Last year, my parents informed me over breakfast that we were personally affected and involved with the 9/11 attacks. As I sat frozen, fork suspended mid-air, they told me that some of the terrorists stole my mother’s cell phone number when we were on vacation in Florida and used it to make calls in the weeks leading up to and during the attacks on the Twin Towers.
I was bewildered and outraged that I had not known about this sooner. My parents swore they thought I knew, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have forgotten that somehow, my family unknowingly played a part on that devastating September day. To be fair, I was only eight years old at the time and was relatively oblivious to what was happening.
My parents had no idea that our phone number had been stolen until they received a bill from Cingular, now AT&T, on Aug. 26, 2001 for $5,826. The bill showed calls to Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Kansas, New Jersey, Texas and countless calls to Pakistan. My parents immediately called Cingular and said that they did not make those calls, and the bill was cancelled. At that point, it was only the end of August and the name Al-Qaeda was not being plastered all over the news. When Sept. 11 arrived and my parents sat on our couch watching the Twin Towers fall on TV, the phone bill was far from their minds.
It was not until Sept. 15 when we received another bill from Cingular for $3,591.55 with similar phone calls that they made the connection. There were constant news reports of investigations about the suspected terrorists on TV. My father remembered hearing that people’s phone numbers had been stolen. As the reporter read off the list of places these calls were made to, he realized that our bill had listed almost all of them.
My parents told me that they decided to call my mother’s friend, whose husband worked for the FBI. They were told to fax the bills to a certain number and to never use that number again. They never spoke to the FBI agents directly but merely communicated through my mother’s friend.
Then they got the call asking if they would mind if an FBI agent flew to our house in the Bahamas to ask them a few questions. By this point, I was completely dumbfounded and gaped at my parents over my by then cold pile of pancakes. The FBI at our house? My mother described how she had been shaking with fear but had agreed to let the FBI do whatever was necessary. She was mostly worried that they thought we were somehow involved in the attack and that they would investigate us. In the end though, it was not necessary for the FBI to visit. They had gotten all the information they needed from our faxed phone bills and by that time, other people were coming forward with their tales of stolen phone numbers too.
Later, we found out that police had broken into the house one of the terrorists was occupying in Hollywood, Fla., only a block away from where we had stayed on our vacation that August, and discovered the instruments he used to intercept and steal cell phone numbers. Our phone bills, along with similar bills that other families turned in, helped to locate the house.
I’m proud to say that we were able to help with the investigation in some way. Apart from this incident, the horrors of 9/11 were far reaching and touched my family at home in the Bahamas. One of my mother’s friends had a son who was on the roof of the second tower waiting to be evacuated when it fell. An employee in my father’s bank was on the phone with someone in the first tower when the plane hit. We have a friend in New York who worked near the area and was able to get to safety after the first tower fell. It’s a shame that I was so young at the time and unaware of the situation and the importance of what was going on. Now that I’m older and I understand the impact of that day, I am chilled to think how we were personally affected by those events.
We still have the phone bills filed away at home, a reminder of the devastation of 9/11 and our little part in trying to help in its aftermath.
Paola Crespo can be reached at paola.crespo@theminaretonline.com
