On Feb. 26, 1993, while sitting at her desk on the 72nd floor in the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter office in the South Tower, Lolita heard a loud boom and noticed smoke entering the office through the elevator shafts. She and her colleagues quickly began to evacuate the building down smoke-filled stairwells. It took her two hours to exit the building and at times she could not see hand in front of her face, Jackson recalled.
Although that first attack was frightening, Jackson credits her survival on 9/11 to her experience in 1993.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Jackson was in a conference room on the 70th floor of the South Tower when she witnessed Flight 11 crash into the North Tower. Jackson and her colleagues — many of whom were also survivors of the 1993 bombing — immediately began to evacuate the building, taking care to implement safety and evacuation procedures they learned in the aftermath of the 1993 attack.
Jackson took an elevator down to the 59th floor, where her colleague Thomas Swift decided to find an empty office to call his wife. Jackson continued without Swift to the 44th floor sky lobby. Lolita then continued her evacuation on foot down the stairs and safely exited the South Tower.
Little did she know that this decision would end up saving her life.
Swift, who boarded an elevator about five minutes after Jackson, would be killed when Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.
The story of Lolita Jackson, who survived both the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the September 11 World Trade Center attack. Recorded by the 9/11 Memorial website here.
