Kristopher Woolley was walking toward the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the south tower collapsed before his eyes. Had it held a few minutes longer, he believes he would have been directly beneath it.
The then-27-year-old Latter-day Saint and Goldman Sachs analyst had watched from the 50th floor of his office building as the second plane struck the south tower almost at eye level. After evacuating to Battery Park, Woolley and a colleague started moving toward the towers to help. Then came the roar.
“It went from a beautiful blue-sky day to just like a volcanic eruption, and we were in the middle of the ash,” he said in an oral history interview with the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Oct. 25, 2022.
The next day, Woolley and four fellow Latter-day Saints set up a makeshift food line for first responders and used an abandoned U-Haul truck to provide Gatorade and ice to Ground Zero. They stayed until 2 a.m.
For Woolley, Sept. 11 brought his faith and testimony into sharp focus.
“I thought a lot about the plan of salvation, the restored gospel and the reality of Heavenly Father and my Savior Jesus Christ,” he said. “I was profoundly aware of all these things, probably like never before.”
As Americans mark the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Church News has gathered reflections from Latter-day Saints who recounted their experiences in oral histories housed in the Church History Catalog (catalog.ChurchofJesusChrist.org).
April Cobb
The following comes from an oral history recorded with April Cobb on Aug. 11, 2022.
April Cobb’s husband woke her to say a prayer before he left for work on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — a simple act of faith she would greatly appreciate by the end of the day.
The couple had moved to Pentagon City, Virginia, only months earlier. Their apartment sat less than a mile from the Pentagon. That morning, she boarded the Metro for a job interview near the White House, unaware that hijackers had struck the World Trade Center. Cobb’s train pulled away from the Pentagon stop roughly a minute before American Airlines Flight 77 hit the building.
“Nobody on the Metro seemed to have any idea what was going on,” she said. “I was naive and knew nothing.”
What followed was a seven-mile walk home — in strappy sandals, with her husband’s socks pulled over her feet — through streets thick with rumors and smoke. A stranger put her arm around Cobb as she wept. Others in minivans offered cold water and rides to people they had never met.
“The humanity of the people that day toward strangers is nothing I have seen since,” she said.
When they arrived home, Cobb’s husband asked: “Don’t you visit-teach Liz Howell? Doesn’t her husband Brady work in the Pentagon?”
Weeks earlier, April Cobb was asked to be a visiting teacher to Liz Howell, a fellow Latter-day Saint one floor above her. Rather than wait, Cobb had visited. When her new friend said that afternoon she still hadn’t heard from her husband, Cobb went upstairs and sat with her.
Others gathered in the Howells’ apartment: the Relief Society president, the bishop, close friends and a military chaplain. Seven days later, Brady Kay Howell’s death was confirmed.
The chief medical examiner who received Brady’s remains was a Latter-day Saint. He found Brady’s temple recommend in his wallet and contacted the stake president.
Cobb learned that even one visit to someone in need can make a difference.
“If I had not done my visiting teaching, I wouldn’t have known her,” April Cobb said. “Instead, it opened us up for a lifelong friendship and a joyful opportunity to serve.”
Manuel Mercado
The following comes from an oral history recorded with Manuel Mercado on Sept. 29, 2022.
On the morning of Sept. 10, 2001, Manuel “Manny” Mercado, a native of Puerto Rico, woke with a prompting: Give away a Book of Mormon.
He pulled a new copy from his closet, wrote his testimony inside, and gave it to a coworker at their kiosk on the ground floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.
The next morning, the tower was gone. Mercado later confirmed his coworker was safe — Sept. 11 was his day off.
Mercado, a cellphone programmer, was supposed to be at work at 6 a.m. But the night before, he had asked his boss for permission to vote in New York City’s mayoral primary. His boss told him to come in at 9 a.m. instead. The first plane struck at 8:46.
“My boss went through what I did not go through,” Mercado said. “He did my shift.”
Within days, Mercado was back at Ground Zero as part of the rescue effort, programming phones so first responders and construction crews could reach their families. He worked 12-hour days, six days a week, for two months, but he always attended worship services on Sunday.
His anger was harder to manage. Mercado said that if given the chance, he would have gone to war “like Captain Moroni” to defend freedom.
Then came the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. On Sept. 14, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush asked the nation’s houses of worship to open their doors. Mercado walked into the Latter-day Saint chapel on 65th Street and Columbus in Manhattan. Among the first to arrive, he was greeted by music performed by the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square playing over the speakers.
“I started crying like a baby,” he said. “All the hate that I had in my heart against the terrorists — it was like wiped away, like cleansed. It was like, ‘All is well.’”
He said he sat in the quiet chapel and let it go.
“The Church is true,” Mercado said. “Definitely.”
Susan Robison
The following comes from an oral history recorded with Susan Robison on Dec. 13, 2022.
Susan Robison’s husband, Ron, normally arrived at his office on the 72nd floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower by 5 a.m. But having returned from a business trip to Hong Kong at 2 a.m., he stayed home on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
The couple was eating breakfast together in their Battery Park City apartment — three blocks from the towers — when a colleague called to say a plane had struck the north tower. Minutes later, a roar passed directly over their building. It was the second plane, followed by an explosion.
With no electricity in the building, residents were told to shelter in the basement. In the dark, lit only by the glow of cellphone screens, a small group began singing to calm several frightened children. Susan Robison stood beside a woman she had never met — a mother whose own children were at a school somewhere in the city — and held her hand.
During that time, Robison served as Relief Society president of the New York New York Stake. In the weeks that followed, kindness arrived from around the world: 400 teddy bears from Washington state. Thirty-five quilts hand-stitched by friends in San Diego. The inscription of a book of well wishes from the Harrogate Ward Relief Society in England read: “We pray that each of us may find peace and comfort in the scriptures, and in the knowledge that we have a loving Heavenly Father and Savior.”
Years later, Robison reflected on what she had witnessed — the singing in the dark, the strangers clasping hands, the hotel maid who offered a hug, the Red Cross worker who called her cellphone that night just to make sure she was OK.
“The terrorist attacks were horrible, terrible acts. But in the aftermath, I saw the best of people,” she said. “In times of extreme trial and danger, there is comfort in knowing that the Lord is with us, that we can turn to Him for peace and direction.”
Evan McMullin
The following comes from an oral history recorded with Evan McMullin on Feb. 10, 2023.
Evan McMullin was sitting in a windowless Central Intelligence Agency basement room taking a Microsoft Excel course on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when a woman in a dress and tennis shoes poked her head through the door and asked, “Do you know we’re under attack?”
Within minutes, the returned missionary and Brigham Young University graduate was watching the World Trade Center towers burn on a monitor in his supervisor’s office.
Within weeks, McMullin was at the Pentagon helping select targets in Afghanistan.
Within months, he had entered the CIA’s Directorate of Operations — undercover operations — a path that would take him to conflict zones across South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa for the next decade.
But early in McMullin’s training, a moment of doubt nearly derailed his confidence. Seasoned officers took him to lunch in a North African country and ordered wine. When McMullin declined, they asked if he was a Latter-day Saint. He said he was.
“They said, ‘You can’t do this work without alcohol,’” McMullin said. “I worried about that through the rest of training.”
He chose to keep his standards anyway and was surprised to discover that people he worked with — foreign contacts operating in dangerous, high-stakes settings — trusted him more because of it.
“Your standards are an asset and your faith is an asset, not a liability,” McMullin said. “And it certainly was in that most difficult context.”
McMullin spent nearly three years in one country tracking al-Qaida operatives, reenlisting again and again when colleagues encouraged him to move on. He described the experience in language familiar to any returned missionary: “I was on a mission.”
There were no chapels in most of the places he served and little Church support. He slept with a loaded weapon beside him. Yet he said he felt sustained by a quiet confidence that the work was right — and that the freedom he was protecting had eternal significance.
“This country allows for that,” he said — the freedom to learn about the gospel, to choose it and to pursue a path toward exaltation. “Without America being what it is, the cause of freedom suffers globally.”
