North Las Vegas residents speak out about 9/11

The towers had fallen. The city smelled of burning jet fuel. Black smoke billowed in the distance. A thick cloud hung heavily over Manhattan.

Throngs of ash-coated people stumbled through New York that September day.

Glynis Seeley was among them, trying to get home. She was a substance abuse counselor in an office about 25 blocks away from what became ground zero when the planes hit that morning 10 years ago. She called her husband, Ed, at their Brooklyn home.

He told her to get out of the city. No one knew when -- or where -- the terrorists would attack next.

So Seeley, now 54 and a North Las Vegas resident, began walking to the nearest subway station. A police officer stationed there told her it was closed and to try another station he heard might be open. She walked to a handful of others only to get the same response. She would never board a train to leave Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge, the most direct way to get home, was shut down. The Manhattan Bridge was still open.

Clad in sandals, the Long Island, N.Y., native began the grueling eight-mile walk home.

She walked past St. Vincent's, the Level 1 trauma center where injured police officers were cared for, where the emergency bays were empty and hundreds of people lined up to give blood. Nurses and doctors stood ready with gurneys, wheelchairs and blankets, but the usual chaos was quiet.

"There weren't any ambulances coming back," Seeley said, crying softly at the memory. "It was just empty. It was a realization they weren't ever gonna get filled up. There was nothing left."

She partnered with a complete stranger who also needed to get to Brooklyn and continued walking.

Past the shoe store on Canal Street, where the owner was handing out free pairs of sneakers to the women struggling in high heels or the barefoot ones carrying pumps and walking on sooty concrete.

Past the ash-covered woman emerging from a subway station "who looked like a ghost."

Seeley waited 45 minutes at a pay phone to call her husband. She spoke with him about two minutes.

"I'm still OK," she told him. "If I get to another phone, I might be able to call again depending on how many people are in line," she said.

He understood.

"Do what you have to do to get home," he said to his love of 18 years. They hung up. At this point of the story, Ed Seeley wipes away tears.

"They had the bridges blocked, and I couldn't get to her," he said. "There were no ways to get to her. I was trying to go pick her up. I told her to tell me what bridge she was on, and I'd be on the other side."

Everything was shut down. Eventually, Glynis Seeley made it across the Manhattan Bridge and found that subway stations were open on that side. She parted ways with the stranger, whose name she never learned, and boarded a train. With sore and swollen feet, she finally reached the doorstep to her Brooklyn home four hours later.

A stark quiet blanketed the city that day, except for a fighter jet flying by .

"Hearing that fighter jet over Manhattan made me really angry," she said. "There's no reason for this. Just because you hate our guts? ... If you don't like the way you're living, do something about it. Fight in your own country; fight for your own rights. Don't come over here and attack our way of living because you don't have it. That was the tough one."

She visited that "place of reverence" on each anniversary , except after the couple moved to North Las Vegas five years ago.

Seeley plans to return to ground zero with her sister for the 10th anniversary in a post-Osama bin Laden world. His death in a complex located a few miles away from Pakistani government officials was a "slap in the face to the U.S."

"Somebody needs to remember how awful this was," Seeley said. "It's visual proof that it wasn't just awful; it was hell and horrendous.

"There are still people who hate us, and they will continue with what bin Laden wanted to do. ... Ten years later, what it means to me still now is that we can never allow anything like that to happen again."

Contact Downtown and North Las Vegas View reporter Kristi Jourdan at kjourdan@viewnews.com or 383-0492.