LYZ GLICK SAYS she believes in fate.
Does she believe her husband was
fated to be on that plane? “I do, I do,” says Lyz. “He was scheduled
to fly out on an earlier flight the day prior. Even three days before the
flight, he had begged me to have him stay home. He didn’t want to go.
And I said you have to go. You can’t say no to your company. And I think
with all the badness going on that God or some higher power knew that
Jeremy had the strength to somehow stop some of the bad that was going on.
I believe that. I believe that Jeremy was meant for a higher purpose.”
What if he hadn’t been on that
plane? “I’m not asking that,” says Lyz. “I’m not going there.”
Wherever that doomed plane was
heading Tuesday morning, it never got there with its payload of jet fuel
and 45 innocent people. And evidence strongly indicates Americans owe a
debt of gratitude to the citizen heroes aboard Flight 93.
One of them was 31-year-old Jeremy
Glick — the middle son of Joan and Lloyd Glick of Hewitt, N.J. The
entire family — including a brother who joined the Dateline interview by
phone from Tokyo — wanted to tell us the story of his life and his
heroic death as a keepsake for his baby daughter born only 12 weeks ago.
The story began with a phone call
Tuesday morning. His father-in-law, Richard Macklin, answered the phone at
his home in New York’s Catskill Mountains, where his daughter and
granddaughter Emmy were visiting.
“We had received a call from Jeremy as he was boarding the
plane at seven in the morning — 7:30 — to say good morning to Lyz or
goodbye to Lyz,” says Richard. “And the baby had been up all night. We
let Lizzie sleep, so it was a 45 second call, ‘have a good trip’ and
we’d gone about our business. Lizzie was sleeping.”
Jeremy Glick was booked on Flight 93
out of Newark bound for San Francisco. The plane departed on schedule at 8
am. Breakfast was served to 38 passengers by five attendants. They settled
in for the five-hour flight, not knowing what the rest of us were watching
in horror.
A 20-MINUTE CALL
“My son called from
Westchester, said, ‘Turn the TV on,’” says Richard. “I turned the
TV on, and the crashes were occurring. I just had a gut feeling that
Jeremy’s up in the air, but hopefully he’s gone. And Lyz was up now,
and the news was going on. And I was turning TVs off. I didn’t want
Lizzie to worry that something was going on. I think she knew, or maybe
she didn’t want me to worry. And then the phone rings at about a quarter
to 10. And it’s Jeremy. My wife picked up my phone, and she said,
‘Jeremy, thank God, we’re so worried.’ And he said, ‘It’s bad
news.’ And he said, ‘Let me talk to Lyz.’ And that’s when they
started talking.”
What time in the flight did they get
the call? “He said they had been up for about an hour, and there was
some very bad men that had come onto the plane,” says Lyz. “I’m not
sure how long they had been up before the plane was hijacked. But he said
that the men had a bomb and they had a knife. He said that they were
Arabic-looking men. I think he said they were wearing red headbands. The
description said that there were three of them. He was very surprised that
these people could have boarded the plane.”
Did he say that they were flying the
plane? “He didn’t say anything,” says Lyz. “I asked him if the
pilots had been in contact with them to tell them what was going on, and
he said that no contact had been made by the pilots. It seems that the men
had taken over the plane and had moved everyone to the back of the plane
and kind of left them there.”
Jeremy told her he was calling from
the plane air phone. It was a conversation Lyz says lasted for more than
20 minutes.
So he was free to talk? Or was he trying to speak surreptitiously?
“He was free to talk to me,” says Lyz. “I was a little bit, I think
surprised by the aura of what was going on, on the plane. I was surprised
by how calm it seemed in the background. I didn’t hear any screaming. I
didn’t hear any noises. I didn’t hear any commotion. It almost
didn’t make sense to me, you know, that such a terrible thing could be
happening, yet what I was hearing in the background and in his voice was
not as bad as what was really happening on that flight.”
There was no hysteria on the ground,
either. Lyz’s mom had the wit to dial 911 from another line. Authorities
patched into the call.
“And we ran and got the cell phone
and dialed 911 and tried to get a link where Lizzie was talking to Jeremy
and Joanne was talking to the state police and questions were going back
and forth,” says Richard.
Who exactly was on the other end of
the phone? “The New York State Trooper barrack,” says Richard.
“I’m not sure — maybe in Kingston, New York, or something like that
where the 911 call routed.”
Were they asking Jeremy questions,
too? “They were listening,” says Lyz. “They had not been able to —
I had heard them tap in, but they were not able to ask questions.”
He said there was a bomb? “Yes,”
says Lyz.
Did he say what the bomb looked like?
“It was something with a red tag around it,” says Lyz. “He was
confused by it.”
But he seemed to believe that it was
in fact a bomb? “Yes,” Lyz says.
Did he ask about the World Trade
Center, or did Lyz bring it up? “He asked me,” she says. “I remember
I was standing in the living room. It was actually right in front of me on
the television. He said, ‘Lyz I need to know something.’ One of the
other passengers has talked to their spouse, and he had said that they
were crashing planes into the World Trade Center and was that true. And I
hesitated for a moment because he was in the air and I didn’t want to
tell him something so horrible. What was he going to do with this
information, was he going to go into a panic? And I just hesitated for a
minute, and I said, ‘You need to be strong, but yes, they are doing
that.’ He didn’t know if they were going to blow up the plane or if
the plane had another mission.”
He didn’t tell her that one of the
passengers had been stabbed and had already died? “No,” says Lyz.
THE PLANE TURNED OFF COURSE
Was there any talk, any exchange,
speculating what could they be doing, where could they be taking them?
“You know, we were able to ask Jeremy some questions, and it was guided
by that 911 call, and he was able to describe where he was,” says Lyz.
“They were still flying high at the time this happened. They were still
able to see rural landscape. And the plane had turned. It wasn’t going
to California.”
He knew it had turned? “Yes,”
says Lyz. “He felt the plane was circling, and it wasn’t going to
California.”
He was right. Dateline NBC obtained
radar data showing the path of United Flight 93. A little more than an
hour into the flight, it makes a sharp turn off course near Cleveland,
Ohio. Radio communication is switched off.
Dateline has also been able to
confirm that a new flight plan was filed from on board, perhaps by a
fourth hijacker — the destination, Reagan International Airport. The
plane was now on a direct course for Washington, D.C.
“He knew something very bad was
going to happen,” says Lyz. “What he needed to know was what was going
to happen. Were they going to blow the plane up, or was it going to crash
into something else, because that made all the difference.”
As Jeremy and Lyz debriefed each other, he was beginning to see the
diabolical plan — that he was not a hostage, he was strapped to a guided
missile. These high school sweethearts, 1988 prom king and queen, married
five years last month, brand-new parents, seemed to be saying farewell.
“We said I love you a thousand
times over and over again, and it just brought so much peace to us,”
says Lyz. “I felt the feeling from it. He told me, ‘I love Emmy’ —
who is our daughter — and to take care of her. Then he said, whatever
decisions you make in your life, I need you to be happy, and I will
respect any decisions that you make. That’s what he said and that gives
me the most comfort. He sounded strong. He didn’t sound panicked, very
clear-headed. I told him to put a picture of me and Emmy in his head to be
strong.”
So she was strong for him as he was
strong for her? “Yes,” says Lyz. “Neither of us panicked. He knew
that he was not going to make it out of there. I was focused on making him
know that I was OK.”
How did she do that? “I don’t know,” she says. “I have no idea.
I have no idea how I’m so strong right now. You can ask my dad, I’m a
very emotional person.”
Richard says, “There was a moment
when he said they have the bomb when she panicked. And she went, ‘Oh my
god, Jeremy, a bomb.’ And then I could hear her say, ‘OK, OK, OK,
I’ll be strong.’ But there was just that moment, and then she had it,
and it was like a normal conversation in a terrible situation.”
A normal conversation? “It was,
Jeremy, do they have automatic weapons?
She was asking questions like I was
asking questions? “Yes, right,” says Richard. “And he was asking
questions, and she would say, ‘Jeremy, they’re not sure what they want
to do. Should they rush the people, or should they just wait?’ It was a
situation —we’ve got choice A, we’ve got choice B.’”
What did Richard think? “I thought
there was a chance,” he says. “While this was going on, I think we’d
turned the sound down on the TV. And there was, they switched to the
Pentagon, and there was another crash has taken place while we’re on the
phone. And we’re saying at least he’s not in that one.”
Lyz says, “I was doing the same
exact thing.”
FORMULATING A PLAN
So there was hope that he
could overcome it. In fact, Jeremy and two other men were hatching a plan
in the back of that 757, now a little more than a half hour from the
nation’s capitol. It was a suicide mission, in a way — not to take
lives but to save them.
Another passenger, Thomas Burnett,
told his wife by cell phone that three of them were talking about
“rushing the hijackers.”
Jeremy told Lyz they were going to
take a vote. “He was asking me, ‘I need some advice — what to
do?’” she says. “‘Should we, you know, we’re talking about
attacking these men, what should I do?’ And, you know, I was scared
about giving him the wrong information. I didn’t want to do something
wrong and have something terrible happen, and so I asked him if they were
armed. And he said he had seen knives. But there were no guns. And then I
finally just decided at that instant that, ‘Honey, you need to do it’.
“And then he joked. He’s like,
‘OK, I have my butter knife from breakfast.’ You know, this was
totally like Jeremy. And then he said to me, ‘You know, I’m going to
leave the phone here. Stay on the line, I’ll be back.’ And then I gave
the phone to my dad because I didn’t want to hear what had happened. And
I just prayed, I just sat there and prayed.”
Richard listened.
A ‘SUPERHERO’ TO HIS
FAMILY
That this son, husband, father,
brother and friend would rise to the occasion comes as no surprise to the
people who watched him grow up.
“When Jeremy was little, he was so
obsessed with superheroes that he would call her Wonder Woman,” says
Jennifer.
His nickname was “Green Lantern.” It’s eerie almost how well he
fit the part he would grow up to play.
“Jeremy won the Citizens Cup at age
11,” says his mother, Joan.
Joanna, his sister, says, “Teddy
bear — just fall into his arms.”
Jennifer says, “And he was the
biggest, you know, ‘big guy.’ He was a big guy, and he liked big
things.”
Joan says, “He was a super athlete.
He was a judo champion.”
But nobody knew he was in harm’s
way Tuesday morning. In fact, Joan was absolutely certain he wasn’t —
not knowing he’d delayed his trip.
“I drove home, and we passed by a
church, and I said, I have to stop, and I stopped and all of the sudden I
opened the door to the church and all of a sudden organ music was
playing,” she says, “and I knew in my heart he had died.”
And 16-year-old Joanna, the youngest
of six children, is the one who has to tell Jonah — the oldest brother.
He lives in Tokyo, and because airports are closed, he’s still
stranded there. Our telephone hookup was their first contact.
“Hey Jonah. It’s Lyz. I can’t
wait to see you,” she tells him.
We sat with the family and talked for
almost three hours, sharing a lot of good memories, of course, and some
tears.
It’s just too hard, isn’t it?
“I have so much to say,” Jed says. “I spent my life trying to be
like him, and I’m going to keep doing it.”
Jennifer says, “You have to
celebrate his life — you can’t mourn his death. He lived more in his
31 years than some people live in 100 years, and that’s what we want
Emerson to know. We want her to know how great he was and happy.”
Emmy, whose proper name Emerson means
strength, will not grow up knowing her father. But she will know that he
was a hero — that he died fighting.
I’ve never seen him cry,” says
Lyz. “And we had talked about it maybe a couple of months ago. And I
said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen you cry.’ This is before my
daughter was born. And the day she was born, the first time he looked at
her, he had tears in his eyes. And then on the phone when I was talking to
him — when everything was happening on the plane, he was crying — and
that was the only other time that I had ever heard him cry. And I’m
definitely the crier in our relationship.”
The last thing Lyz heard her husband
say was to stay on the line. But she couldn’t bear to listen and handed
the phone to her father, who did.
“There was no noise for several
minutes,” says Richard. “And then there was screams, screams in the
background and so I said, ‘Well, they’re doing it.’ Another minute,
seemed like eternity, but another minute, minute and a half, and then
there was another set of screams. And it was muffled. It was almost as if
a roller coaster, the noise that you hear. Then there was nothing.”
Does the family think it’s possible
that Jeremy may have saved the White House? “I think so. I think so,”
they say.
“What he did and what happened on
his flight, it gave us a glimmer of hope,” says Jared.
Joan says, “I think it does that
one person can make a difference, that one person in this country has the
opportunity to change this world and make a difference.”
Richard says, “Jeremy was a
patriot.”
United Flight 93 was the only one of
four hijacked planes to take no casualties on the ground. Now, a widow at
31, Lyz says she is not angry and she has no regrets.
“I don’t feel like there are
things left undone with my relationship with Jeremy, you know,” says Lyz.
“We did it all, and I don’t feel like I’ve left anything unsaid to
him, and I don’t feel like he’s left anything unsaid to me, you know.
And I don’t think many people who are so young can say that.”
Pennsylvania senators Rick Santorum
and Arlen Specter visited the site of the crash Friday and said that after
examining transcripts of phone calls made from the plane, they concluded
that the passengers had tried to overtake the hijackers, and may recommend
the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They believe the intended target was
the United States Capitol.