Twenty-five years after American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, a water-stained note scrawled on Marriott Hotel stationery remains one of the most haunting artifacts to survive the September 11 attacks. It reads simply: “Dear Earl. I love you. Please take care of Imani and Jaryd for me.” The woman who wrote it, 45-year-old Dora Menchaca, was a passenger on the doomed flight, and her family in Southern California has spent every anniversary since remembering her through that message.
Menchaca's note, dated 9/11/01 and signed with her own hand, was recovered from a microwave after the crash, according to NBC Los Angeles. Several passengers aboard Flight 77 had stowed belongings in the appliance, and remarkably, the microwave survived the crash intact. The FBI later visited Earl's home and helped find belongings, the station reports. Separately, according to the Ventura County Star, the note carried a handwritten timestamp reading “7:15 AM PST (I think),” and FBI evidence recovery teams returned it to Earl.
Flight 77 departed from Washington Dulles International Airport and was bound for Los Angeles International Airport when it was hijacked, one of four aircraft seized that morning. The plane struck the Pentagon's western wall at 9:37 a.m. EDT, killing all 59 passengers and crew aboard and 125 people inside the building, for a combined 184 fatalities, according to the U.S. Department of Defense's account of the 2008 Pentagon Memorial dedication.
A Career Cut Short in Cancer Research
Menchaca wasn't originally supposed to be on that flight. She had traveled to Washington on September 10, 2001, to brief the Food and Drug Administration on a new prostate cancer treatment — a cause that was personal to her after her own father's diagnosis — according to UNC-Chapel Hill. When her meetings wrapped up ahead of schedule, she took an earlier return flight, Flight 77, the next morning.
At the time of her death, Menchaca was associate director of clinical research at Amgen, the Thousand Oaks biotech firm where she had worked since 1991 developing treatments for cancer and pneumonia, according to the Los Angeles Times' archived 2001 report. She lived in Santa Monica with her family while commuting to Amgen's headquarters. Menchaca earned her doctorate in epidemiology from UCLA, and the company later established a memorial contribution in her name supporting cancer research and patient care, according to Amgen's own tribute page.
In San Gabriel, her brother, John Menchaca, has attended remembrance ceremonies and said his family remembers Dora every year, per NBC Los Angeles' report. He was working in downtown Los Angeles on the morning of the attacks when he got the call that his sister had been on one of the hijacked planes. He has since called for the country to come together on the remembrance day, the station notes.
A Renovation That Limited the Death Toll
The section of the Pentagon that Flight 77 struck had recently completed a three-year, $258 million structural renovation featuring steel reinforcement framing, Kevlar lining, and blast-resistant windows — upgrades that structural engineers credited with preventing a far higher death toll inside the building, according to Military.com. The wedge was also only partially reoccupied that morning, the outlet reports.
Two of the five hijackers who took control of Flight 77, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, had lived together in a San Diego apartment complex in Clairemont in 2000 before relocating for flight training and eventually boarding the flight at Dulles, Hoodline previously reported.
Preserving the Physical Record
Menchaca's note is among the personal items recovered after the September 11 attacks. Families continue donating recovered relics to public archives to this day.
Amgen has built its own lasting tribute to Menchaca at its Thousand Oaks headquarters, where a reflection garden features a sculpted bronze bust of her. Each September 11, colleagues anonymously leave a bottle of Diet Coke — her favorite drink — at the memorial, according to ColoradoBoulevard.net.
With the 25th anniversary approaching, remembrance of the 2,977 victims continues. For the Menchaca family, though, the memory that matters most remains far smaller and more personal: a handwritten note, a microwave, and the words a mother left for her children a quarter century ago.
