Recalling horrors in the deadly details

O'Neill arrived on the night of Sept. 11. His crew bunked at the Javitz Center and arrived at Ground Zero the next morning. They set up operations in a gym at the American Express Building.

"There was a lot of stuff missing. There was no concrete, no big blocks of concrete. It had all been pulverized. If I can remember the site for anything, it was the dust, all the white dust. It looked like snow.

"You had fire trucks torn in half. You had people all over. . . . There were fire trucks burning, police cars that were burning, ambulances that were burning, all these crushed vehicles.

"The canines on our team are live search dogs. They're looking for lives, not cadavers. . . . One of the dogs, Reilly, had hit on something and gave his sign to his handler, and Chris turned to us, and he said, 'Look, the dog's getting a hit here.'

"There were numerous volunteers, trying to help out. They hopped on the dog before we could size up the situation, and they started right on it. They started shoveling and moving, and moving debris away, and they brought the dog in again. And the dog didn't get a hit again. The dog had gotten a hit on a small piece of a person that might have been there."

Elsie Goss-Caldwell, a West Philadelphia tax preparer, whose son, Kenneth Caldwell, was killed in the collapse of the North Tower.

". . . I was just sitting there on the edge of the bed, getting ready to come into the office.

"Then the phone rang, and it was Kenny. He said, 'Mom, I just want to let you know, I love you.' I was thinking, he's so silly, because the night before we were on the phone just laughing and talking. He had had a busy week the week before because he had to take clients out to dinner and the theater, and I was teasing him, saying I wish I could be that busy.

"All of a sudden, he said, 'I have to get out of here because there's a bomb.' And he was gone. I never spoke to him again . . . never, never, ever.

"That was it. I don't know if he hung up or got disconnected. All I know is, he was gone.

"I turned to [daughter] Keisha and said, 'We've got to go! We've got to find Kenny!'

"Then Natalie, Kenny's girlfriend, she called, and she was like, 'Mom, did you get a message from Kenny?'

"For some reason, when Kenny called her, it went directly to voice mail. And when I heard her message, he was so frantic, so scared, like he was running, and it was in his voice, like he was trying to get away.

Elsie's son Leon arrived the next day from graduate school in Nebraska. A caravan of seven cars headed to Manhattan.

"We sent some to New Jersey, and we made Kenny's apartment our central meeting place.

"We went to the armory, and there were lists of names. . . . I remember when we came outside, there were all these people standing across the street. They were just standing there. I thought, 'What are they doing?' And when we walked across the street, there were all these fliers for all these missing people . . . just thousands."

"At nighttime, I'd call his cell phone, and I would tell him I was coming to get him, and I'd tell him I loved him and not to be scared and that Mommy was coming.

". . . It would ring and go to voice mail, and his voice would come on, and I'd leave a message."