She Was Late To Work On Sept. 11. Her Boss Died. Now She Teaches NJ Students What Happened

NORTH JERSEY — Rosanna Lucignano of Hoboken was the first person in her family to get a job in New York's financial district. Her family was proud of her, she says. Life was good in 2001: She was earning a six-figure salary and raising two small children with her police officer husband.

In 2001, she commuted across the Hudson River each day to get to her job as a phone clerk for Carr Futures, arriving by 8 a.m.

On Sept. 11, 2001, she was late.

Lucignano's job involved juggling multiple phones in order to rapidly relay information to her boss, trader Marco Motroni from Fort Lee.

At the time of the terrorist attacks, Lucignano was dropping her son at his elementary school, she told Patch in a recent interview.

She got a call from her husband, who asked, "Where are you?"

"I said, 'I'm super late,' " she recalled. "And he said 'Stay where you are.' "

She figured plane crash was an accident and she'd head to work later.

After her husband called a second time, she noticed parents flocking to the elementary school to pick their children up.

A second plane had hit the South Tower around 9:03 a.m., and people were getting word of a possible terrorist attack.

Lucignano collected her child and left. She never worked at Carr Futures again.

Sudden Change

Lucignano usually commuted to 4 World Trade Center. But on Sept. 11, her boss and many other executives were conducting their semi-annual meeting on the 92nd floor of 1 World Trade.

1 World Trade was the first tower hit by a plane, at 8:46 a.m. The plane is said to have struck floors 94 through 98.

Lucignano remembers, "Parents were running into the [school] building and grabbing their kids. I started to realize what was happening. There were people [returning to Hoboken] covered with soot."

"The next day," she said, "I called everyone I knew who was on the trading floor. The vice presidents were all up there on the 92nd floor that day. When you're a phone clerk, you have two phones on your ear, and you're breathing down the neck of your broker. You're giving them trades. Marco Motroni was my boss. He was Cuban; he had a heart of gold. He used to sing my name, 'Rosanna.' He was 54 years old."

Lucignano said she and Motroni became friends, and she always looked out for him. She was devastated the next day when no one had heard from him.

"I called Mark's son, and he said, 'No, we haven't heard anything yet.' They were checking the hospitals," she said.

Later that day, Lucignano drove to Motroni's home in Fort Lee to talk to his family. "They said, 'Mark talked about you all the time. You always had his back,' " she said. "I tried to comfort them as much as I could. I said I could get his trading jacket and things from 4 World Trade."

"The trading floor reopened on Thursday," Lucignano said. "I never went back [to work]. My whole company was gone. There was one phone clerk I stayed in touch with. They were all gone."

Lucignano said that while driving home from visiting her boss's family a second time, heading along the Hudson River, she thought she saw beams of light extending from the towers upward, and imagined her boss talking to her.

"I was driving on River Road," she said. "There was all those lights and all that smoke. I looked over and i saw what I thought was the ghost of the towers. I literally felt like I saw the soul the souls going up until this abyss into the sky. I called [my husband] and told him what I saw. He said, 'I told you, I should have gone with you.' I saw a vision of Mark coming to me with his mustache and his reading glasses and saying, 'I'm not coming back and it's ok. We're at peace.' "

She added, "I worked milimeters over this guy's shoulder in the most intense environment."

Crying In School

Lucignano spent more time volunteering at her son's school.

"I realized how many people I lost. I kept going back to Calabro every day," she said. "Our offices moved to Midtown. I wasn't going to do that. I had two small children, and I was traumatized."

Eventually, a teacher suggested that since she was there every day, she should apply to be a substitute teacher.

Soon after that, a fourth grade teacher went on medical leave, and Lucignano became her permanent sub.

"It was easy," she said. "I had 20 little kids compared to 5,000 men screaming at me all day. I was more mature [than a younger teacher]. I was married with children. I loved it right away." She began taking graduate school classes.

Twenty-five years later, she's still teaching in the New Jersey public schools, and educates students about Sept. 11 each year. But she wasn't always able to talk about it.

On Sept. 11, 2002, she began crying in school and couldn't stop, she says. She headed to the school nurse, then spent the rest of the day with the school's director of special services, Cecilia D'Elia, who just retired.

"We always had a special bond because of that," Lucignano said.

Now, she keeps a bulletin board dedicated to Sept. 11 on her classroom wall.

"I always tell the story of the man in the red bandana," she said. "He always had a red bandana on. People talked about being rescued by him. Then, years later, his family realized it was him. I talk about the man because it reminds them about those who didn't survive, and how families are still waiting for information."

Lucignano says that she visits the World Trade Center site before Sept. 11 each year. She also listens to the names of the victims read on TV on that date.

She said that she was astonished when she saw the tribute in lights in 2002, because it was similar to what she thought she saw.

"I believe in my heart that other people saw it, that whoever was the architect for that site, saw what I saw," she said. "So many souls left together."

She said that she met the wives of many of the brokers in her firm who died. "They had young children," she said. "It was just horrid."

She added, "They say, 'Never forget.' I don't think we can forget. I remember the faces and the conversations."

Remote Teaching And Covid

Lucignano was touched by a second mass tragedy years later, when she lost her younger brother to covid — all while teaching her fourth grade class remotely.

Lucignano's classes went remote in mid-March 2020.

At the time, her younger brother Richie lived on the floor below her in their family's rowhome, where they had both grown up.

Besides running the family Laundromat on the ground floor, Richie Altomare worked at a nursing home up the hill in Jersey City Heights. During the lockdowns, he insisted on going to work, she said.

"He said, 'If I don't go, who's going to take the [patients] to their activities?' " he told her.

There was a shortage of masks and other personal protective equipment for workers at the time, but he kept on.

"Then he said, 'I feel tired,' " Lucignano said. "One day my sister said, 'Can you go check on Richie? He doesn't sound good.' Since my husband was a police officer, he drove him to Christ Hospital. I never saw him again."

Like many covid sufferers, Altomare, 56, battled the virus in the hospital for weeks, appearing to get better, then worse. (New Jersey's most deadly day was April 30, in which 430 patients died in one day. The deaths and case numbers fell after that, as residents remained on lockdown and were not in close contact.)

Altomare lost his battle on May 6.

Lucignano said she recently bumped into an old friend who had moved out of town and asked about her brother. The friend hadn't realized he had passed away.

"She felt bad," Lucignano said. "I said, 'Don't feel bad. It warms my heart that you remember him.' "

Lucignano said it's especially important to teach about the Sept. 11 and the pandemic to those who are too young to remember.

In fact, people under 30 are said to have few or no significant memories of Sept. 11.

"This year I'll be teaching science for the first time," Lucignano said. "I'll be talking about the pandemic. I started as a chemistry major [in college] at St. Peter's."

She said she will also keep her Sept. 11 bulletin board up.

"I have my laminated newspaper articles," she said, "and my business card. It says 10048. The towers had their own zip code" (The Postal Service retired the zip code after the towers came down.)

"It's important to remember," Lucignano said. "People who weren't there, I don't think they feel it like we do."