A newly published excerpt from a forthcoming memoir by Frank Siller offers a detailed account of his brother Stephen Siller’s final hours on September 11, 2001, when the off-duty New York City firefighter abandoned plans for a round of golf and ran on foot through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel toward the burning World Trade Center.
According to the account, Stephen Siller had just finished an overnight shift with FDNY Squad 1 in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood when, just after 8:46 a.m., news of a plane striking the World Trade Center’s North Tower came over the scanner in his 1990 GMC Sierra pickup truck. He had been driving to Staten Island to meet his brothers before heading to central New Jersey for golf.
Instead, he turned around on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and drove toward the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would take him under the river into Lower Manhattan. While en route, he called his wife, Sally, told her a plane had hit the World Trade Center, said he loved her, and asked her to tell his brothers he would not be able to play golf that day.
Witnesses saw him run in as others ran out
At the mouth of the tunnel, Stephen Siller encountered Robin and Joe Raiso, a couple whose car had nearly entered the tunnel before police shut it down after the first plane hit. The two watched as Siller got out of his truck, retrieved roughly 60 pounds of firefighter’s gear from the back, and began running toward the tunnel entrance on foot.
NYPD officers initially stopped him at police barricades blocking the tunnel, but let him through once they recognized he was an FDNY firefighter.
“We were shocked and amazed. Everyone was trying to run out,” Joe Raiso said. “He was running in.”
That was the last time the Raisos saw him. Siller ran roughly 1.7 miles through the tunnel — the longest continuous underwater vehicular tunnel in North America — toward Lower Manhattan. Frank Siller writes that his brother was likely inside the tunnel at 9:03 a.m. when a second hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower.
A legacy built from that run
Frank Siller’s account does not describe what happened to his brother once he emerged from the tunnel into Lower Manhattan. The Siller family later founded the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which supports first responders, veterans, and their families, in Stephen’s memory.
The account is excerpted from Frank Siller’s memoir, “Let Us Do Good: My Brother Stephen, 9/11, and the Mission to Honor America’s Heroes,” set for publication by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
