Kristopher Woolley was walking toward the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the south tower collapsed before his eyes. Had it held a few minutes longer, he believes he would have been directly beneath it.
The then-27-year-old Latter-day Saint and Goldman Sachs analyst had watched from the 50th floor of his office building as the second plane struck the south tower almost at eye level. After evacuating to Battery Park, Woolley and a colleague started moving toward the towers to help. Then came the roar.
“It went from a beautiful blue-sky day to just like a volcanic eruption, and we were in the middle of the ash,” he said in an oral history interview with the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Oct. 25, 2022.