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The 9/11 Survivor I Never Expected to See Again
The last time I saw Brian Clark was on 9/11, his face covered in ash. 25 years later, we reconnected completely by chance
Video: A Split-Second Decision, a Lifelong Brotherhood
Shuran Huang/AARP/Getty Images
It was a routine appointment on an ordinary day this past spring. At least it started that way. I was checking in at my eye doctor in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, when the patient next to me heard me announce my arrival and said, “Are you the Ed Baig who wrote about tech for USA Today? I have to talk to you.” But before the conversation could go further, I was ushered into my eye exam.
I racked my brain, wondering who this guy was. A publicist eager to pitch a story idea? A person I went to school with? When I was told during my exam that a “Mr. Clark” was waiting for me, I couldn’t recall the name. It was only when I finally saw him up close, and he mentioned Sept. 11, that it all came flashing back.
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Smoke pours from the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center after they were hit by two hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001.
Robert Giroux/Getty Images
An eyewitness to history
The only other time I had met Brian Clark was nearly 25 years ago, on 9/11. I was covering the terrorist attacks for USA Today. (So was practically every other journalist with the newspaper, no matter what their regular beat was.) I had been assigned to gather reactions from people in my community near New York, so I was outside a train station in Glen Rock, New Jersey.
Suddenly I spotted Clark, his face covered in ash. “Were you at the Trade Center?” I asked. He described the events of that tragic morning in vivid detail, a condensed account of which was published under my byline in the next day’s newspaper with the headline: “A panicked rush down 84 floors.”
The Sept. 12, 2001, article written by AARP’s Edward Baig, who was working at “USA Today” at the time.
Courtesy IMAGN/Reuters
Now, nearly 25 years later, we were face-to-face once again. “Your USA Today story changed my life,” Clark told me. “It led to many interviews, documentaries and speeches” — and testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Without my article, he added, “no one other than my family would have known my story.”
Rescuing a stranger
Hours before I interviewed him, Clark had escaped the World Trade Center’s South Tower. But the ash on his face and clothes told only part of the story.
His office as an executive at the international brokerage firm Euro Brokers was on the 84th floor. He and his colleagues were aware that something awful had happened after the first plane slammed into the North Tower next door, but no one knew exactly what. In the glare of his peripheral vision, Clark saw swirling flames. Some of his coworkers pressed against a window and witnessed the horrific sight of people jumping to their deaths from the other tower. But then a voice came over the PA system telling the people in Clark’s tower that there was no need to evacuate. Many returned to their desks.
Down on the 81st floor, Fuji Bank executive Stanley Praimnath also didn’t know what had happened to the neighboring tower. He received phone calls from his mother and brother asking if he was OK. He told them he was. But when he looked up through the huge panes of glass, he saw “fireballs falling from the sky from the North Tower.”
After calls to his supervisors went unanswered, Praimnath and a coworker took an express elevator down. At the ground-floor turnstile, a security guard told them the building was safe. Praimnath went back up, but his rattled colleague headed home.
Back at his desk on the 81st floor, Praimnath’s phone rang again. It was a colleague from an office in Chicago telling him to get out immediately. Right then, Praimnath looked south, toward the Statue of Liberty.
“Still holding the phone in my hand … what I saw is a giant airplane, gray in color, bearing down on me, eye level.… And I can still hear in my head that revving sound that the plane is making as it is getting closer and closer.” He dove under his desk.
“The next thing I know, the most thunderous sound, the plane just bam, slammed into the building,” Praimnath recalled. “It looked … as if the bottom wing took out my entire floor … and the rest of the plane was someplace else, and a large chunk of the plane was stuck in the office doorway, maybe 20 feet away from where I was ... like a demolition crew came and just ripped the entire floor apart. All the walls are flattened, all the furniture was mangled, broken up like a matchbox, and all the windows were popped.”
At that moment, three stories above Praimnath, Clark heard what he describes as a loud “boom, boom.” The ceiling, air-conditioning ducts, speakers, lights and everything else came raining down.
He and several coworkers rushed down a stairwell, but on the 81st-floor landing, a woman urged everyone to head back up due to heavy smoke and flames on the floors below. As the group debated what to do, Clark heard banging and a man’s muffled cry for help from behind the rubble, saying he couldn’t breathe. That man, who Clark later learned was Praimnath, had seen the flashlight Clark had with him as a fire safety warden.
Clark and a colleague went to help the man, but halfway there, his coworker was overcome by smoke.
Suddenly Clark was on his own. Everyone else in the group followed the woman’s advice and headed back up the stairs. Only Clark and a coworker, who initially started going up but turned back, survived. The rest were among the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks that day.
“I grabbed a desk and tipped it up on its end, and crawled up on top of the desk, so I’m above this nine-foot wall, looking down, into the pit,” Clark recalled. He told Praimnath to jump.
“I jumped, grabbed on, and he gave me a headlock,” Praimnath says. “And he pulled, and I squirm, and I flew off on the other side.”
The two eventually made their way down the emergency stairs to the street and ran toward Trinity Church. Less than 10 minutes later, the South Tower fell.
Clark and Praimnath were among just 18 or so people who escaped that tower despite having been on or above the floors where the plane struck. Although their tower had been hit at 9:03 a.m., 17 minutes after the North Tower, it was the first of the two buildings to collapse.
Praimnath and Clark at Clark’s New Jersey home in 2025. “The longest time we go without talking now is a couple of months,” Clark says.
Courtesy Brian Clark
A friendship born from tragedy
In the confusion and clouds of ash and debris that followed, the two men were separated, though not before Clark had gotten Praimnath’s business card. Clark managed to catch a ferry to New Jersey and a train to Glen Rock, a 20-minute drive from his home in Mahwah, New Jersey.
And though Clark reports that he and Praimnath don’t see each other that often — he still lives in north Jersey and Praimnath on Long Island — they consider themselves “blood brothers for life” after surviving the ordeal. That’s not just a metaphor: During their escape, the two men gripped each other’s bloody, wound-covered hands.
“The longest time we go without talking now is a couple of months,” Clark says. When he calls to wish Praimnath a happy birthday, family members call out, “Uncle Brian is on the line.”
It’s an “odd friendship,” Clark, who is from Canada, admits. “I don’t have a brother; now I have a brother. And we’ve more than stayed in touch.... It is a wonderful thing.”
Praimnath feels the same way. “If I [were] to die tomorrow, and that person was to do a eulogy, I would want Brian to do it.... This was a man who thought about me before [himself]. I found in 9/11 a guardian angel, and … for that I am grateful. Had it not been for this man who risked his life, stopped to investigate, I would have died, and I owe everything toward him. Everything. If he [were] to ask for one of my limbs today and he really needs it, he gets it.”
Clark and Praimnath speak during an interview in 2011, explaining how they escaped the South Tower.
Sebastien Micke/Getty Images
The Guyana-born Praimnath, who turns 70 in October, compares himself to a cat with nine lives. He, like Clark, also survived the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center that killed six and injured more than 1,000. He was later diagnosed with leukemia, got through a severe bout of COVID and underwent emergency quadruple coronary bypass surgery. He leans heavily on his faith and became a licensed minister in 2006.
Clark, now 79, is retired and has 11 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He says he would have been fine leaving the details with his inner circle. But, he told me, “I am pleased that others have my story as a reference point for both factual and emotional reasons.”
A chance encounter revisited
Had he not heard my name in the doctor’s office, Clark says he wouldn’t have recognized me any more than I would have him, and we would have passed each other as strangers. But meeting him again — and learning what he has done and hearing his words — brought me new perspectives on life.
“I learned that there’s no point in trying to answer unanswerable questions,” Clark told me. Like our reunion encounter: Why did that happen? Clark says that while he was “dazzled” by the happenstance — and that it occurred so near the 25th anniversary of the attacks — he was ultimately unfazed. It’s how he feels, too, about the tragic events at the World Trade Center and his escape. Some things in life will remain mysteries, he says: “Why me and not somebody else? What if I turned right instead of left? All that stuff. You can’t have a do-over, so we’ll never know.”
As a native New Yorker, I was deeply affected by 9/11, even though I didn’t know anyone who perished that horrible day personally, and by no means do I compare my situation to those who lost loved ones.
I had only recently moved out of the city and into the suburbs, so the attack felt like a punch to the stomach, a sad but also angry feeling I still get whenever I’m near Ground Zero. All these years later, with the Freedom Tower now occupying the site where the Twin Towers once stood, it remains unfathomable that those buildings have been erased from the lower Manhattan skyline.
Bumping into Clark also rekindled a lot of raw emotions.
I had a part-time job one summer in the World Trade Center and had spent time there on numerous occasions over the years, including press events and family celebrations at Windows on the World, a popular restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower.
Nor was it lost on me that I had been on a coast-to-coast flight for business just two days before those hijacked jetliners wreaked so much devastation.
Glen Rock itself lost 11 residents that day, so the tragedy hit close to home that way, too; the town has a dedicated 9/11 memorial.
Clark thinks the people who put together the museum, memorial and reflecting pool around Ground Zero did a good job. However, he was not in favor of building another skyscraper there, even though he eventually made it to the Freedom Tower. “I will confess I wouldn’t want to be working on the 84th floor of that building,” he says.
His wife, Dianne, who’d spent more than an hour on 9/11 not knowing if he was dead or alive, was convinced that he’d died when the towers fell, and calls his survival a “miracle.” Still, she experienced years of panic attacks and a sense of PTSD that made her reluctant to visit the museum. For Brian, she says, there’s “just something there that will never go away.”
Clark still gives talks at schools, churches, businesses and charities. “The consistent feedback I have received from listeners is their appreciation of the details I described. ‘I felt like I was with you as we were descending the tower.’ Or, ‘My cousin died in the WTC that day, and now I have a better understanding of what she went through.’ Many others have offered statements such as ‘Your calmness was inspirational.’ Or, ‘Your optimism gives me hope for the future.’ ”
Perhaps in those moments of connection, Clark is finding another way to lead strangers out of the darkness.
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