just could not believe what I was hearing.

I was like, I actually, I think I went into shock.

Why am I special?

Why, why was I spared? Why didn't they make it?

I was smelling my own skin burning.

Definitely a love story.

It feels wrong to have walked out of there alive

when so many people didn't.

Janice called me and asked me if I was sitting down,

and I said, "Yeah, I'm, I'm just sitting down.

I was and having my cup of coffee".

It was morning, and she started telling me

that Tania is not who she said she was.

And she was like, "Oh, no, come on".

And I said, "Well, this is what I heard

in the attorney's office,"

and the both of us started looking things up.

She's not a fraud.

She's a person that's hurting.

And she said, "No, Linda".

She goes, "Her name is not what she's been telling us.

There was no husband Dave.

She didn't even have a relationship with Dave.

We don't even think she was in the towers that day".

When I got the phone call,

I was at work,

and I immediately started yelling out right in my office,

"What happened? What happened?"

Because I thought she had done something to herself,

and I didn't wanna hear it.

I didn't wanna hear it that she had done something to herself.

And Linda kept saying, "It's not what you think.

It's not what you think. It's not what you think".

And finally, she blurted out the words,

and I wanted to hang up the phone.

I wanted to yell at Linda and say,

"How could you say that?

How could you say that she's a fraud?"

We end tonight with a story

that began on 9/11, a story of tragedy and heroism,

survival and love.

There's just one problem.

As Jeff Glor reports, the story, repeated many times

in the past six years, may be a complete fabrication.

Shocked and stunned.

The New York Times

discovered a flood of discrepancies.

A Manhattan woman is under fire tonight.

Turning now to a mysterious story

about a woman and a possible stunning deception.

No World Trade Center job, no fianc�,

no dramatic escape.

Merrill Lynch,

the financial management company where she claimed to work,

had no record of her employment.

I was shocked, you know.

I couldn't believe it. What happened here?

Why, why did she do this,

and why did none of us question her?

There was no evidence

that she made money off her story,

but she certainly gained fame.

Can we talk to you for a minute, please?

Head has now been removed as president

of a 2,000 member organization of Trade Center survivors.

The person that we saw

and that we believed in never existed.

This was totally shocking, totally shocking,

because of all the things I would

ever think about somebody,

that's just not something that I would think about.

You're looking at everyone with suspicion.

If Tania can lie... anybody could lie.

Perhaps she's evil.

Perhaps there's some thread of evil in there.

I don't know.

Evil is not a word that ever existed in my life

until September 11th, but I know evil exists,

and it is possible.

Tania was my sign that God was there that day.

I felt like God had protected her.

Well, God's gonna protect me also because

she beat the odds that day.

She beat all the odds that day.

So, to have that taken away from me,

the sign that God was there that day...

...there's a, there's nothing that she could ever say

to me today or going forward that will ever change the pain

and the anger, and I'm sorry, but the hatred that I have

for that woman right now.

I don't have any room in my heart to find sadness for her.

What she did to me, what she did to the 9/11 community,

and what she has done to the families,

I want answers. I want to know.

I wanna know who she is. I need to find that out.

I wanna know who she is. I need to find that out.

She didn't hurt anyone physically.

She didn't sign any documents.

She did not do anything what we would say is illegal.

It is true that Tania never stole

any money from the, she never made any money

from this involvement.

I don't think money was what her objective was, frankly.

Why she's done this has been,

everybody wonders that.

Myself, I don't know.

I think after 9/11,

we all wanted to have a piece of it.

I mean, I think if we're being honest with ourselves,

there was a really human, strong desire to,

to not only give back and try to help

but also to connect to it in some fundamental way.

Well, I think a lot of people used 9/11

to heal themselves.

I mean, I think 9/11 became, oddly,

a religion for some people, you know.

It was a way to belong.

It was a way to be part of something bigger than themselves.

For some people who need either some kind

of identity or some kind of notoriety or visibility,

this became a way, in Tania's case, I would guess,

I don't know for sure, but for her to feel needed.

I think, you know, my, my friends

who are widows were like, "Why would she wanna be us?"

You know, "Why would you want to be us?"

And, you know, having known what we've suffered,

it, you know, that was to all of us

a very normal response to have.

Alicia Esteve Head.

You know, when I think about what Tania

was doing on 9/11, 2001,

she probably was just having a regular day in Barcelona,

you know, getting up like everyone else.

You know, someone made some form of an announcement

that there's a terrorist attack going on in Manhattan.

From what I can tell, she had never been

in the World Trade Center.

It's obvious she did her research on Dave,

whom she had never met.

I mean, she knows where her company was located.

So, she probably did her research on us.

She was probably just watching us and trying to see

what we were talking about and how we felt,

and she adopted the personality.

You know, she knew how survivors felt

after going through something like that,

and she became one of us.

We didn't know much about

her present life at the time.

It would have been actually cruel

for any one of us to question her on anything.

It would have been downright cruel.

I mean, she mentions working for Merrill Lynch

and in this financial think tank that she told us about,

but we had never been to her office.

We had never met any of her co-workers,

and from what I understand,

she would actually rent office space to meet people,

and nobody ever questioned it.

Tania, to give her a compliment,

she's the best liar I've ever met.

I mean, she was so good at staying on her story

that I really didn't notice any inconsistencies

until I knew her for a couple of years.

Had we actually compared notes like we do now,

we would have realized something was wrong.

She told me that she lost her wedding ring in,

on September 11th and that Tiffany's had replaced

the wedding ring that she had lost.

There were references to her fianc�

that, that changed from fianc� to husband back to fianc�.

She even promised the Crowthers that she

had saved a piece of her burnt clothing and would put it

in a plaque and give it to them.

She told me on the day that her brother died

that his wife had a baby on the same day,

and they named the baby, Dave.

I remember I was in her apartment one time,

and she always talked about her dog, Elvis,

and her dog, Elvis, and her old dog, Elvis.

And one of the times that I was in her apartment, I said,

"Where's your dog? I never see your dog".

And she would always have the same answer.

"Uh, Lupe is walking him".

And I remember one day I said,

"Boy, that dog gets walked a lot.

That's the most walked dog.

I mean, that dog must love Lupe

because she's always walking him".

But one day, I went into the apartment,

and I asked her, "Where's, where's your dog?

I wanna see your dog".

And she said, "Oh, you know, Lupe's walking him".

And I said,

"Tania, do you or don't you have a dog?"

I got right in her face because it bothered me

that I couldn't, I love dogs,

so, it bothered me that I couldn't see the dog.

And she just looked at me and went,

"Oh, yeah, of course I have a dog".

After The Times article, she disappeared,

and I don't know if it's because she actually

just left the country or if she's just been hiding well,

but really, none of us have had any contact

with her since then.

The other thing she did was she wrote me an email

and said, "Hello". That's it.

I saw that as her way of opening up a line of communication.

I just deleted the email, and that was it.

There had to be some sort of recognition

that she was doing something wrong,

and... and she was deviant in, in, in that way,

but that is only something that we see now.

That's something that we couldn't see then.

Go across the street.

Right over here at this light.

See those two ladies with the two orange hats?

Yes.

You're gonna tell them you're family,

family members, right?

Well, we're actually all survivors,

let me tell you, yeah.

So, you let them know,

and they'll let you in so you can go inside,

all right, ma'am?

Thank you.

So, follow me, guys.

No pushing, no shoving.

I just hope that she really does get

the help she needs and that she can live a full life.

She's a smart woman.

She's talented, and she can offer

a lot of great stuff in this world.

So, forgiveness, yeah.

This, there, I absolutely forgive her.

I know we should forgive, but I don't know.

It, it would really take a lot.

I don't think I could ever do it.

I just, I just feel that hurt, that wronged.

She was a troubled person.

There were issues that drove her to do this.

And because she was not functioning in a normal way,

how can you hold, you know, not forgive someone like that?

She's never apologized.

This is all a great mystery, and it's, it is what it is,

and, and it's not gonna affect my life any longer.

I've already forgiven her.

Holding onto all the feelings that I had

once I found out that she had lied to us is

not gonna take me anywhere where I wanna go.

We'll get through it. You know that?

We'll get through it. You know that.

All the things that I was doing this year

putting this together, I was thinking,

"Where's Tania when you need her?"

You know what I mean?

And it just made me feel even more upset because I'm like,

"I miss her". I really, I miss her.

You know, I miss it like I miss life

back on September 10th.

I miss, I miss that.

I miss, I miss the what was.

I miss the what could have been.

That's what I miss.