NEW YORK – He had just helped pull three bodies from the rubble when he saw it there in dawn's first light, standing in a sea of debris. A heavenly symbol in a hellish setting. A cross.
Exhausted and traumatized by his labors, the man dropped to his knees in tears. "It was a sign,'' Frank Silecchia would recall, "a sign that God hadn't deserted us."
It was a remnant of the World Trade Center's North Tower, a 17-foot-high cross-section of steel I-beams that had plummeted into the shell of an adjacent office building two days earlier.
NEW YORK – He had just helped pull three bodies from the rubble when he saw it there in dawn's first light, standing in a sea of debris. A heavenly symbol in a hellish setting. A cross.
Exhausted and traumatized by his labors, the man dropped to his knees in tears. "It was a sign,'' Frank Silecchia would recall, "a sign that God hadn't deserted us."
It was a remnant of the World Trade Center's North Tower, a 17-foot-high cross-section of steel I-beams that had plummeted into the shell of an adjacent office building two days earlier.