9/11 Survivor Speaks at BHS Today

For many students at Belleville High School, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 are something to be studied in history class, or at most a vague memory from their early childhood a decade ago.

Michael Benfante, who barely escaped from the collapsing towers, today offered those students a compelling first-person account of that eventful day.

“For whatever measure of evil and death and destruction there was from that day, there were countless measures of heroism,” Benfante said to an auditorium packed with BHS sophomores and seniors this morning.

Later in the morning  a brief ceremony was held to plant a cherry tree donated by the Class of 2009 at the BHS campus. The tree will be dedicated to the memory of 9/11 victims.

A Montclair native who now lives in Bloomfield, Benfante was asked to speak by Donato DiTrolio, a Belleville High teacher and a neighbor of Benfante.

Benfante has been widely hailed as a hero (a label he rejects) for his actions on Sept 11, when he and a colleague, John Cerqueria, carried a wheelchair-bound woman named Tina Hansen down 55 stories of the North Tower immediately after it had been hit. During his talk, Benfante stood before a screen showing his interview with a television reporter on the morning of the attacks, mere moments before the South Tower came crashing down. Benfante was caught on video fleeing from the airborne torrent of debris that rushed up the streets of Lower Manhattan.

The sight of a terrified Benfante elicited a few chuckles from the students -- a reaction Benfante is used to.

“It’s strange, people laugh when they see this. If I could have run out of my skin, I would have,” he said. “This is someone literally running for his life.”

Benfante was managing an office of salespeople for a now-defunct company called Network Plus, which had space on the 81st floor of the North Tower. The hijacked airliner struck the opposite end of the building at 8:46 am, causing a “reverberation” that Benfante initially thought was a gas explosion. While he was not yet aware of what exactly was happening, Benfante knew he had to get his staff out.

Benfante left when the office was completely evacuated, then came across Hansen several stories down.

As he and his colleague Cerqueria helped the woman down, Benfante -- who at this point did not know the South Tower had also been hit -- remembered the firefighters walking up, in the opposite direction, towards where victims were trapped by fire.

“They kept on saying ‘everything’s all right,’ in this calm voice,” Benfante recalled. “But their mouths were saying one thing, and their eyes were saying something else. They knew what was really going on, and they were  scared.”

To Benfante, those firefighters who fought off their terror and headed straight into an inferno a thousand feet up to “help their fellow man” are the real heroes.

Benfante told the students those examples of heroism are applicable to their own lives. He noted how, when workers left his office, there wasn’t a panicked dash for the exits. Instead, co-workers helped one another. “Everyone left in pairs,” he said.

He also equated the 9/11 terrorists with bullies, who tried to use fear and force to get what they wanted. Benfante urged the students to take that comparison to heart as they begin another school year.

“Help others. If you see someone being bullied, do something -- try and stop it, or tell teachers or your parents,” he said. “You’re not that much different from me. You can do the same thing.”