'World Trade Center' :
Accountant’s heroic 911 journey part of new film

story by Julie Weisberg / Wilton Bulletin Aug 10 2006

It was an early September morning when David Karnes received a call from his sister as he sat working in his Deloitte & Touche office in Wilton. His sister had called from her home in Pittsburgh to tell the then-former Marine that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

“'That doesn’t sound right, 'I thought. It was a clear, sunny day in Wilton, and we’re only 45 minutes away,” he said. “Then it just came to me, right then and there: that had to be a high-jacked airliner.”

A few minutes later the senior accountant got another call from his sister. She said a second plane had hit the towers, and they were now both on fire.

“I told my co-workers, .I don’t know if you guys realize it or not, but we are at war,” he said.

Several Deloitte & Touche employees watched that morning's events unfold on a set of televisions mounted on a wall of their Westport Road office. But he was not one of them.

“And then I went back to my desk and started praying about it ... and I just felt God calling me,” he said.

Over the next several hours on Sept. 11, Sgt. Karnes, 48, would decide to leave his Wilton workplace, making his way south to assist with the Ground Zero search and rescue. That decision would ultimately lead to the Marine finding and helping to save the lives of two Port Authority police officers - John McLaughlin and William Jimeno - trapped beneath some two stories of rubble where the trade center’s south tower had stood only hours before.

Sgt. Karnes’ personal journey on Sept. 11 has been immortalized in Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone’s new movie, World Trade Center. The film focuses on that day’s events as they happened to Officers McLoughlin and Jimeno, from just before the attacks to their rescue.

But the movie, which opened nationwide yesterday, also takes the time to follow Sgt. Karnes as he makes his way from Wilton to the collapsed towers debris center.

“God put it in my heart to go down there,” Sgt. Karnes told The Bulletin during a Tuesday afternoon phone interview from his New York City home. “ I just felt that there were people down there that God wanted me to find.”

The rescue

Sgt. Karnes, however, did not take a direct route to lower Manhattan that day. After speaking with his wife and praying at his desk at Deloitte & Touche, the Pennsylvania native stopped at his Stamford home at the time to change into one of two cleaned and pressed Marine uniforms he kept hanging in his closet.

He said his wife, Rosemary, used to chide him about why he still kept his uniforms in a perpetual state of readiness.

“I told her you never know. And I always want to have a set ready,” Sgt. Karnes said. “I am first and foremost a Marine. It is kind of in your blood.”

Then he did something that to anyone other than a former Marine would seem a strange stop to make en route to a search and rescue effort: he got a haircut, “high and tight.”

“Marines don’t put on their uniform unless they have a haircut,” he said. “It is just military discipline.”

Sgt. Karnes then drove to a Long Island storage facility where he kept some military gear that could come in handy at the scene. For his trip to lower Manhattan, the former Pittsburgh police officer drove the used convertible Porsche he had bought the month before, because his 1985 Mercury was in the shop. The Porsche’s model? A 911.

“The uniforms, the car, my background ... it all came together that day,” he said.

A short time later he reached the Brooklyn Bridge. There, he was asked to show his military identification badge. He did, and was allowed to continue on into Manhattan.

“They said to me as I drove off, .Hey, give 'em hell staff sergeant,'” Sgt. Karnes said.

At the scene, he said he ran into five or six other military men in their uniforms, too, each hoping to help in some way.

But unlike many of the others who came that day to help, Sgt. Karnes was already familiar with that area of the city. Before he was assigned to the accounting agency’s Wilton headquarters, he had worked for several years at Deloitte & Touche’s World Financial Center offices, located across the street from the World Trade Center.

“I used to get an eerie feeling when I worked down there,” he said of the trade center area, adding that he had always felt the towers were vulnerable to an attack, especially after the 1993 bombing. “It didn’t surprise me.”

When Sgt. Karnes asked the other men gathered if any rescuers had gone into the epicenter of the collapsed towers, one of them responded, “no way, no one would go in there.”

“But then, I started praying and thinking about it,” he said, and he began to walk down Church Street with another Marine in uniform, a man he only knew as “Sgt. Thomas.”

One of the main reasons no one had yet ventured into the epicenter of the blasts, he said, was that workers were afraid a tower that appeared to be severely damaged was about to collapse.

But, in addition to serving as a Marine and a former police officer, Sgt. Karnes also had worked for more than five years in a Pennsylvania steel mill, following in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather.

“My steel mill probably made those beams I was walking on down there,” Sgt. Karnes said.

Looking more closely at the tower, he drew on his steel worker experience, and determined it was not about to collapse. Instead, he said, the dust and sun that had settled on it created an optical
illusion that is was leaning.

“And so I said, .Sgt. Thomas, there is nothing wrong with that tower,‘” he said. “And from there, we went into the debris ... we were the only ones in there.”

The two men began to patrol through the rubble, calling out as they walked, in hopes of locating any survivors.

“Then, as we began to walk toward the South Tower, I got a sense that there was someone who was out there,” Sgt. Karnes said.

A short time later they heard a muffled voice coming out of the depression where the South Tower had been.

“We said, .We can hear you, keep yelling, ‘” Sgt. Karnes said, adding that after they made contact with the two officers in the rubble, Officer Jimeno said to the Marines, “Don’t leave us.”

“And I told him, .Hey buddy, this is the United States Marine Corps. We aren’t going anywhere - you’re being rescued.’”

Next, drawing on his police experience, Sgt. Karnes asked for Officer McLoughlin and Jimeno’s badge numbers, addresses, phone numbers, and family information, as much identifying information as he could. He then called both his wife in Stamford and his sister in Pittsburgh and relayed this information to them. Because, he said, if he had called the police and told them where he was - at the center of the World Trade Center debris field - he didn’t think that they would believe him.

“So, the two of them called the authorities for me,” he said.

After a short time, Sgt. Thomas headed back down the street, to serve as a guide for rescue workers. The next person on the scene was a paramedic with expired credentials.

“’What you got down there, ‘ he asked me. And I said, .Two officers,‘” Sgt. Karnes said. “Then we wormed our way down about 20 feet through some of the twisted channels of steel.”

During this time, Sgt. Karnes said the paramedic was able to deliver much-needed first aid to the officers. They were down under the debris for about 25 minutes.

“It was very smoky,” he said. “I almost passed out a couple of times.”

Eventually, a group of New York Police Department officers arrived at the scene, and began to work to remove the two men from the debris.

But as the team worked, fires began to inch their way closer to rescuers. And then, as if on cue, a fireman arrived with a portable device to keep the encroaching fires at bay until a nearby fire station
was able to get a hose to tame the flames.

“It was as if the whole thing was divinely orchestrated,” Sgt. Karnes said.

It took about three hours for rescuers to pull Officer McLoughlin and Jimeno to safety.

Sgt. Karnes said he stayed at the hospital with Sgt. Jimeno for a couple of hours. After getting a short amount of sleep, he returned to Ground Zero and assisted with the search and recovery effort for another seven days.

“I went into the voids that no one would go into,” Sgt. Karnes said. “We were big, tough men down there ... but a lot of us cried ... none of us had ever seen anything like it.”

On the morning of the ninth day, he went back to work in Wilton.

“There was a huge amount of paperwork on my desk,” he said.

And so he worked overtime for the several weeks just to catch up.

Re-enlistment

But while Sgt. Karnes returned to his role as a Deloitte & Touche accountant, he knew it was only temporary.

“On the pile (of rubble) I made a vow that I would go after the people who did this,” he said. “And it took me a year and a half to get back on (military) contract.”

After serving his first year of re-enlistment with the Marines, part of which he spent in the Philippines, Sgt. Karnes’s Pittsburgh unit was assigned to Iraq. He served two consecutive tours there, from August 2004 until January.

Sgt. Karnes said he did not have one day off during that 18-month time period, where he worked on average 18 hours a day.

He added that if he wasn’t married, he might still be on the Iraq war front.

“People don’t know ... this is all vital and necessary,” he said of the war on terror. “These guys aren’t messing around ... we took the fight to them.”

Although the staff sergeant is still on active duty, he won’t be for long. This fall, he will be back behind a desk at Deloitte & Touche, working in the organization ‘s World Financial Center offices - once
again finding himself near the World Trade Center site.

Still, Sgt. Karnes said he enjoyed his time working in Wilton.

“I think it is nice up there,” he said.

Sgt. Karnes did not want to comment on the World Trade Center movie, or the strong, positive reaction audiences have had to his character in the film because, he said, he had not yet seen it. A private screening of the film was scheduled for the Marine Tuesday evening.

And, while he says there are probably some parts of the rescue story that Mr. Stone may have erred on or left out, that is to be expected in a Hollywood film of a real-life event.

“I know the real deal and so do a lot of other people,” he said. “And I am satisfied with that.”

The heroic actions of Staff Sgt. David Karnes on Sept. 11 play a central role in the new film, “World Trade Center.” In the film, which opened yesterday, the former senior accountant is shown leaving his Deloitte& Touche office in Wilton to join the search and rescue effort at Ground Zero that day. - Sgt. Ryan D. Libbert photo