End of Silence

I was just scanning through the CNN feed as I do most days at some point. I clicked through to a story about the victim’s families testimony at the Moussaoui trial. The last sentence of this quote literally gave me goosebumps after I read it.

The grandfather of the 9/11’s youngest victim, testifying Monday at Zacarias Moussaoui’s sentencing trial, described watching on television as the plane carrying his son and granddaughter hit the World Trade Center.

The grandfather, C. Lee Hanson, said that his son, Peter, called him on the phone that morning.

“As we were talking he said, very softly, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!’,” said Hanson, 73, describing the moment before he watched the plane hit the Twin Towers.

A few minutes earlier, Hanson said, Peter had told him he thought the hijackers were going to crash the plane into a building. “Don’t worry. Dad, if it happens it will be quick,” he quoted his son as saying.Sue and Peter Hanson were on their way from Boston to Los Angeles to visit the grandparents and take their 2-1/2-year-old daughter, Christine, to Disneyland.

We just flew with the kids and my mother to Disneyland last month. As I read that last line, it all flashed through my head. How much fun we had as a family there and how that family had the same intentions and never made it. They had no idea when they got on that plane that it’d end that way.

Nearly five years later and it really hit home for me. It’s a good thing we got the person ultimately responsible for that atrocity. Oh wait…