The Date That Froze Time
On 9/11, These Four Were Planning For College. Then Their Parents Died And Their Dreams Were Rearranged.

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 25, 2006

The images come at them -- not as often as they used to, but often enough. In a movie trailer before the feature presentation. On a newspaper's Web site, or on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." They pick up a magazine in the dentist's office and there is President Bush giving some speech or another, raising once again the specter of Sept. 11, 2001.

The day that no one will let them get beyond.

Freddye Carter lost her mother at the Pentagon that day. Mike Rogers's mom died at the World Trade Center. Melissa Shulman's dad died there too, and so did Patrick Dowdell's father.

They don't deny that the victims -- the real victims, those who died -- should be remembered. But the details that absorb the rest of us don't mean as much to them: How exactly did their parents die? At what time? Where in the Pentagon? In which tower at the World Trade Center? All the questions: Where were they when they heard the news? What was life like after that? Did the money for survivors, from federal and private sources, make them rich?

People want to make them into walking memorials, symbols, metaphors. But their parents are dead and in the end that's all that matters to them -- that, and the fact that like other 22- and 23-year-olds, they're dreaming big dreams and are busy trying to make those dreams come true.

All four would have graduated from college this spring if things had gone according to plan. They would have sat through speeches reminding them to shoot for the moon, blaze their own trail and do whatever they do with heart. The platitudes would have sailed through the air along with their mortarboards.

As it is, only Dowdell graduated.

* * *

Sometimes Mike Rogers gets angry -- angry at the terrorists who killed his mom, angry at family members who lost patience with him, and angry at himself for losing his way for a couple of years.

But what really riles him are politicians who use his mother's death -- and the deaths of 3,000 others -- to advance their agendas. He doesn't like sounding sympathetic to terrorists, but he opposes the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the National Security Agency program to wiretap Americans. "Don't use my mom's death as a political ploy to get the country behind you," he says.

Talk about having to take charge of your own life and move on; Rogers has more than he can handle without serving as anyone's poster child.

The same day his mother, Rosanne Lang, died at the World Trade Center, Rogers, a few days shy of 17, went to live with his mother's sister in Belford, N.J.

Donna Caballero and her husband, Al, weren't thrilled about taking on a fifth child. But just days before Lang, a stock trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, was killed, she had asked Donna to become executor of her estate and Mike's possible guardian. Donna had agreed.

The other alternative, Mike's father, living somewhere out West, wasn't someone anyone in the family wanted to see the boy living with.

Mike Rogers and the Caballeros moved into the house his mother had owned, an elegant white home in Middletown with a swimming pool. Rogers, who had a history of drinking and using illegal drugs, resumed some of his bad habits. But he managed to get into Georgetown University.

He says that soon after he turned 18, in late September 2002, Donna Caballero told him he was no longer welcome at home. Caballero denies this, saying he was given a choice between continuing his destructive ways and having a family and a foundation to support him.

He stayed at Georgetown a year and a half. Assets from his mother's estate helped him pay tuition, room and board, and he hired a lawyer to regain possession of his mother's house. Of those first couple of years after Sept. 11, Rogers recalls in a telephone interview, "I was trying to do Georgetown on my own, then this whole court case on my own. It sucked. The only silver lining was that it built character."

Then came the baby. After leaving Georgetown, Rogers returned to Middletown, and, with his legal effort to regain his mother's house in limbo, bought a townhouse. He picked up jobs as a physical therapy aide, then a waiter. Nicole Lane, a girlfriend, moved in with him, and gave birth to a baby whom they named Michael. Suddenly the world got bigger than just him and his mother's death.

This spring, he phoned Georgetown and asked to re-enroll. If he's accepted, money from the survivors' fund will enable him to attend school full time and support his family, he said. He'd like to go to law school, perhaps into politics after that.

His big world is about to expand. Nicole is pregnant again. Though not married to her, Rogers refers to her as his wife.

"I wish I could have graduated on time. All of my Georgetown friends are graduated and will be gone when I get back. But I look at the other side, too. I have a wonderful wife, wonderful son, soon I'll have a wonderful daughter. Of course, it's hard because I miss my mom. I'd love for her to see her beautiful grandchildren."

Rosanne Lang was one of 12 children, a self-made success. Her son, an only child, has no doubt what she'd be telling him right now: "If you want to live in the world, you have to make the world the one you want to be in."

Getting On With Her Life

About two years ago, Freddye Carter, then 20, took a part-time job as a civilian cashier in the commissary at Fort Myer in Arlington. She found the job online and was hired without telling anyone about her mother.

She drives to work now in her Ford Expedition, which she paid for herself, passing by her mother's grave at Arlington National Cemetery on her way to the 3-to-11 p.m. shift.

"I'm a GS-3," she says, and the pride in her voice is unmistakable.

And: "I don't want people to feel sorry for me. Of course, my mom's death makes me cry, but I deal with it. Every day."

She's sitting in the living room of a brick house in District Heights, in Prince George's County just over the District line, where she and her father, Fred, lived with her mother, Angelene, until Sept. 11. On a wall opposite the sofa hangs an oil painting of Angelene, a petite woman with a heart-shaped face who worked as a civilian accountant for the Army.

Before Sept. 11, Carter hoped to go to Frostburg State University in Western Maryland to study music. Instead, she enrolled in Prince George's Community College, where she has accumulated more than 50 credit hours.

It's just Freddye and her dad now, and their shih tzu, Mikey. Her father, an Army staff sergeant, retired in July 2002. She calls him on his cellphone several times a day to check up on him.

He stays on her case, too. About a year after her mother was killed in the Pentagon, Freddye started dating a young man she knew from Suitland High School. Her father tried to steer her away from him, saying he was only after vast sums of money that he, like so many people, assumed she had been given after Sept. 11. They dated on and off for three years, going out to dinner and to the movies. He never paid a dime, she says. She finally realized he was taking advantage of her and dropped him.

Why did she stay with him so long? Because she could talk to him, she said.

"My mom was my best friend. I was trying to fill a void. I didn't like talking to my dad because he would cry and I would cry."

Those were hard times. Sometimes the reminders came out of the blue, like when she was in a department store in May and a salesperson asked her, "What are you and your mother doing for Mother's Day?" She stopped watching TV news and scanning magazines in the grocery stores because it seemed she'd always see another story about Sept. 11.

She knows that if Angelene were around, she would be telling her daughter to put the past behind her and get on with her life. That is what she has done.

Since she was 12, Freddye has been taking voice lessons in opera. Last fall she applied to the music conservatory at Oberlin College. She was put on the waiting list and plans to reapply in August. If she isn't accepted this time, she may seek admission to the school of music at the University of Maryland. Or she may look for a higher-level job in the federal government.

Her bedroom is small, and cluttered with bluejeans, pink and purple tops, stuffed animals and CDs. Here, she is allowed to still be a girl, if a girl with purpose.

"When I get up in the morning, before I do anything else, I sit on the edge of that bed," she says, pointing to her single. "I ask myself, what have I got to accomplish today? Tomorrow is not a promise to anybody."

'Life Really Is Like This'

One evening in early May, Melissa Shulman, 22, and friends from college went to see the new movie "The Da Vinci Code" in a theater near Princeton, N.J. As the first preview started to roll -- nothing more than a shot of the Manhattan skyline on a sunny day -- she froze. She knew what was coming: the trailer for Oliver Stone's much-touted new film, "World Trade Center," a movie capturing the collapse of the buildings that took the life of her dad, Mark Shulman, a fire protection engineer.

Her first instinct was to leave. But that would have meant scrambling over a half-dozen people. The trailer is only two minutes, she told herself. You can do this. She stayed in her seat, but started to cry, and a girlfriend took her hand.

Some people handle tragedy better than others. Shulman, in the beginning, thought she would be one of the strong ones. In the fall of 2002, she entered Princeton with a keen interest in chemistry. "I pretty much got through freshman year. I loved it," she recalled. "Go for the best," her dad had always told her. She was doing that.

But something happened in the second semester of her sophomore year. In spite of the emotional support she got from her mom, she couldn't concentrate on her work and could barely make it to class. Was she simply experiencing sophomore slump? She didn't know. It's the curse of those who experience severe trauma early in their lives: They will always question failures of spirit that could, in fact, happen to anyone.

"There was no trigger," she said. "I guess everything about September 11 just kind of hit me."

She took a leave of absence and enrolled that next fall semester at Monmouth University, a state school in West Long Branch, N.J. She found a therapist. She gave Princeton one more try during her junior year, withdrew, then got an office job in New York with the Mayor's Volunteer Center. Her spirits improved, and last fall she re-enrolled at Monmouth, from which she will graduate next year with a major in politics.

As much as she wishes the world would let her be, she is able to admit that she also has needed its help. She bristles slightly at the suggestion of a contradiction.

"Of course, lots of kids lose a parent to disease, or terrible disaster," she says. "But those kids don't have to see something every day on the news that reminds them of the event that took their parent. I don't ask to turn on the news and see yet another broadcast about the 9/11 memorial being delayed, or the trial of Moussaoui replayed. . . . The constancy of it all is the hardest part. It makes it almost impossible to take that next step and move on."

Before Sept. 11, she says, she thought of herself as a "forever optimist." She clung to that attitude for a while, believing that the attacks were random, her father the victim of a circumstance that could never happen again. "Life isn't like this," she told herself.

Of late, she has come to realize that "wait a minute, life really is like this." Bad things happen, really bad things. She'll encounter other obstacles, she says, but "if I can get through this, they'll be a breeze."

Monmouth has been a good fit for her, she says. She's considering applying to AmeriCorps or Teach for America after graduation, then going to law school. Like Mike Rogers, she toys with the idea of entering politics, although she confesses -- and one can almost see a smile tugging at one corner of her mouth -- that "my dream job is to be a sportscaster for ESPN."

'I Never Asked for Any Recognition'

It will not occur to Patrick Dowdell, 23, to resist going to Iraq, just as it wouldn't have occurred to his father, Kevin, a firefighter in Queens, not to respond to a call for help at the World Trade Center.

"We're the good guys, " Patrick Dowdell says of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. "We're capable. Why not us?"

Dowdell, who graduated this month from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, appears not to have spent as much time as others pondering the reasons for, or results of, 9/11. He estimates that he's talked to 15 or 20 reporters over the past five years, and done so willingly.

But his situation is a bit different from that of some others. His father was a hero, not a victim. Kevin Dowdell ran into the Twin Towers as they collapsed; other fathers and mothers ran out, or never made it. Assuredly, some of those trapped tried to help others, but their kids will never know. Patrick Dowdell knows what his father did, or tried to do. He has been too busy to do much reflecting. He was attending Iona College when the twin towers were hit. He returned to classes three days later. Once the family realized that Kevin had perished, Patrick finished his morning classes, then drove to Ground Zero, the site of the explosion in Lower Manhattan, to assist the surviving firefighters in Rescue 4 unit, Queens, look for the remains of his father and other victims. "Sooner or later that site was going to be broom-swept. I didn't want to say I was too scared to do it. There was no reason for me not to."

"The buildings fell so fast and so hard that everything turned to dust," he recalls. He would stay on site until 2 or 3 a.m. searching through that dust. Someone found a halligan that his dad used to pry open doors and windows -- it bore Kevin's initials: KD, R4. Kevin's body was never recovered. The family finally held a funeral on April 20, 2002, and Patrick played the bagpipes. Then he went to West Point, where he had applied and been wait-listed the year before. At West Point, he said, "you're not just going to school, you're putting on a uniform. You're there for business and every summer you train."

"I grew up real fast at Ground Zero," he said, sitting in his dorm the day before graduation, while his mom and younger brother waited outside. "I found out I could handle the scope of what happened to my family and all the other families. It helped me see what I could do. Confident, I guess that's the word I want."

That confidence was undoubtedly already there, waiting to be called upon.

Dowdell tells this story: His father had a second job installing flooring, and from the time young Patrick could hold a hammer, he went with him as his assistant. "If you work like a man, you get paid like a man," he'd say. "He paid me well," Patrick said.

Soon, he will be off to Oklahoma for field artillery training. In his view, moving on is more important now than looking back. He has never asked for special treatment, he says, and when he's told that some Americans suspect he might have, his voice rises for the first time in the conversation.

"That's a pet peeve of mine," he says. "I never asked for any recognition. Most people don't even know my history unless they know me well, or know my family. My dad is not a credential, not something I brag about or put on my r?sum?. I didn't call you ."