Community Corner

Libertyville Resident on United Flight on 9/11

A decade later, Patch takes a look at how the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have influenced or affected Libertyville residents.

Tim Carroll of Libertyville was flying into New York from Chicago on a United Airlines flight on Sept. 11, 2001.

He remembers the day being crystal clear when he left Chicago in the morning and also when his plane came around the Twin Towers in New York.

“We had a car waiting for us and as we were walking to the car, the driver said that a small plane had hit the World Trade Center,” Carroll said.

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At this time, the driver hadn’t turned on the radio and Carroll still had no idea what was going on.

“I called my wife, which is pretty peculiar because I never do that when I land, and said I landed and heard a small plane hit the World Trade Center and I’m sure this is going to mess up my flight home,” he said.

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'That's My Plane'

After he hung up, Carroll recalls everything still being normal until he saw smoke coming from the Twin Towers. That was when he asked the driver to turn on the radio.

“We turn on the radio and there was an announcer that was pretty panicked, and he was announcing that it was a United flight that was mine,” Carroll said. “I realized at that point it was the plane right behind us.”

Carroll was about three miles away from the Midtown Tunnel when all hell broke loose.

“It was just like a switch went on and sirens started coming and lights started coming,” he said.  “I’m so thankful that I made the phone call, at least wife knows I’m on ground and not on that plane.”

Mass Panick

Four police cars came through Midtown Tunnel, stopped traffic and according to Carroll, people started getting out of their cars and ran.

“I could start seeing what looked like people jumping out of the building and it just started escalating. It was such an unbelievably helpless feeling, then all of a sudden the second plane hit, and now I started realizing was something of a major magnitude was happening, and all I could think about was I would not see my family again.”

Carroll managed to get back to his Connecticut home but was not able to secure a rental car for two days because all national rentals were gone. In the end, he found a local rental car and decided he would drive that back to Chicago.

Preciousness of Lives

When he arrived in Libertyville, Carroll drove to each of his three children’s schools.

“I just remember pounding and knocking on the principals’ doors and saying ‘I want to see my kids,’ ” Carroll said. “I felt so lucky, so fortunate, yet so sad, vulnerable and impacted by the terror and the loss of life and the reality of whole thing.”

Freedom Changed

The day after Carroll arrived home in Libertyville, he took out a revolutionary cannon given by his father, and fired three shots to commemorate those that had lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I just felt for the first time the vulnerability, the price of our freedom the vulnerability of our liberty and how somebody could so viciously take advantage of it at the expense of our lifestyle as Americans,” Carroll said. “Our naïveté about our freedom was just so pure that it will never be the same.”

In memory of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, Patch is providing a look at how the event has influenced or affected Libertyville residents. .


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