Shatisha Williams shares her 9/11 story, finding hope through faith.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Twenty-four years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the memories remain vivid for Shatisha Williams, a central Ohio resident, who was near Ground Zero that morning.
Williams was on a bus commuting to her job at the North Tower of the World Trade Center when she heard the first reports on the radio. What she initially thought was a minor incident quickly escalated into a nightmare.
“The bus driver had the radio on and then it said something happened at the World Trade Center so then I immediately called my office and spoke to one of my coworkers and he said, ‘The building blew up. We got to get out,’ and he hangs up on me,” Williams said.
As the towers collapsed, Williams described scenes of panic and devastation.
“It was chaos. It was complete chaos,” she said. “We couldn’t get out of the downtown area. It was either you were going to walk across the bridge, as we seen many people… all that smoke was coming across and people crossing with bloody legs, or you could go further up because there was only one train running.”
Williams walked for miles, eventually reaching Brooklyn where she found a payphone and called her family.
“Here I am just like, I want to get home to make sure my mom knows I’m okay because I work at the World Trade Center,” she said.
The emotional toll lingered long after the dust settled.
“I didn’t know who made it out, who didn’t make it out until hours, hours, hours later,” Williams said. “Seeing the names and faces and seeing some of the people that I knew that was lost.”
Today, Williams channels her experience into hope and healing. Now a pastor, she shares her journey of faith and resilience with others.
“Can good come out of tragedy? Always,” she said. “Do we want to go through tragedy to get that good? Absolutely not, right? But I think it made me a better person in terms of caring for people, being a person of God.”