Panic set in as it became harder to breathe, so he turned around and started back down. He began to go up the stairs to find clear air, but the doors on each landing were locked, a safety mechanism to keep smoke from filling the whole building in the event of a fire. DiFrancesco and his colleague Brian Clark, an executive vice president at Euro Brokers, went to rescue the man, but DiFrancesco became overwhelmed by smoke and had to turn back. On the way, he ran into a group of people trying to escape they told him to go up the stairs instead, because the flames were too bad below.Īs they debated which way to go, they heard someone calling for help. Moments after he left his office to evacuate, the second plane smashed into the South Tower, hitting the building between the 77th and 85th floors.ĭiFrancesco was thrown against a wall by the force of the impact, and then he rushed to the nearest stairwell and headed down. The first plane had just struck the North Tower, and from his office on the 84th floor of the South Tower, DiFrancesco, a 37-year-old Canadian money-market broker for Euro Brokers, could see smoke billowing from the building. Based on those accounts, this is what happened to DiFrancesco: In the past 10 years, he has given only a few interviews, including one for John Geiger's book The Third Man Factor and another for an article in the Ottawa Citizen. He says it forces him to relive the nightmare. DiFrancesco prefers not to go into detail about his horrifying experience on 9/11.
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