9/11 anniversary: Local victims, heroes remembered 25 years later

The mysterious call came in around 7:40 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001.

Sue Mladenik was making the bed in her Hinsdale home and quickly grabbed a nearby phone, hoping the unusually early noise wouldn’t awaken her young daughter.

But after the mother said hello, there was nothing but a dial tone.

The screen of the landline only offered the cryptic message “no data sent,” with no other information on the caller or number on the other end of the line.

A few minutes later, the terror began.

Through clear blue skies, traveling faster than 400 miles per hour, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

The Boeing 767 crashed between the 93rd and 99th floors, soon felling the iconic skyscraper and instantly killing the 87 passengers and crew aboard the plane.

Watching in horror as news channels replayed footage of that scene over and over, Sue Mladenik would think about that strange disconnected phone call she received just before the jetliner made impact.

“I believe it was my husband calling me from the plane,” she said during a recent interview with the Tribune, while fighting back tears. “No one will ever convince me” otherwise.

The Rev. Jeffrey Peter Mladenik, an associate pastor at Christ Church in Oak Brook, was supposed to be in Los Angeles that morning on a business trip for his internet publishing company.

But the 43-year-old father of four instead made a last-minute trip to the East Coast to handle a customer crisis, putting him on that ill-fated flight from Boston’s Logan International Airport.

At first, some watching conjectured the collision might have been a terrible accident.

Yet it soon became clear this catastrophe was planned and meticulously orchestrated with intention.

America was under attack.

And the devastation that unfolded on this day a quarter-century ago would remain seared in the nation’s collective memory.

Coordinated destruction

Seventeen minutes after the north tower was pierced, another commercial passenger plane — United Airlines Flight 175 — sharply banked left before slicing through the second of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, leveling what was once an architectural marvel of steel symbolizing American economic strength and global commerce.

Thirty-four minutes later, American Airlines Flight 77 tore through the western side of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.; more than 7,000 gallons of jet fuel on the Boeing 757 ignited an enormous fireball that burned for hours.

Another 26 minutes passed before the final crash of the day: United Airlines Flight 93 suddenly turned around and detoured from its planned course, heading for Washington, D.C., with a suspected target of the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

The world would later learn that all four jets had been hijacked by al-Qaida terrorists under the direction of notorious founder Osama bin Laden.

Yet during that last hijacked flight, passengers and crew thwarted the mission, storming the cockpit and forcing the plane to crash into a field in Pennsylvania.

All on board were killed. But the plot was foiled.

“These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong,” President George W. Bush declared. “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”

As the 25-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks approaches, Sue Mladenik doesn’t want the nation to forget this sentiment of national unity and steadfastness in the wake of terror, particularly amid this era of mounting polarization and division across the country.

She urges Americans to remain vigilant about national security to guard against future potential threats or terrorism, recounting how vulnerable the country allowed itself to be just two and a half decades ago.

And she wants the world to honor the memory of the 2,977 killed in the onslaught that day, including her husband — a devoted clergyman who always kept a Bible on hand while traveling.

The grieving widow surmises that Jeffrey Mladenik likely offered fellow passengers the comfort of scripture during their final moments on that unfathomable morning.

The graduate of North Central College in Naperville and Wheaton College was survived by four children: Kelly, Josh, Dan and Grace, who was adopted from China and only 4 when he died.

The couple were in the process of adopting their daughter Hannah from China when Jeffrey Mladenik was killed, and Sue Mladenik had to refile the paperwork as a single mother; she later adopted the family’s youngest child, Bethany, from China as well.

The mother mourns that the two younger Mladenik daughters never had a chance to meet him. They have no memory of Sept. 11, 2001, like an estimated 100 million Americans who were born after the attacks or were too young to have recollections of this day.

Eternal legacy

Sue Mladenik has come to believe that retribution or punishment won’t bring a sense of resolution.

The trial for accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and three others is scheduled for June 2028, though Mohammed’s confession was recently excluded by a military judge because it was deemed to have not been made voluntarily.

The outcome, though, will likely not assuage Sue Mladenik’s pain.

“It’s not going to bring my husband back,” she said. “It’s not going to bring any of the other victims back.”

In 2011, the fatal shooting of bin Laden in a U.S. military operation didn’t give Sue Mladenik any sense of relief.

Her only solace comes from keeping Jeff Mladenik’s legacy alive.

She frequently talks to him at Clarendon Hills Cemetery in Darien, where some of his cremated remains were buried. The rest are kept in a small urn at her home, which is now in west suburban Sugar Grove.

Initially, his body had remained unrecovered from the site of ground zero; his original death certificate read, “Cause of death: blunt force trauma. Homicide. No body found,” she recalled.

Over the course of several years, the family received five separate notifications that pieces of his remains had been identified.

She keeps a shrine of 9/11 memorabilia in her basement, surrounding a framed portrait of Jeffrey Mladenik in glasses and a beard that used to make Grace giggle when he would pick her up and embrace her against her cheek.

One wall is decorated with a large image of an American flag inscribed with the names of every Sept. 11, 2001, victim in its red and white stripes. There’s also a mosaic of the twin towers made in a collage of images of those who were killed that day; she points to Jeffrey Mladenik’s likeness in the top right-hand corner.

A charcoal etching of her husband’s name from the National September 11 Memorial in New York hangs on another wall. She also had his signature tattooed on her arm.

On Friday, she plans to commemorate her husband and all the lives lost 25 years ago by speaking at a local 9/11 memorial called “The Healing Field” in Oak Brook.

The commemoration will display 2,977 American flags, each bearing a biography of a victim of the attacks.

While speaking at a previous memorial years ago, Sue Mladenik lamented that her husband missed his children’s graduations and would never see the adults and parents they have become.

That he never got to celebrate his beloved White Sox winning the World Series in 2005.

That he never got the chance to grow old with her.

“When you get married, they say the two shall become one. I was no longer one. The best part of me was gone … forever,” she told the crowd. “We keep him alive in our hearts, talking about him and remembering him all the time. His life was important. He needs to be remembered for the extraordinary man that he was.”

Backlash, dual fears

The early morning Metra commute to downtown Chicago on Sept. 11, 2001, felt vaguely unsettling, the Muslim chaplain recalled.

“There was something very strange in the air,” said Omer Mozaffar, who was 29 at the time. “Something did not seem right.”

At Union Station, thick crowds had formed around television screens; Mozaffar caught phrases like “unprecedented” and “never heard of this before,” but couldn’t get close enough to see what had happened.

While walking to work downtown, he finally learned the news from a man staring at an outdoor TV screen, who said, “They hit the World Trade Center.”

Anger laced the stranger’s voice.

Although no one had much information after the initial plane crash, Mozaffar immediately feared for his safety.

“I got very concerned about my own well-being. Exactly that moment,” recounted Mozaffar, who now serves as a Muslim chaplain and advanced lecturer teaching Islamic studies at Loyola University Chicago.

Like many Muslims across the country, Mozaffar endured dual layers of trepidation as the morning unfolded.

So much of America was gripped by anxiety and panic, particularly in the Chicago area

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But in addition to worry about outside threats, many Muslims, Arab Americans and South Asians also faced immediate backlash domestically.

“I experienced a level of terror that I have never experienced before or since,” Mozaffar recalled. “Part of it was the bewilderment of trying to make sense of what was going on. As well as the fear of being attacked because of being Muslim.”

President Bush repeatedly condemned this displaced blame in the aftermath of the attacks, stating “Islam is peace” at the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., while declaring that perpetrators of bigotry and violence “don’t represent the best of America.”

Despite these words, anti-Muslim hate crimes jumped from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001 nationwide, according to the New York advocacy group Human Rights Watch’s 2002 report, “We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes Against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to Be Arab or Muslim After September 11.”

In Chicago, the Arab American Action Network was set on fire following a string of harassing calls and emails directed at the Southwest Side community center in the wake of 9/11.

St. John’s Assyrian Church of the East was set ablaze 12 days after the attacks, sustaining $150,000 in damage.

In southwest suburban Palos Heights, a man was charged with a hate crime for attacking a gas station attendant of Moroccan descent with the blunt end of a machete on Sept. 11, 2001; officials had said the assailant described being angry about the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

While the climate was terrifying, it also proved in some ways to be galvanizing. Muslim and Arab groups rallied to protect their communities from violence and prejudice.

Mozaffar was often called upon to speak about Islam to church groups throughout the Chicago area, as well as some local synagogues and corporate offices; he estimated he has given thousands of talks of this kind since 9/11.

A movement grew nationwide and locally to encourage more reporting and documentation of incidents, recalled Sufyan Sohel, senior adviser and general counsel for the Chicago office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

And there were bright moments when allies showed staunch support, like a bouquet of yellow flowers left outside a Des Plaines mosque following the attacks, with an anonymous note reading “May all your families be safe.”

The number of reported hate crimes against Muslims never dropped to pre-Sept. 11, 2001, levels, though they did decrease markedly throughout the later 2000s and early 2010s, according to a 2023 Marshall Project Report citing FBI data.

But in recent years, Islamophobia and anti-Arab rhetoric have once again increased; Sohel cited the 2016 presidential election as a major turning point spurring this spike.

During the heated campaign, Donald Trump declared during a CNN interview, “I think Islam hates us.”

Last month, President Trump referred to Democratic candidates running in the midterm elections as “jihadists.”

Some elected leaders tried to tamp down the national temperature in 2001.

And after 9/11, there was also a strong feeling of cohesion among many Americans, with much of the nation banding to take care of one another and heal collectively, Sohel recalled. Much of the bigotry was still on the fringe.

Today, the country is so much more fractured; hate has become normalized, he added.

“When we hear elected officials speak so negatively and filled with hate against our community, it tells our community: Hey, they will never see us as Americans,” he said.

Mozaffar believes it will be up to everyday people to promote a change or shift to this culture.

“If I had the time, I would literally sit face to face with every single person in Chicago to compel them to get to know me and for me to know them. The idea being the need toward reconciliation,” he said. “I don’t expect our heads of state to be promoting this anytime soon. They are capitalizing on keeping us all divided.”

Mass destruction, recovery

As a firefighter watched the twin towers collapse on the television in a North Side fire house, he felt called to go to ground zero.

“I knew I was going to New York City,” recalled now-retired Chicago Fire Department Battalion Chief Joel Burns.

No one ordered him to go. But once Burns finished his last scheduled shift here, he and three fellow firefighters threw bags of equipment in the back of a van and drove roughly 790 miles to Manhattan without stopping.

“We were probably doing 100 miles per hour,” said Burns, who was a new lieutenant at the time. “We had all our gear with us, so any copper could have stuck his head in the window and know that what we were telling him was truly what was going on. So we were like: Let’s get there.”

By nightfall, they first glimpsed the massive plume of smoke — which rose several thousand feet into the atmosphere — as they crossed the Hudson River.

The 110-story twin towers had collapsed into a 16-acre smoldering crater of broken and twisted beams, everything coated in a fine pulverized concrete powder.

Tens of thousands of firefighters, other first responders and volunteers from all over the country converged on ground zero to aid in what began as a search-and-rescue mission but soon shifted to recovery.

For long days, they sifted through the wreckage of what had become a mass grave, looking for any human remains or objects that could be identified.

They formed giant bucket brigades — human chains filling 5-gallon containers with rubble and hand-passing them out of the site.

The operation moved nearly 2 million tons of debris alongside active fires, which continued to burn for more than 100 days, according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York.

Now-retired Aurora Fire Department Division Chief Jason Demas was one of six firefighters from the west suburb selected to aid in the recovery.

There weren’t many objects remaining. He never encountered a desk or file cabinet. Most everything had been crushed into dust, he recalled.

But there were occasionally items he did find that made the scene a little more human. A purse. A hairbrush.

And along the perimeter, desperate people kept trying to give the first responders flyers with names and photos of their loved ones.

“I can’t tell you how many people handed us pictures. ‘Please, have you seen this person?’” Demas recalled.

Posters of victims were taped to surrounding trees. Boxes of tissues were affixed to the trunks.

“To wipe away the tears,” Demas said.

‘Never forget’

Three hundred and forty-three New York City firefighters were killed at ground zero.

Burns recalled that whenever the remains of a firefighter were recovered, all work at the site — which became known as the pile — would suddenly halt.

“All of the machines. The cranes. The dozers. Everything would shut down and they would try to get a hold of their fire company,” Burns recalled.

The firefighter’s remains would be placed in a Stokes basket covered in an American flag. Everyone would pause to salute, he said.

At one point, while taking a break with a few other firefighters, Burns noticed a few sheets of paper — some man’s tax returns — at his feet.

The owner would have once fiercely protected his privacy, Burns thought. Now the document was just lying there for the world to see.

“Stuff that was so important was now trivial,” Burns said. “His name, his Social Security number were right there. And everyone could care less.”

That moment, a New York firefighter approached and thanked them for helping. That man was searching for the remains of one of his colleagues and carried with him a flag, hoping to cover the body.

Burns doesn’t know if that firefighter ever found the person he was looking for.

But several years later, at a firefighter’s promotion party at a bar in Chicago, a large man entered and stared directly at Burns, who began to get nervous.

The guy turned out to be that New York fireman, in town for a Jets game.

“He said, ‘I’ll never forget talking to you — you were the first guy to make me laugh after the events of 9/11,’” Burns recalled, chuckling a little. “I think we were bashing what (expletives) our mayors were.”

The nation’s mantra after Sept. 11, 2001, became “We will never forget,” a pledge to forever honor the victims and heroes of that day.

Burns teaches at the McHenry County College Fire Academy. Most of his students weren’t alive 25 years ago. He often speaks during class to this next generation of firefighters about 9/11.

“If we forget the past, we’re going to repeat it in the future,” he added.

As Demas and his colleagues drove back to the Chicago area from ground zero, they felt a similar responsibility to share what they had experienced with others, particularly those too young to have lived through the horror.

“You have to know your history,” he said. “You have to know the people who did this to us. You have to know the people who didn’t do this to us. And that you can’t blame certain people for certain things.”

Without this deeper understanding, “we become a society of assumptions,” Demas added.

“We have to understand how we grow from this as a country,” he said. “We can’t change what has happened. But we can change what we are going to do” going forward.