Nicole Parker Recalls Surviving 9/11 and the Moment That Changed Her Life

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Guy Benson: Well, as I mentioned yesterday at the top of the show, we’re going to spend much more time than we typically do, even in previous weeks leading up to 9/11 anniversaries, talking about that day and the memories of that day because it’s the 25th anniversary.

I think it is imperative that we have these conversations very openly. Because, again, as I pointed out yesterday, if we don’t pass along the true history of what happened, there are lots of other people who, in service of other agendas, will very happily fill in those gaps dishonestly with their tendentious-to-deceitful versions of what happened.

Helping us in that regard here is Nicole Parker, a Fox News contributor and former FBI agent. She has quite a story as it pertains to this. Nicole, welcome back to the show.

Nicole Parker: Thank you so much for having me. I could not agree with you more. I think it’s so important that we never forget–not just by saying “never forget,” but that Americans truly have a respect for this holiday, where many Americans lost their lives.

Guy Benson: Let’s talk, as a starting point, about an email that you sent–and you made this public–an email you sent to your father on September 11, 2001, at 8:49 Eastern Time that morning. Give us the context here and tell us about it.

Nicole Parker: So this is the first year I’ve ever put that out publicly. I send an email out to my closest friends every single September 11th because I do think it’s important for people to know, understand, and remember.

I am originally from Houston, Texas. I had taken a job in New York City. I’d interned and then took a job at Merrill Lynch. My family and friends around the country would always say, “Where do you work?” And I’m like, “You know those two tall towers in New York City, the Twin Towers? I work down there.”

I did not work in the Twin Towers. I worked in the World Financial Center, but it was connected by a footbridge across the West Side Highway.

That morning, I did my daily commute. I took the 1 train down to the World Trade Center. It lets you off underneath the World Trade Center. I would walk out by the underground mall of the World Trade Center, and then I would walk through the North Tower, also known as One World Trade Center. I walked through there around 7:40 or 7:45 that morning.

Then I took the escalator from the World Trade Center. You go through this little area, go up the escalator over the footbridge, and then I was at my office at Merrill Lynch in the World Financial Center.

So I was in the North Tower about one hour before it was struck.

Normally, I would get to work around 8:30, somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00. But that morning I got there earlier because it was my brother’s birthday. I wanted to send him an e-card. This is back in 2001, when e-cards were the cool thing. And I just had some personal matters I wanted to take care of.

So I’m at my desk, and my colleague–it was Election Day that day in New York City–came in earlier than normal. We were talking and just chatting at our desks.

My boss, Wynn Smith, was the chairman of Merrill Lynch International. He was in Japan at the time. It was fairly empty in the office, so we were just kind of chatting about little things.

And the next thing I know, at 8:46, I hear the loudest explosion you could ever imagine. It shook everything.

I just remember thinking, “What in the world was that?” Because, Guy, it was the most beautiful morning. The night before was extremely stormy in New York, but 9/11 was crystal clear. It was fall–crisp, beautiful.

I heard the sound, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” We ran to the window, and sure enough, the North Tower was on fire. There were flames coming out of it, big black billowing smoke. It was like silver–it looked like silver confetti coming down from the building. It was part of the building, and it had just completely shattered.

We had no idea what was going on.

But I can tell you, I was shocked. I had no words to describe it. I was immediately concerned, more than scared. I was concerned because I looked up there, and the first thing I said was, “There are people dying up there. There is no way people are going to survive this.”

And I had just walked through the World Trade Center. I was looking at the elevator banks as I was kind of peeling off to go to the World Financial Center. You see the little elevator banks, and you see people going to the different floors and waiting for the elevator.

And I thought, “Holy crap. Those people I just saw–those people…” If anyone was above a certain floor–I didn’t know what floor it was, but it looked like it was around 85 or higher, 90 or higher–I was thinking, “There’s no way they’re going to make it out of there.”

And that broke my heart.

So I’m from Texas, you know. I was barely 23 years old. I rushed back to my desk, and I just fired off an email very quickly to my dad, basically saying, “Dad, I saw the explosion across from the World Trade Center. I’m fine.”

I spelled the word “explosion” completely wrong, but that’s how scared I was. I didn’t care. I was shaking–shaking. I fired that off to my dad.

That was the last that my family heard from me for hours.

I went back to the window and just watched the entire thing happen.

The South Tower was struck. Originally, we didn’t know what it was. Everyone was like, “Oh, maybe it was an airplane.” We turned on the television in the conference room and were watching it, but people were like, “Oh, maybe a small Cessna plane.”

And then, right as we were standing there, the next thing we know, we see a plane flying into the South Tower, and we’re like, “Oh my gosh. This is not an accident. We’re under attack.”

That’s when I knew.

Guy Benson: And by the way, just to jump in very quickly, it’s all resonating with me. I was growing up in the area. I was in high school in northern New Jersey. I remember the clear sky. I remember the crisp temperatures. My dad also commuted through that exact same spot every day. He took the PATH train.

And having that exact same revelation, realization–in fact, I just filed a column that comes out tomorrow, and I’ll talk about it on the show later in the week when I talk about my own remembrances. But literally, that thought process was what I wrote in the column and what I felt that day.

It went from this concerning, puzzling mystery to, “Oh my gosh, this was intentional. We’re under attack.” And it happens in a heartbeat. And then your brain finally gets there.

Nicole Parker: Yeah, my brain really didn’t, honestly. As I was watching it, even before the second plane struck the South Tower, I did start getting scared because I was like, “How are they going to save all those people?”

And I felt so helpless. I was like, “What am I going to do to help? I can’t just stand here and watch. People are dying up there.” But, like, what was I going to do? I was working at Merrill Lynch. I’m not a firefighter. What was I going to do?

I just remember thinking in my head, praying, like, “God, please help these people. Give them comfort. This is terrible.”

And I started putting myself in their shoes. Then you start having this feeling: “Oh my gosh, what would I do if that happened to me?”

Then, when the second plane comes in, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, how many more planes are going to come in? Is my building next?”

That was my thought.

So I immediately talked to–I mean, there were only a few of my colleagues there at Merrill Lynch at the time, and everyone had gathered where I was because I was on the top floor. I worked for the chairman of Merrill Lynch International at the time, so all these people were coming into our work area whom I didn’t even know from Merrill Lynch.

A videographer was there and different people were capturing what was happening, and I was just terrified. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

But after that second plane came in, I was absolutely terrified, and everybody started screaming. I was like, “Okay, I need to stay calm.”

My first thought was, “I’ve got to get out of here.”

My other colleagues were like, “No, I think it’s safer to stay inside,” because at this point people started jumping from that North Tower.

There was a sheer desperation, and it didn’t take long for people to have no other option than to jump. And so we started seeing people jumping.

I’m like, “Is it better to stay inside the building, where there’s no debris coming at us, or…?” Part of it was just the whole thought process. You’re not even thinking. You can’t even wrap your head around it.

You just keep thinking, “This is a nightmare.” And you close your eyes, you open them, and you’re like, “No, this isn’t real.”

So eventually I made it out of the building, but I had a spiritual moment in that elevator.

You’re never supposed to take the elevator in an emergency, but that’s what my colleagues were doing. And I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. So I’m like, “I’m just going with them. Wherever they go, I am going with them because I need to get out of here.”

I just remember being on the elevator. Everyone was frantically crying. People were screaming.

And I just remember feeling, “Oh my gosh, am I going to die?”

That was the thought that came to my mind: “If I die today, am I ready to die? Am I prepared to meet God? Am I prepared to meet my Maker? Am I a good person?”

That is literally what was going through my thought process.

And my other thought was, “If I make it out of here, one day I’m going to give back and serve my country because there are people who have made the ultimate sacrifice, and I’m going to do something to make a difference. All that matters in life is helping other people.”

And that’s literally what came to my mind.

It was a glimmer, and then it went away, and then the fear came back. But it was like a moment of peace, and I felt God’s love.

There’s a song I learned at church as a child when I was three years old. It’s called “I’m a Child of God.” And there is a certain part, and the song says, “Lead me, guide me, walk beside me, help me find the way.”

And that is all I kept thinking–the lyrics to that song.

“God knows me. He’s aware, and he is going to guide me and help me.”

We ended up getting out of the elevator. We ran down the escalator, we went out of the World Financial Center, and that’s when it was total chaos.

Sirens everywhere, debris, people screaming. Some were running, some were silent, some were crying. It was just like a mix of everything.

I ended up running around to the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden, which is at the base of the World Financial Center. I was just standing there with one of my colleagues, and we were looking up and watching people jumping.

Even as horrific as it was, you couldn’t not look. My colleague kept saying, “Don’t look. That’s going to…” But you couldn’t. As disturbing as it was, you couldn’t not look. There were people, and we’re just staring.

And the NYPD–when I first came out of my building, they were like, “Get out of the way because we’re by the World Trade Center. You’ve got to keep moving. You’ve got to move.”

Guy, I can tell you that if it hadn’t been for the NYPD, who kept yelling at us and telling us to keep moving, my curious self–as disturbing as it was–I probably would have been at the base of the World Trade Center and could potentially have been crushed.

But they kept saying, “You’ve got to move. You’ve got to move.”

Guy Benson: That’s right.

Nicole Parker: They kept saying, “Move, move, move.”

And I was with my colleague, Mark Colori, from Merrill Lynch. And he said, “I have a feeling in my heart. We’ve got to get off this island. We’ve got to get off the island.”

I’m like, “Well, where are we going to go?” I couldn’t get to my house in New York. It was on the Upper West Side. I’m like, “I can’t. Where am I going to go?”

And he said, “Just come with us.”

Three of us from Merrill Lynch, actually–three other people, including myself–we ended up taking a ferry to New Jersey.

I’d never been to New Jersey in my life at the time. So I just did what everyone else was doing.

We got on that ferry boat. People around us were crying and screaming.

I’ll never forget a girl sitting next to me. She’s like, “You know, my dad works in the World Trade Center, and I hope he’s…” And I remember thinking in my heart, “There’s no way that your dad made it if he’s above the point of impact.”

And it just crushed me.

But I didn’t want to show it. You don’t want to show a sign of hopelessness. You want to be supportive.

But it was just that darkness, and it felt dark. There was just this darkness in the air. I don’t know how else to describe it.

It was terrifying.

But we got on the ferry. We ended up getting to New Jersey, and then the first tower collapsed shortly after I left.

Guy Benson: So I just want to come back to that brief moment that you had of lucidity, maybe a moment of divine intervention, where you said, “If I get out of this, I want to do something different with my life.”

And as we introduced you here on the show, as we have previously, we don’t mention that she’s a former Merrill Lynch analyst or something. We say that you’re a former FBI agent.

So just briefly here, talk about your decision to do what you did career-wise.

And then, just to add on to that, since 9/11, that moment, I think almost every American would have been willing to bet a lot of money that there was another gigantic attack that was going to happen sooner or later. It was going to happen.

And thanks to our military, our intelligence, our law enforcement, that, thank God, didn’t happen. But it did not feel like that was likely at all at the time.

I just want to give that shout-out and that credit because often that gets lost. But you made a big turn in your life at that moment.

Nicole Parker: So what happened, like I said, I had this–I call it a spiritual moment–where I just felt God’s love, and I feel like we all have a purpose.

And when you see so many people dying around you and you think, “Wait, why are they dying and I’m not? That could have been me.”

There were people that were literally killed in the lobby of the North Tower of the World Trade Center around the same time that I would have been walking through there if I’d come in at 9:00. Because I came through before the plane hit at 8:46, there were people who were killed.

I mean, the whole thing–you just think, “Okay, why them, but not me?”

And so I did. I continued to work in finance.

I will never forget, I wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to Texas after 9/11. I’m like, “Okay, I’m done with New York. This is traumatizing.”

The city was terrible. It was scary. It was quiet. There were military with rifles everywhere. It was just something that I wasn’t accustomed to.

And I just thought, “I want to get out of here. I want to go home.”

And my dad said, “Nope. You need to stay in New York City because if you come back to Houston, no one understands what you saw and went through, and you are going to be a crazy person and you’re going to feel alone. It’s better for you to heal around other people who experienced the same thing that you did in New York.”

And that’s probably one of the best pieces of advice that my father has ever given me, because he was right.

There was a lot of healing that needed to take place.

So I stayed. I worked in finance for a while. I went from Merrill Lynch. I even transferred at Merrill Lynch. I went into private wealth management. I got all my brokerage licenses.

And then I went on to work in prime brokerage at Bank of America Securities. I worked with hedge funds. And then I went there and I actually worked for a hedge fund–a very successful hedge fund. I’ll just leave it at that.

And there was just an emptiness that kept coming into my soul. And I’m like, “You know what? This is not what I’m supposed to be doing.”

And I was speaking to different friends about different ideas, and that vow I made to God in that elevator kept coming back to me.

“What are you doing to serve others? What are you going to do to serve your country?”

The hedge fund is not the answer.

And a friend of mine from Wall Street recommended, “You know, maybe you should join the FBI.”

And I’m like, “What?”

I’d never thought of that. I didn’t come from a law enforcement family.

And I thought, “You know, that would be interesting. That’s a good way to give back.”

And I just went on to the FBI. And then the rest is history.

Guy Benson: Here we are having this conversation, and I’d love to continue it at some point, but I’m just up on a break that I absolutely have to take.

A fascinating recounting of that day, and I’m so glad that you joined us to have this discussion today, Nicole. Thank you.

Nicole Parker: Thank you, and God bless all of our heroes. And God bless America. Thank you.

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