When daycare teacher Tara Jones arrived at work that September morning, the first issue demanding her attention was the air-conditioning.
The system had been malfunctioning for several days, and Jones believed it was simply nearing the point of failure.
All around her, parents and grandparents were checking children into the Children’s Discovery Daycare Center at 5 World Trade Center before continuing on to their jobs.
Inside the center’s floor-to-ceiling windows, babies and toddlers ate breakfast, preschool-age children got comfortable in their classrooms, and staff prepared for what appeared to be another routine Tuesday.
Then Jones heard an unfamiliar swishing sound above the building.
At first, she thought the troubled AC unit was forcing out one last burst of cold air before shutting down for good.
Moments later, a mother glanced through the windows.
‘Oh my God. It’s not the AC unit. It’s a bomb,’ she screamed.
This was daily life at the Children’s Discovery Center inside 5 World Trade Center: breakfast tables, toys and artwork, with small children arriving as parents headed to work. Nothing in that ordinary scene suggested its teachers would soon be tasked with guiding an entire daycare through America’s most infamous terrorist attack.
A parent later captured an image of the remains of the Children’s Discovery Center following the attacks.
Tara Jones, pictured playing the three little pigs story with her students. Tara said staff regarded the youngsters in their care almost as their own. On September 11, that bond would be tested beyond anything they could have imagined
Seconds earlier, at 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 had slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
In an instant, the calm outside the daycare dissolved.
People began running in blind panic through the complex as smoke billowed above them and debris rained down around them.
For Tara, everything narrowed to the 28 infants, toddlers and preschoolers in her care.
Some were too young to run. Others could not possibly keep pace with adults fleeing for their lives.
She and her fellow teachers had one overriding task: get every child out alive.
What followed was an extraordinary rescue improvised almost entirely on the run, and a split-second decision that would ultimately save every one of those 28 children.
‘I thought I was gonna die,’ Tara told the Daily Mail in an exclusive video interview ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks. ‘I thought we were all gonna just die.’
When the first plane struck the North Tower, a small group of daycare teachers became unlikely heroes – carrying 28 children through the chaos and refusing to leave a single one behind. From left to right: Onica Sarjeant (wearing a scarf second from left in the back row), Tara Jones (in the back row wearing a pink shirt), Robyn. Middle row: Karen Caycedo (second from left), Elsa (fourth from left wearing a orange zip up). Bottom row: Denise (in the middle wearing a green shirt)
The daycare’s planned evacuation route towards Building 7 was blocked, forcing Tara to find another way out. Pictured: students from the daycare on an undisclosed date in one of the center’s classroom
Their rehearsed emergency plan was to evacuate towards Building 7. But amid the chaos, Jones made a split-second decision to take a little-used maintenance route instead.
Only later would the chilling significance of their detour become clear. Five World Trade Center was ravaged by fire and wreckage from the collapsing Twin Towers. At 5.20pm that day, Building 7 – the evacuation point – collapsed entirely.
But in those first frantic minutes, Tara knew none of what was to come.
She turned to her class and uttered a phrase the children knew from regular fire and bomb-threat drills: ‘It’s an emergency. We have to go.’
Some children were still smiling and chatting as they followed their teachers, believing this was just another exercise.
Then a mother and father who had just left came rushing back inside.
‘We can’t get out!’ the woman screamed over and over again.
The rehearsed plan suddenly meant nothing.
Remembering the passage used by workers to take out the trash, Tara led the children through a little-used escape route. Pictured: Denise and Semiramis De Pena
After getting out of 5 World Trade Center, Tara and some of the children paused beside this cemetery across the road to regroup. They were in the St Paul’s Chapel cemetery across from the daycare when the second aircraft hurtled into the South Tower
The daycare’s designated evacuation point was 7 World Trade Center. Tara’s group never went there after she chose another way out. The 47-story building collapsed at 5.20pm that afternoon
Standing frozen in the hallway, Tara suddenly heard a little voice in her mind say: ‘Go the way the maintenance man takes the trash.’
Tara knew exactly what it meant.
Near the daycare’s art-supply room was another door. She knew maintenance workers used it to move through the complex.
Scrambling, she turned, shouting for the children to follow.
The group moved through the building until they reached a glass-lined area. Fearing the debris outside could bring the glass down around the children, the teachers dropped low and crawled with them through part of the escape route before finally emerging near the Borders bookstore.
Only then did Tara look up and see the enormous hole torn into the North Tower.
The daycare’s director, Charlene Melville, found Tara’s group outside. She then turned around and went back inside to help evacuate the infants who were with Onica Sarjeant, Elsa Reyes and Karen Caycedo.
But getting outside became the least of their worries, another problem loomed ahead – how to flee a disaster with children who cannot yet run.
The collapse of Building 7 gave Tara’s split-second decision a haunting significance in retrospect. She says she had never thought of the rescue as her achievement, instead crediting the combined actions of the daycare staff
Tara carried two at once while others clung helplessly to the edges of her clothes. As the classes became mixed in the chaos, teachers simply picked up whichever child was falling behind.
‘Everybody was just picking up whoever couldn’t run fast enough,’ Tara recalled.
Eventually, Tara began to feel she could go no further. Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm her, but she spurred herself on.
‘You can’t give up. You have to keep going for these kids,’ she remembers chanting.
Miraculously, she spotted an overturned double stroller lying abandoned in the street and made a dash towards it. Righting it, she loaded children into it and continued away from the complex.
At one point, Tara along with fellow teachers Sasha and Robyn – who was eight months pregnant at the time – stopped with the children at a cemetery to catch their breath.
But when a stranger offered to take one of the children from Tara’s arms to relieve her, she refused.
‘No, lady. I can’t give you my babies.’
Pictured: Tara with one of her students in 2001. He was on his way to the daycare when the first plane hit and was not part of the evacuation that day. The Daily Mail is withholding his name due to his mother’s request
‘I know she wanted to help,’ Tara said. ‘But I don’t know her.’
As they gathered themselves on the grass, the second plane struck the South Tower.
‘That’s when we knew. That’s when we knew this was no accident, but an attack.’
Tara remembers the world seeming to move in slow motion before the daycare group fractured.
Some headed for City Hall. Others made their way towards the pier. One group caring for infants would eventually persuade a supermarket to give them shopping carts so the smallest children could be pushed through the streets.
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As Tara lifted a little girl named Lois over a chain, her shoe slipped off, but there was no time to retrieve it.
‘I guess it’s embedded forever,’ Tara says.
And above them, people were falling from the towers.
‘That was awful,’ she said. ‘And you knew by the screams each time, even if you didn’t look.’
While Tara and the children were making their way through Lower Manhattan, Mary De Voe was heading in the opposite direction – back towards the daycare.
Mary had dropped her three-year-old daughter Alana at the daycare early that morning before taking her five-year-old son Liam to nearby PS 234.
When she saw the hole in the first tower, there was no hesitation.
‘I’m going to go down because my daughter’s there,’ she remembers saying at the time.
Mary had reached the daycare and found it empty, however, she remained calm, still thinking there had been an accident.
Knowing the emergency plan, she assumed the children had been evacuated towards Building 7. She headed there, expecting to find Alana among them. Another father was there too, searching for his son.
But the children weren’t there and then the second plane hit.
All 28 children in the daycare groups that morning, however, survived and were eventually reunited with their families. This picture is an archive from the center and was taken prior to 9/11
One father arrived at the hospital where the daycare took shelter, smothered in the white ash of Ground Zero he fell to his knees when he finally found his son
‘That’s when chaos happened,’ Mary recalled, ‘that’s when I started to panic.’
The evacuation routes had now dissolved into confusion. The daycare children and teachers were scattered across Lower Manhattan, some heading towards City Hall and others towards the pier.
Mary eventually learned that some of the children were on their way to City Hall with Tara and headed in that direction.
Moments later, Mary bumped into Tara’s group. Then she saw three-year-old Alana was approaching, hand-in-hand with a teacher who had only started that day.
Her daughter had been reluctant to leave because she wanted to finish her painting.
Mary grabbed Alana and ran to collect Liam.
But there was still no escape from the danger closing in around them. When the South Tower collapsed, Mary was caught in a stampeding crowd with two tiny children.
Only when the immediate danger began to recede did Mary’s body finally surrender to shock.
In the years afterwards, the children carried memories of smoke, falling buildings and the desperate journey through Lower Manhattan
Tara revealed that many of her former students had to undergo therapy for years as she herself had to leave New York in order to heal
Even now, Tara says that knowing she is going to speak about September 11 can keep her awake the night before
‘I kept swallowing my vomit because I kept wanting to throw up,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to throw up in front of the kids. You have to stay strong for your kids.’
Her husband, meanwhile, was across the Hudson watching as the towers plummeted.
He believed his wife and children were still at the daycare.
Unable to reach Mary, he sent a message to her pager: ‘I love you.’
‘He thought we were under the rubble,’ Mary said, her voice trembling all these years later. ‘He thought we were gone already.’
Tara’s group eventually reached St. Clare’s Hospital, where staff found them food, cots and paper to draw on.
One four-year-old began to draw.
She drew the towers and the fire, then she drew a person falling.
Tara admitted she had regrets about not going back to see the skeletal frame of daycare. ‘I didn’t have the courage’ she said
‘She absolutely knew what happened,’ Tara said.
Tara remembers a father’s arrival at the hospital, enveloped in the white ash of Ground Zero.
Tara still remembers the man dropping to his knees when he saw his child.
He grabbed his baby and just sobbed.’
Eventually, all the children were reunited with their families but survival could never erase that day.
Mary later found Liam sleeping beneath his bed because he feared the building around him might fall. Alana recalls less, but she remembered being carried while looking backwards as smoke engulfed the fleeing crowds. For a time afterwards, even steam rising from New York manholes could terrify her.
Tara struggled with sleeplessness and relentless PTSD, eventually moving away from New York to North Carolina, although she never stopped teaching.
She wanted to return to Ground Zero afterwards. Part of her felt she needed to see what remained of the place where she had worked.
The children are now adults, but the teachers who carried them to safety still remember every step of that extraordinary escape
‘I couldn’t do it,’ she said, adding, ‘That’s kind of a regret that I have.’
The children she teaches today are older, but each year they ask her to tell them what happened on September 11.
Deirdre Hogan, the Children’s Discovery Center’s former financial director, had helped hire its staff.
Twenty-five years later, she believes their actions that morning proved they had chosen exactly the right women.
‘We definitely hired the right people,’ Deirdre told the Daily Mail. ‘Despite being terrified themselves, they would have done anything for those kids.’
They had, she said, ‘the biggest, biggest hearts’, adding that ‘being a part of the center is something she is most proud of in life.’
Mary is more direct still.
‘They were lovely heroes, total heroes, absolutely,’ she said.
Yet Tara has always found the word ‘hero’ harder to accept, insisting she was simply a teacher doing what a teacher should do.
‘Those babies, they couldn’t get themselves out of the building,’ she said.
‘We had to do what we did.’
And ultimately, for Tara, the measure of that extraordinary morning remains the same one it was when the teachers finally accounted for every child.
‘We got them out, and everyone was safe.’
