Humans At Their Worst and At Their Finest

Markita Roberson, Coordinator of Undergraduate Programs in Religion, hails from New York and was living in Southern California at the time of the attack.“I was in the other room when it came on the news” Roberson said. “My roommate said ‘Hey Kita! They’re pickin’ on your hometown again.’ I turned on the Today show. When I first saw it, I didn’t realize the hugeness of it. I didn’t realize that it was an attack. When they showed the second plane hitting the towers, I came to the realization that whoever was doing this was doing it deliberately.”

Roberson is grateful that her best friend Wendy, who worked at the World Trade Center, escaped the attack by a mere fifteen minutes because she missed the train.

“The firefighters got about 20,000 people out. Wendy was evacuated because she was 10 minutes late to work. After they were evacuated, she was able to see the South Tower get hit. After that, all they could do was run. They had to escape the fumes because if they didn’t, they would die,” Roberson said.

Roberson is also thankful she was not in the towers at the time of the attack.

“A few years before the attack, I actually interviewed for a job on the 86th floor. I was in the elevator on the 70th floor and all I could see was cloud. I said to the Lord, ‘I don’t want to work here,’” Roberson said.

When Roberson and her friends were all working in Manhattan in 1991, they all got a feeling that New York was not a safe place to work. After she barely escaped the 1994 train attack in New York, Roberson decided it was time to go.

“Though we saw humans at their worst, we also saw humans at their finest. I recall a contractor going into the rubble, though he could have died, saying ‘I know how dangerous it is. But if there’s a chance that somebody is alive in there, I have to try and save them,’” Roberson said. “God was right there. If He was not, 30,000 or more would be gone. ”