“I suddenly knew that my dad was the Flight 93 hero from the news.” “I hung up and started sobbing,” Mills said to Cosmopolitan. The four men who prevented the attack posthumously received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 2002.Īll but Bingham had children or were expecting children before that fateful day, and those kids, 17 years later, are carrying on the legacies left by fathers they either barely knew or never met. The plan was for the hijackers to crash the plane into the Capitol, the Pentagon or the White House, according to published reports. Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and Todd Beamer rightfully are forever immortalized for their role in battling a group of hijackers on United Flight 93 - a flight that ultimately took the lives of everybody on board the plane.Īfter Burnett, Bingham, Glick and Beamer, all former athletes, stormed the cockpit and battled four hijackers, the plane ended up crashing into a Pennsylvania field instead of a Washington, D.C. His photos, for example, are kept at eye level for David and Drew.Thanks to the action of some very brave men, the world won’t ever know the additional destruction it could have seen on Sept. To preserve her husband's memory for the children who will grow up without him, Lisa keeps him very much present in their home. "To hear the garage door go up, see the kids go to the door, is probably the biggest thing I miss." "Coming in the door every night is the big thing," she says, referring to her husband's homecoming at the end of each workday. Still, there are almost constant reminders of the void in her life. "If I see a picture of the crash site or something like that on TV, obviously I think through it in my head," she says, "but I don't dwell too much on what happened that day." Though Todd is always in her thoughts, Lisa said she tries not to focus on the events of Sept.
"I know that many years down the road we'll still be sad in some ways. "Although pain dissipates over time, it doesn't go away," she says. Lisa, who lost her father when she was 15, knows that emptiness all too well. I felt like he was smiling."īut Morgan came home from the hospital to no father. Lisa says of her husband, "I felt like he knew what was happening. Lisa says Todd had hoped third child would be a girl, and she named the baby after him - Morgan was his middle name.
Now the mother of three - including Morgan's two big brothers, David, 4, and Drew, 2 - Lisa is still learning how to raise her family without her husband. Her mother, Lisa Beamer, has become a public symbol of courage and strength to a grieving nation as she struggles to keep her family together. The passengers apparently fought with the hijackers for control of the jetliner, which plummeted into the ground rather than hitting its intended target. Her father, Todd Beamer, was the 32-year-old hero on United Flight 93 who said "Let's roll" before joining other passengers in storming the cockpit. 21, 2002 - Though she's just 6 weeks old, Morgan Kay Beamer - with her father's dark hair and a little cleft in her chin - is building a bridge between Sept.