The Freedom Tower

This is one of those “last man” standing stories but this one begins and ends with a view of a world view I remember quite well. Windows on the World was the best kept secret brunch spot in New York — $19.95 per person got you the best Sunday lunch and a bird’s eye view of the greatest city on earth.
This was where a survivor of 9/11 had to make his last stand. His story was featured recently in The Daily Cardinal, the campus newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The last man alive out of the World Trade Center’s North Tower Sept. 11 2001, janitor William Rodriguez, told his story of survival and heroism Saturday at a lecture sponsored by the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth.

Rodriguez held one of five master keys to the WTC—a tool he calls “the key of hope” that enabled him to save 15 people trapped inside the two towers.

The custodian’s story started at 8:30 a.m. when he arrived to work on the basement level of the North Tower. He was late and ached from cleaning the 110 flights of stairs the day before. He had missed the free breakfast he ate every morning on the top-floor restaurant, Windows on the World.

At 8:46 a.m. he heard an explosion. “Boom!” Rodriguez imitated. He heard a man screaming “Explosion! Explosion!” from underneath. “I wanted to say a generator blew up. I thought it was a bomb.”

This piece of evidence may show explosives were used in accompaniment to the hijacked planes, he said. When the plane hit, “the walls cracked and the building shook.”

Rodriguez did not pause. He helped a man with a third of his body burned and pulled two out of an elevator filled with water. He put them in an ambulance and re-entered the towers.

He met firefighters and used his key to open stairwells and guide them through the building he had worked in for over twenty years.

“We got to go up, we got to go up!” he said. “I want to go up to help my friends,” Rodriguez said, referring to the cooks at the top floor restaurant.