Sarasota, Florida -- Peter Abbott became the police chief for the City of Sarasota after retiring from the New York City Police Department in 2002.
One year before that, on September 11th, he was a high-ranking officer at NYPD. That morning, he had given a friend a ride into Manhattan, and was just starting his day.
"I hear a large commotion, and I see everybody stacked up against a far window," Abbott remembered. "I walk over, and I can look up, and if you look at an angle, you can see the smoke pouring out of the north tower."
"So I ran down to the municipal plaza, across City Hall Park, and just as I got close to the complex, the second plane hit, and I saw this big explosion. The smoke came out of both sides and met at the top of the building."
"Now we're wondering: when's the next one gonna hit? It was very eerie."
"We kind of walked up to the complex and saw a bunch of emergency service rigs, so we started helping guys get their [air] packs on and all of that stuff."
Standing in an intersection with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the city's top staff, Abbott learned at the same moment they did that two other planes in the air were still unaccounted for. "I remember the mayor was on the phone with the vice president asking for air support. It was very different," Abbott said.
When Abbott and hist team ducked into a building to set up a temporary command post, the first tower collapsed. "Day went to night," he said. The debris and rubble trapped him and his team inside. A maintenance worker led them out a back exit. "We started directing all these people who were bleeding, and stumbling, you know -- full of dust."
"I can't imagine describing what it looked like, 'cause there was like four inches of grey powder on everything."
He and another officer saw a customs agent in uniform walking in a daze; he'd just crawled out from under the first tower's rubble. They brushed him off and sent him away. Then the ground shook. A wall of concrete and dust -- several stories tall -- wrapped around the corner in front of them and flooded onto their street.
"I was like, 'Oh man -- this is not good,'" Abbott remembered. "So I ran to the north side of the street... and I grabbed a door. And it opened! I was so thankful it opened."
"We jumped inside just as the smoke blew past."
"We did a roll call and we found out that there were 23 police officers missing from our agency. I believe 37 from the Port Authority. And 343 from the Fire Department."
"The guys that I had put the [air] packs on, with my detail, all of those guys perished."
"It was a very difficult time. A very difficult time."
