Morgan Stanley had 1,500 employees in the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001, and 13 died, leaving approximately 1,487 survivors. Twenty-five years later, some of those survivors say the attack didn't just spare their lives — it redirected them entirely, pulling them out of finance and into careers built around helping other people.
That evacuation was aided by regular mandatory drills. As reported by The Oakland Press, Morgan Stanley had improved its safety procedures after the 1993 bombing. According to Morgan Stanley, those drills and other safety improvements are credited with saving hundreds of lives. Rescorla himself died after returning to the World Trade Center to search for people left behind, the Oakland Press reports.
Not everyone made it out. Tom Swift, who worked at Morgan Stanley alongside survivor Lolita Jackson, died in the attacks, one of nearly 3,000 people killed that day, per the same account. Jackson was in a meeting in the South Tower when the North Tower was hit, and she escaped the building that morning — not for the first time.
A Survivor of Both World Trade Center Attacks
Jackson is among a small group of people who escaped both World Trade Center terrorist attacks: she had been on the 72nd floor and descended pitch-black stairways during the February 26, 1993 truck bombing, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, before escaping the South Tower again in 2001. That 1993 bombing killed six people, injured more than 1,000, and required a four-hour, multi-agency rescue effort to clear 50,000 occupants from the Twin Towers.
After 9/11, Jackson left finance and entered public service, the Oakland Press reports. She worked in the New York City Mayor's Office, where she was in charge of public affairs after Hurricane Sandy, and she later served as director of special projects managing operations for major infrastructure efforts including the Second Avenue Subway, according to Holyrood Magazine. She went on to become the city's lead climate diplomat to the United Nations and helped train city employees serving communities where people had lost loved ones and homes, per the Oakland Press. Jackson has cited her 9/11 experience as the catalyst for asking herself what work she was truly willing to dedicate her life to, Holyrood reported. She also pursued jazz singing, according to the Oakland Press.
From Morgan Stanley Intern to Full-Time Red Cross Responder
Nancy Karole Kennedy's path took a different shape. She had started at Morgan Stanley as an intern and was a 39-year-old manager at the firm when the towers fell, the Oakland Press reports. About a year later, in 2002, she became a Red Cross disaster response volunteer, responding to fires, floods, and hurricanes before eventually becoming a full-time Red Cross employee.
“I'm a kinder person than I was before,” Kennedy said, according to the Oakland Press. She later became director of development at a cancer center within Hackensack Meridian Health, where she fundraised for cancer care and research, and she has attended conferences on dealing with post-traumatic stress. Kennedy planned a gathering for her World Trade Center colleagues at her house this October. The Red Cross response to 9/11 involved more than 57,000 team members. The American Red Cross report cited here concerns improvements after the 2005 hurricane season.
Survivor's Guilt Turned Into Literacy Work
Doug Brown, who also worked at Morgan Stanley, left finance and started volunteering and tutoring elementary school students in reading, later working for literacy nonprofits, the Oakland Press reports. “It just was so random,” Brown said of surviving that day, per the same account, and he has described experiencing survivor's guilt in the years since.
What Psychologists Call Posttraumatic Growth
Trauma survivors can experience what psychologists call post-traumatic growth by helping others, a concept that exists alongside post-traumatic stress disorder as a possible response to traumatic events, according to the Oakland Press. The framework describes positive psychological transformation following severe adversity, according to research cited by a clinical guide on the five domains of post-traumatic growth. Tedeschi and Calhoun identified five core domains of growth: appreciation of life, relationships with others, new possibilities, personal strength, and spiritual change.
Tedeschi now serves as a psychologist and executive director of the Boulder Crest Institute for Posttraumatic Growth, per the Oakland Press. The institute's work is described by the Boulder Crest Foundation.
Eranda Jayawickreme, a psychology professor at Wake Forest University, said many people report some degree of growth after adversity and trauma, according to the Oakland Press. But Jayawickreme's own published research urges caution, emphasizing that credible post-traumatic growth assessments require longitudinal tracking of virtue-based behavioral changes rather than relying solely on retrospective self-reported surveys, per a study indexed on PubMed. That research cautions that retrospective self-reported surveys alone are insufficient to establish growth.
The Toll That Hasn't Ended
The toll of the attacks remains ongoing, including health consequences for survivors and responders.
Identification of the dead also remains unfinished. As of August 2026, forensic investigators with the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner had officially identified 1,651 of the nearly 3,000 victims killed at the World Trade Center, leaving roughly 40 percent of the deceased unidentified while testing continues. Investigators continue their work to identify the remaining victims.
