Speaking publicly for the first time Friday, Jefferson, a GTE Airfone supervisor, offered a direct account of her conversation with Todd Beamer, a passenger on Sept. 11’s doomed United Airlines Flight 93. Those details provide a clearer picture of what happened in the minutes before the hijacked Boeing 757 plowed into a field 80 miles outside Pittsburgh.
While other passengers called family members to make last-minute declarations of love, Beamer simply punched “0” on his seat-back phone and reached a stranger, who became tethered to his life in its last moments and ever since.
Her report of their conversation offers further evidence that the hijackers killed or injured the pilots and that the passengers made a last-ditch plan to overcome them.
Jefferson, 43, was monitoring call volume at the company’s Oak Brook Call Center and thinking about eating breakfast when a call came in at 9:45 a.m. from a man who said his plane had been hijacked.
Taking over from an operator who was too upset to speak, she introduced herself and asked him for the details.
Beamer, a 32-year-old sales account manager for Oracle Corp., and one of the passengers apparently involved in the uprising, told her that two hijackers with knives had overpowered the pilots and locked themselves inside the cockpit.
The pilot and co-pilot lay dead or injured on the floor of the first-class cabin, he told her, passing along information from a flight attendant. A third hijacker stood guard over the 10 first-class passengers, pulling shut the curtain that separates first-class from coach.
The 27 coach passengers remained in their seats, joined by flight attendants, who had been ordered by the hijackers to sit down, Beamer told Jefferson.
Although authorities have said there were four hijackers on the plane, Beamer mentioned only those three, she said. If the coach passengers were left unguarded, it would explain why so many were able to make last-minute phone calls.
He also did not appear to know about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, she said, although reports of other passengers’ calls have indicated they were aware of the terrorist acts.
“He asked me if I knew what [the hijackers] wanted,” she said in an interview, flanked by company officials. “Was it money? Ransom?”
He told her his name, talked about his pregnant wife and two sons, and, never wavering in his calm, asked her to call them if he died. Then, about nine minutes into the call, the plane began to fly erratically, she said. For the first time, she heard screams in the background.
Beamer raised his voice.
“`We’re going down, we’re going down,'” she said he told her. “`We’re coming back up. No, we’re turning around. I believe we’re going back north. At this point I don’t know where we’re going.'”
Then, he asked her to say the Lord’s Prayer and 23rd Psalm with him.
By this time, Jefferson, who was taking notes, had notified authorities, and the FBI was on another line to the Call Center. Agents told Jefferson to ask Beamer if he could determine the nationalities of the hijackers, but she said she never got the chance to relay the message.
Moments later, he told her that a few of the passengers had made the decision to attack the hijacker in the first-class cabin.
“I’m going to have to go out on faith,” he told her.
“Don’t assume the worst, Todd,” she said she told him. “You still have hope.
“And,” Jefferson recalled, “he said at this point he didn’t think he had much of a choice, and he turned to someone else and he said, `Are you ready?’ They responded, which I didn’t hear the response, and he said, `OK, let’s roll.’
“And that’s the last I heard from Todd Beamer.”
Jefferson kept the line open but heard only silence. Ten minutes later, she heard on the radio that Flight 93 had crashed, in Pennsylvania.
“I was just hoping he would come back and pick up the phone,” she said. “I was just waiting for someone to pick up the phone. Anybody.”
Finally, she hung up and, for the first time, broke down.
“I felt like the little short time we had together we had bonded,” she said. “It was like losing a good friend.”
Tribune reporter Kim Barker contributed to this report.
