There's a Brooks Brothers store across the street from the World Trade Center in New York. Shortly after the attacks on September 11, a young doctor named Sandeep Jauhar headed to ground zero to help. He ended up at the store, which was transformed into a makeshift morgue. Suddenly, he's put in charge, which was the last thing he wanted. This is a story of ties and white collared shirts, and how heroism is often improvised.
Produced by Dan Bobkoff, with Anna Mazarakis and Sarah Wyman.
Read more:
- How a young doctor ended up in charge of a makeshift morgue in a Brooks Brothers store on 9/11
- How a Brooks Brothers salesman inadvertently saved a man's life on 9/11
Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
DAN BOBKOFF: A quick note before we start: this episode is about 9/11. Some parts are graphic and may be difficult to listen to.
Every morning, I head into a skyscraper in lower Manhattan. It's called One Liberty Plaza, and it's imposing, even a little ominous looking — 54 stories of steel painted black. Coming at it from the west, I climb up some steps and pass a huge Brooks Brothers store. On the first floor, in the window, there are pictures of models in perfect conservative oxfords or argyle sweaters.
On September 11, 2001, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center across the street, the paper and rubble from the collapsing buildings piled up on those steps.
CNN: ...that One Liberty Plaza building which is just to the east...
DB: ...and some of those windows were blown out. Rumors spread fast.
CNN: ...they saw the building starting to twist and then said they saw some windows starting to break...
DB: But One Liberty Plaza's steel held up.
Our office is in that building now. And ever since we moved in, I've thought about what it looked like around here 17 years ago. What was Ground Zero across the street is now glass towers and a transportation hub that looks like a white winged caterpillar. This was and is a hub of capitalism too… stock exchanges, big banks, and lots and lots of stores are all right here.
One Liberty Plaza once again looks like it did before the attacks. Right up those steps, just as there's been since the building opened in the '70s, there's that two-story Brooks Brothers, selling the uniform of capitalism.
And there's this one photo that has always stuck with me. It was taken right after 9/11 from the outside looking in. In the background, the store is remarkably intact. Shelves and shelves of perfectly stacked dress shirts. In the foreground, there are two mannequins. One leans on its back, pressed up against a table of shirts. The other, to its left, is lying flat on its back on the ground, on top of dust and papers and broken glass blown in from the buildings that collapsed a few feet away. The mannequins look like bodies. And at the moment this picture was taken, it's almost like it was foreshadowing what this store would become a few hours later. It's a story I hadn't heard before.
NPR: A Brooks Brothers storefront near the collapse site is now a makeshift morgue where rescuers are bringing any body parts.
DB: And now I think about a guy I met who lived through that.
From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name, the show about brands you know, and stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.
It's been seventeen years since 9/11. It feels to me like we've begun to lose the specific details of that day. The small stories. We're more likely now to see images of rescue workers putting a flag on rubble. Horror has given way to patriotism.
So today, a different September 11 story. How two people's lives were changed at the Brooks Brothers store next to the World Trade Center.
The first: a dapper salesman named Antonio DeJesus, who helped dress a man about to go for a job interview in the towers. After the first blast, Antonio fled, and amid the chaos and confusion, rescue workers transformed his store into a makeshift morgue.
The second: a young doctor named Sandeep Jauhar, who later found himself inside the store when it had become a place to take body parts... Desperately improvising as the unlikely leader in the room.
What happened in his brief time there forced Sandeep to question his training, preparation, and his own limits.
Sandeep was like many first responders. He felt like he couldn't do much but gave everything he could.
ACT I
DB: Whenever people talk about 9/11, they almost always talk about the weather.
NEWS: Let's take a look at the highlights for today. New York City. Beautiful day here...
DB: That sky that morning! It was stunningly blue.
NEWS: Miles and miles of sunshine! Miles Davis. We're gonna put Miles out there.
DB: Alarmingly blue, one said. Airline pilots have a term for the unlimited visibility on days like that: "severe clear."
I think people talk about the weather as a way of saying that morning was exceptionally ordinary. Like the best version of an average Tuesday. At first, that's what it was like for Antonio DeJesus.
ANTONIO DE JESUS: It was like 7:30 when we got there to open up and then by 8:30 we full on business.
DB: Back then, Antonio held the keys to the Brooks Brothers across the street from the World Trade Center. So he was the one who got things up and running that morning. He made sure the piles of sweaters and the racks of suits were ready for the kinds of people who shopped at that store.
AD: It was the typical Wall Street guy, the family guy, and of course the tourists coming in to look at the towers.
DB: Today, Antonio is a salesman at a new Nordstrom Men's shop uptown. We caught him on his lunch break outside.
But he spent a couple decades at the two-level Brooks Brothers at One Liberty plaza, selling white collars to the white collar workers.
AD: I love the place, it was always gonna be in my heart as a second home because while you were in the inside, it was like you were on the outside. You could see everything that was going on when it was cold, when it raining, when it was snowing. So it was nice to be there.
DB: And on that morning, just after Antonio unlocked the front doors, a guy rushed in.
AD: He didn't like his tie and neither did I, I was trying to convince him that for an interview he needed to get a different tie. A little more conservative than what he'd chosen.
DB: The customer had a big job interview in a few minutes at Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm at the top of the North Tower.
AD: I remember pulling out a white shirt out of the wall to place it there and took his jacket off and put it on the top and I was showing him ties. 'No I don't like this one, I like this one, No I don't, No I don't like that one.' And we were like back and forth with the dilemma. It's a normal thing. When you're selling, you have to offer options, choices.
DB: And by the time he'd finally settled on a tie, it was around a quarter to nine. The guy left, headed toward the towers.
Then, at 8:46am, Antonio heard what he thought was thunder. The north tower was 800 feet away. Then screaming, and fleeing. And then another crash. This time the south tower just 500 feet from his store. Antonio ran away and into a building farther away, trying to escape but then realizing he couldn't out-run the debris.
AD: Then, when it was was finally clear I left, and I was stepping on all this powder. My shoes got covered with this white like uh dust, sediment… whatever it was there. And you look at the ledges of the buildings it was like snow had gone through it and everything is full of papers. And of course the smell of burning wire, I can't get that out of my head.
I was in panic mode, but I was in control. So as I walked around and encountered other people that seemed to be lost… Like I saw this guy that used to be a shoe shine guy… they only knew one way in and one way out home… and I walked with him through the street to find a way of getting him on a bus or something like that for him to go home.
DB: It would take a year for Antonio to find out what happened to the man who had a job interview.
But on that morning, around the same time Antonio was selling ties, a young doctor named Sandeep Jauhar was at a different kind of appointment.
SANDEEP JAUHAR: We actually, my wife and I, had been trying to get pregnant, so we actually went to her obstetrician that morning.
DB: Sandeep had just finished his residency. He was kind of a prodigy. Started college at 16. He finished a PhD before he started medical school. Now he was starting a cardiology fellowship at Bellevue Hospital on Manhattan's far East Side. He was as well trained as a 32 year old doctor could be, and about to start a family.
SJ: I think we had already met with the doctor, and we were handling some insurance form or something, and I was sitting in the waiting room, and I looked at the television, and there was a lot of hubbub.
NEWS: Obviously a major fire there, and there has been some sort of explosion. We don't know all the details. There is a reporter...
SJ: Then, it appeared that a plane had struck one of the towers. At that point, no one thought that there would be any need to get involved. I remember thinking this was just a terrible thing that happened, and it was on my mind when I got into a cab to go down to Bellevue.
NEWS: Crashed into the upper floors… excuse me, I'm getting a report here… Steve Sullivan, who is...
SJ: The radio was on…
NEWS: ...this morning although our FM station is off the air. Actually…
SJ: And I recall that either the radio or the cab driver said, "A second plane hit the building."
NEWS: Um, I just saw a second plane flew from the South, going towards the north, and it's...
SJ: And stupidly, I thought, "What are the chances of that?"
NEWS: ...a second plane, it seems to be like a 747, one of those size planes…Ok… it just flew seconds ago into the tower… Ok, we are not going…
SJ: Bellevue is one of the trauma centers, and so it became quickly obvious that any casualties, at least some of the casualties, would be brought to Bellevue. So, I went down to the emergency room, and I remember at one point, there was just a whole line of trauma surgeons dressed in blue, and it was just a very vivid sight. It was like a sea of blue.
My friend, Todd, who was a fellow, said, 'The building just came down.' I remember thinking, 'That's not possible,' and that under the stress of it all, he's hallucinating, or that maybe a portion of the roof fell off, and, 'Wow, this is just getting really horrible.' So I remember looking out the window, and I couldn't really see anything, but it was pretty clear that there was only one building, and that there was a lot of smoke.
The hospital went into complete overdrive, and they started calling in people who were post-call...
DB: Did it feel like the hospital had a plan, or was this kind of beyond the plan?
SJ: I think it was being improvised. But I think the plan at that point still was there are going to be a whole bunch of people coming in, and we better get the maximum use of limited resources. So surgeons were brought in, and I remember then we just waited.
There were very few patients. There were no casualties, people who had been in the buildings. So, at that point, just the communication was so poor that it just wasn't clear what was going on with those people. Were they downtown? Were there just not enough ambulances to bring them to Bellevue? And so, when they asked for volunteers to go down, I said, 'Okay. I'll go down.'
And there were maybe six doctors, a couple of nurses... sort of a contingent from Bellevue went down in the ambulance. We got down there.
DB: What was going through your head on the way? Were you even processing this?
SJ: I mean, I didn't know what to expect. I just remember thinking, 'This is Beirut.' Literally the color changed, you know? It was relatively sunny up at 34th Street, and all of a sudden, it was like nighttime. I mean, it was like a deep, deep dusk, and there was smoke swirling all around. There were cars that were just coated with ash. I mean, it was just sort of a silly thought, but I just remember thinking, 'This is absolutely insane, that this is actually New York City.'
That first day, when I went down to that first triage center, and this was maybe an hour or so before we had to evacuate because of the World Trade Center 7 building was on fire, and they had deemed it structurally unstable. I walked in, and I just said, I just blurted out, 'Where are the patients?' Someone said, 'They're all dead.'
ACT II
DB: The next few minutes include graphic descriptions of body parts the Brooks Brothers morgue. If you don't want to hear, or if you're listening with children, you may want to skip ahead.
NEWS: People are waking up in disbelief with unbelievably heavy hearts, especially those who have lost loved ones or who are uncertain where their loved ones are.
SJ: Very understandably, my wife did not want me to go down there the second day.
NEWS: We still don't know how high the human toll will climb.
SJ: You know, she thought I'd played my role, and that there was really no reason to go down again.
NEWS: But the early numbers, Matt, are staggering. 266 people…
SJ: I went back to the triage center. A policeman shouted that they needed doctors in the Brooks Brothers building, that they had set up a morgue there, and they needed doctors there, and he wasn't clear what it was about.
And at that point, I had spent quite a bit of time in the triage center, and nothing was really going on, so they were asking for help somewhere else. So, I went ahead and followed him, and walked over to the Brooks Brothers building.
We got to the building, and I remember in the lobby, there was just shattered glass, and there were police dogs. And I think actually, at that point, they were using dogs to search for survivors. So there were some German Shepherds in the lobby of the Brooks Brothers building, and then there was a curtain, and someone was saying, 'You can't come through here unless you're a doctor.' And the policeman, who I had followed, said, 'I have a doctor here.' So, he led me in, and then, we were in I guess the first floor of the Brooks Brothers building, Brooks Brothers store.
I remember there were tables with shirts, like Brooks Brothers shirts. Some of the clothes had like thick dust on them, but you could still make out that that was green, and that's pink, and that's you know, so you could still sort of make out the colors. It was just so incredibly surreal.
There was really nothing. I walked in, and I remember there were about three doctors sort of standing on the floor, and then behind them, there was a table, and there were three or four people sitting at the table. And that was about it. And they were sort of standing around, and I think that someone had just brought in a body part, and they were trying to figure out what to do with it.
The three people behind the table were I think listening for instructions and maybe filling out forms. And the main doctor there was a man. He was older than I was. He looked like maybe he was in his mid-40s, but he had a badge that said PGY3, which means he was a third year resident, and I was actually a fellow at the time. So, I was actually more senior than he was, and I just remember that thought really disturbing me, that they might actually call on me to run this thing, and I had absolutely no idea what to do. And this older gentleman seemed to know much more than I did about what to do.
At one point, I think someone who was sitting behind the table said, 'Do we need a separate form or do we need a separate bag for each body part?' And there was silence. No one really knew. I think someone was going to go and ask the policeman, but I don't think they knew. So it was just a sort of scene of tremendous improvisation, not really knowing what was going on. And I was just kind of standing there, and then they brought in the remains of someone who had died.
And they were…. sifting through the body.
This person had been, their whole lower body had been severed, and so there was a pelvis, like a lower part of the body, and out of the pelvis were hanging, basically, their abdominal organs. And I just remember feeling incredibly nauseous, at that point. I wasn't sure what to do, and I don't think anyone knew what to do.
There was a woman there who ended up saying something like, 'Holy mother of God. What do we do with this?' But then, someone said that part of this victim had been brought in earlier with a cell phone, so they were going to try to use the cell phone to identify his family, and call, and I guess deliver the bad news, but that wasn't our job. We were just supposed to document these parts, and have the people behind the table fill out the form, and then attach the form to the bag, and then, move on.
And after they got through that, I was just standing there, and the woman sort of turned to me and said, 'I've got to leave. I just, I can't do this anymore,' or, 'I need a break. Are you a doctor?' I said, 'Yes.' She said, 'Great. You're in charge now.'
DB: What did you think when they put you in charge? This is what you had dreaded when you first walked in.
SJ: Yeah. I mean, I didn't want to be in charge. I'm a cardiologist. I don't relish emergencies, but I do handle emergencies, people having heart attacks, but this was so beyond anything I was able to do. It was pathology. It wasn't what I had been trained to do. I mean, I recognized the importance of it. I was really glad that there were people there who were doing this job.
Then, the other guy, who was a PGY3, said that he was also going to be stepping out. I don't know how many hours that they had spent there. There were, fortunately, a couple of other doctors, and I guess because I was a PGY4, suddenly, I was in charge.
They may have brought in another stretcher with other parts, and there were… I remember I had gloves on, and I sort of looked, and I tried to do my best to identify what these parts were, it was a spleen, liver, or whatever. I tried to get through one of those, and then, at that point, I just started to feel physically sick. I just couldn't do it. There were, fortunately, a couple other doctors there, and there were those people behind the table, and I said, 'I can't do this right now,' and I ended up walking out.
I would've stayed if I could've done it, but I think you probably could imagine that doing that for about 45 minutes or an hour can just - It's such a emotionally turbulent thing, that I just had to get away.
As I was walking, I remember there were, the dressing room, there were bags and bags of unused body bags, so they clearly were planning on doing this for a long time.
I remember not walking out through the lobby, but just walking out through a door, just pushing it open and just walking out onto a street that was just pretty much demolished.
DB: You never went back in?
SJ: No.
DB: How long were you there, would you say?
SJ: You know, it's such a blur. Probably about an hour, maybe, 45 minutes, something like that. I don't really remember how I got home.
DB: I think, watching this from afar, there's almost this feeling that the first responders and the people like you, who are rushing in there, are almost like superhuman, that they're not having emotions in these periods. They're not experiencing grief, or revulsion, or any of those things.
SJ: Yeah, it's impossible not to experience emotional upheaval and trauma in a situation like that. I mean, there are situations where you can kind of turn off your feelings, or at least suppress them in the service of rational thought. You know, when you're trying to diagnose a patient, or you're working with sick patients like I do, but that kind of situation, it's just impossible, because you just understand the enormity of what happened, and moreover, it was in my hometown, and there was no doubt that subsequently, I was to hear about people in my building who worked down at the World Trade Center, or subsequently, parents of my children's friends who perished. You know, so it was… You couldn't be there without being aware of that.
DB: And then, that was it?
SJ: And then, I did not go back the next day. No.
For a long time, I just didn't really want to read anything about 9/11. I knew that the memorial was being erected, but I didn't really ... I only visited it last year, maybe two years ago. You know, it's just something that I kind of put in a corner of my mind. It's not something that I particularly talked about or you know….
DB: Why not?
SJ: I just didn't want to. I didn't think it was something that I really wanted to revisit or talk about what I had seen, you know? Maybe there's a little bit of PTSD or ... you know. I mean, I don't want to put a word like that on it. What I went through was just so minuscule compared to what some of the firefighters and the policemen who were down there for weeks, you know, and other people were there for a long time. I was there for a relatively short period of time, but the experience was such that, you know, I didn't really want to remember that much of it.
DB: Had you worn Brooks Brothers clothes before then?
SJ: Oh, yeah. I still do.
DB: Do you think about that, at all?
SJ: Maybe vaguely, you know?
DB: How so?
SJ: You know, just that I was at the Brooks Brothers building. It's such a contrast. You know, like the store is one that just sort of seems to embody all-American values and sort of business attire. I don't know, it's just what I think of Brooks Brothers, sort of clean living, and then, there was this morgue in the store, you know? It was unreal.
From what little I know about the motivations of the terrorists that day, they were really trying to hit at the centers of Americanism…
NEWS: The heart of commerce and the signature of the New York skyline is no more.
SJ: ...and one could argue that Wall Street and what it embodies, and the mercantilism and capitalism, that was their motivation. The fact that Brooks Brothers was sort of swept up in that was obviously an accident, but it's sort of in keeping with that day.
DB: Have you been back to that store since then?
SJ: No.
SJ: It all looks so different because it was… you know, everything was bombed out. There was rubble all the way up to the entrance to the store.
DB: Right over here?
SJ: Yeah.
DB: So I guess the dressing rooms are right over here.
SJ: Yeah.
DB: What do you see? If you can describe it.
SJ: Yeah this was exactly - yeah it's all kind of rushing back. But yeah it was very dark and this was actually not the morgue, per se. I think that was on a different wing, but um so these tables had been cleared out and then there was that one table where people were sitting and recording, and then there was this open area in the middle where people were bringing in the body parts to be processed. But yeah, it's exactly what I remember.
But yeah I do remember seeing the shirts. Like, stacked up neatly. Yeah, I mean you hear that a lot. You don't want the terrorists to win, you know, to emerge victorious, so you rebuild. And we rebuilt right on the World Trade Center site, right? I mean... I think that's - that reflects the American spirit. Yeah I'm glad that they didn't demolish this place. I'm glad it's still up. It's nice to see actually. But I don't want to shop here. (laughs)
ACT III
DB: Exactly one year after the attacks the Brooks Brothers reopened at One Liberty Plaza across from Ground Zero.
AD: A lot of the stores reopened. Our damage was cosmetic, it wasn't structure. So they were able to replace everything and then put it back into business.
DB: Antonio DeJesus had spent that year at another location uptown.
AD: I said well I want to go back to Liberty Plaza, that's my home. I love the place, it was always gonna be in my heart as a second home. We wanted to show that downtown was back in business.
DB: When he first returned to the store, people in the building — security guards and the like — started telling him stories.
AD: They were telling us that, you know, did you know that your fitting rooms were stocked with body bags that only have extremities?
DB: He turned to his friend Jackie, who was another salesperson there.
AD: Me and my friend Jackie what we did is we took a moment and went to the ladies department, which also was used for that and we put out a prayer for the souls that were, you know, for what happened. After that, everything was calm and clean and we moved on with our lives.
DB: Do you remember what the prayer was?
AD: Well, it was something like 'Oh Lord, here we are praying for the lives - for the souls and lives lost in this catastrophe' and so on. It was something along those lines. It was just to make sure that we felt comfortable and clear that a prayer was put out for those people
DB: After that, things mostly returned to something resembling normal.
AD: I mean we were kind of quiet the first year or so but we were there.
DB: The area around the store was still a mess. But one day a man walks in.
AD: And he is telling someone a story 'Oh I was here, and this guy helped me with a tie, and he was so indecisive and blah blah blah...'
DB: It was the guy who had come into buy ties before his interview at Cantor Fitzgerald.
AD: I heard the conversation and I said 'oh, I'm that guy......'
DB: Cantor Fitzgerald was one of the worst-hit companies on 9/11. More than two thirds of its workforce died that day. But this man had never made it to his interview.
AD: But in this case, was just a coincidence that the guy came in and I'm the guy helping him and that I make him a little bit later, no late, he was already. But hey, if he feels grateful about it, hey I'm happy.
DB: Do you know what his name is?
AD: I don't know his name because I never took his name or anything like that, but this is one of those things I keep thinking about when I think about 9/11 and everything that went on - and it was just that. The one guy who probably saved his life just because he was dealing with me and he was very indecisive.
DB: Antonio would go on to work at that store for another 16 years. Sandeep would become a successful cardiologist and author. This area is once again a tourist attraction, now as much for the memorial as for the gleaming new mall.
You could pass that Brooks Brothers and have no idea what happened there. But head up to the second floor, and right by the dressing rooms there's a gallery of photos. There are photos of the store in the days after the attacks, and then the same spot ten years later. The sweaters and suits are now clean. And the mannequins once again stand in the window.
CREDITS
DB: This episode was produced by me, Dan Bobkoff, with Anna Mazarakis and Sarah Wyman.
Our senior producer is Clare Rawlinson. Our editor is Peter Clowney.
Sound design and original music by Casey Holford and John DeLore.
The executive producers at Stitcher are Chris Bannon, Laura Mayer and Jenny Radelet.
Let us know what you think of the show. You can email us at householdname@businessinsider.com And if you're new to the show, check out our past episodes, and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next one.
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