On the morning of September 11, 2001, a 2-year-old girl and her parents boarded United Airlines Flight 175 in Boston. They were headed for a vacation at Disneyland in California before hijackers overtook the cockpit. They diverted the flight path and crashed the plane into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
That family died upon impact. Lolita Jackson, who worked for a major financial services firm, was in the South Tower that horrific day. She was fortunate enough to get out of the tower before it crumbled to the ground.
Also Read: How the last survivor of 9/11 made it out alive after the Twin Towers fell
That was not the first time that Jackson survived a terrorist attack. She was also at her desk in the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, when terrorists planted a bomb in a rental van. The bomb went off in a parking garage beneath the North Tower, killing six people and wounding thousands more.
As the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches next week, Jackson’s survival story is worth remembering.
“I’m a living testament that it can happen to you, and it can happen to you twice,” Jackson said to The Associated Press in 2023.
Surviving the First Attack
Jackson didn’t grow up with much. She possessed intelligence and ambition, though, and those character traits helped her graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. She always longed to work on Wall Street, she said in a first-person account for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, so after finishing her studies, she fulfilled that goal and landed a job in Manhattan.
Jackson was early into her career when the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred. Her office was on the 72nd floor of the South Tower, not far from where 1,200 pounds of explosives created a gigantic crater on the lower levels of the North Tower.
The blast left Jackson understandably rattled, the AP reported. She and waves of other employees in the building walked down stairwells full of smoke. Others were trapped in elevators before first responders rescued them.
About 50,000 people escaped from the World Trade Center facility that day.
As tragic as the 1993 bombing was, its mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, said his and his accomplices’ intention was to take down both towers that day, the FBI later revealed. Thankfully, those plans didn’t come to fruition then. Yousef is now serving a life sentence in the ADX Florence Supermax prison in Colorado. That’s where he was when Jackson attended a staff meeting on the morning of 9/11—unaware terrorists were bearing down on the World Trade Center again.
“I Thought I Wasn’t Going to Make it Out”
Jackson happened to look out a window and see American Airlines Flight 11 strike the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. Seventeen minutes later, Flight 175 plunged into the South Tower between floors 77 and 85. Jackson’s company was then located on the 70th floor. Along with a close colleague, Jackson made her way down to the 59th floor when an announcement came for everyone to take the elevator to the 44th floor.
Jackson did as instructed, but her friend stayed behind to call his wife. They separated at that point, and Jackson was on the 44th floor—which had no windows—when Flight 175 crashed into the tower.
“We just felt the impact, and the building just moved,” Jackson recalled to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. “Then it moved back. It felt like it was falling at the time, and I thought I wasn’t going to make it out.”
From that point, Jackson said she quickly descended the stairs to reach the ground level in approximately 10 minutes. She was on a subway, heading home, when both towers collapsed.
Counting the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11 and another one that crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people that day. About 2,750 people died when the World Trade Center towers toppled down, including Jackson’s friend who stopped to call his wife.
It remains the largest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil.
Changing the Course of Her Life
Jackson isn’t sure how she survived one terrorist attack, let alone two. After 9/11, she became determined not to waste her good fortune. She reassessed her life and came to a sobering conclusion.
“I went through a few years of trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I realized that if you could get killed going to work, you better really love your job,” she told the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
You see where this is headed? Jackson quit her job in the financial section and took a year off to pursue various (non-work) interests. She then landed a position in the New York City Mayor’s Office, working for 15 years in the administrations of former mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio. According to her biography, Jackson also has filled various other roles, including being a professional singer. It claimed she has sung at Carnegie Hall in New York.
“It shaped the trajectory of my life,” Jackson told NBC News of 9/11 in a 2023 interview. “I am a very happy person. My friends will tell you I live life to the fullest, because I know tomorrow is not promised.”
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