Things they left behind 9/11

A "Little Red" doll discovered by Brian Van Flandern on Sept 12, 2001.

Brian Van Flandern awoke in Queens on the morning of 9/11 to the news of a plane hitting the North Tower, and was determined to volunteer despite his emergency medical technician license having recently expired. After repeated failed attempts to enroll at several impromptu volunteer coordination centers that had sprung up around the city that day, he decided to head to the World Trade Center site and managed to get past a checkpoint to join other volunteers on what became known as "the pile". He spent 24 hours helping search for trapped and wounded survivors. Morale quickly flagged: He recalls only one successful rescue, in which a man was freed from a piece of steel piercing his ankle. Before leaving the site, he found a rag-doll in the rubble. At first, it seemed to be evidence of a child caught up in the attacks. He later learned it was one of several mascot dolls that sat together on the shelf in the offices of the Chances for Children charity on the 101st floor of the North Tower, other examples of which were found scattered far and wide across Lower Manhattan.

Blood-stained shoes worn by Linda Lopez as she was evacuated from the 97th floor of Tower 2 on Sept 11, 2001.

Linda Lopez was at work at the Fiduciary Trust Company on the South Tower's 97th floor when the first plane crashed into North Tower, sending a fireball past their window and radiating a heat that she said felt like being sunburned. There was quickly a sense of confusion: Was it a bomb? Were the rumors that it was a plane crash true? Should people in the South Tower ignore the advice coming over the public address system to stay put and evacuate instead? Lopez felt she had to get out. She had reached only as far as the 61st when she was thrown against a wall as the second plane crashed into the floors above her. Taking off her shoes, she continued to head down the stairs, passing firefighters heading in the opposite direction. She ran barefoot out of the building, across broken glass and other debris. "Lady, your feet are bleeding," someone said to her as she paused a few blocks away in relative safety. She put her shoes back on, and began learning the details of what it was she had just escaped from.