J1 Reporter Ava Finn 

Everyone has a daily routine. In 2001, for Joan Finn it was wake up, take the kids to school, and go to work. Her youngest daughter, Megan, was 12 years old attending St. Bernard’s and her oldest son, Michael, was a sophomore at Northwest. Before heading to school they remember seeing the first plane hit the tower at 7:46 CST. It was a shocking moment for the whole family. They thought the first plane was an accident, along with many other Americans at the time.

After dropping the kids off at school Finn went back home. On this particular day she did not have to go into work until 11 a.m. She would regularly go in at 7 a.m. She did not have to go in until 11 a.m. because she was training a newly hired college student that would be working the evening shift. So during the gap of time between dropping the kids off and going to work she went home to watch Good Morning America and the results on the accident of the first tower. While watching the news she saw the second plane hit and thought “This is not real. This is not real, but it was. I thought I was seeing things. I was in complete shock.”     

Finn worked at the Great Western Bank branch in Bellevue. While she was training the new hire she got a call from her boss saying, “they just flew the president and landed him at Offutt because that’s the safest place.” Finn says this is the closest she has ever been to the president. The event left her in complete shock because “You couldn’t even believe this really happened.” 

Finn has seen the world change because of this “unheard of” event. There has been more security put everywhere. Government buildings, airports and the banking industry have had a tremendous increase of security on their buildings to try and prevent anything like this from ever happening again. 

Finn says 9/11 is important to reflect on because it changed our society. Sept. 11 was a detrimental part of history that we cannot forget. It was “Major how foreigners could come into our country and kill themselves just so they could harm us. It is something I never want to see happen to our world again.”

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