‘That same feeling of dread’: Las Vegas man recalls 9/11 at World Trade Center

Las Vegas resident John Glock remembers his last time at the World Trade Center.

It was Sept. 11, 2001. One of the trains on his commute from Long Island to Manhattan was 40 minutes late that day. Glock’s bosses were out of town for a conference, and he was irritated at the thought of his co-workers thinking he was taking advantage of their superiors’ absence.

Glock said he arrived at the World Trade Center at about 8:40 a.m., moments before American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the north tower. Because he entered the complex from the subway, Glock was unaware of what was going on.

As Glock tried to make his way to his 53rd floor office in the south tower, he and others were stopped on the ground floor by a group of New York Police Department officers who weren’t letting anyone take the elevators up, Glock recalled during a recent interview.

Then, a flood of people came running his way.

“I’ll never forget the looks on their faces,” Glock said. “I was waiting to talk to a cop … and then when I looked down this long hallway there was just a large crowd of people, wall-to-wall, coming through with a look of terror on their faces.”

Glock initially thought people were running from a gunman. Instinct told Glock to run away with them.

“Mama didn’t raise no fool,” Glock said. “I just turned around and got the heck out of there.”

To this day, Glock says 9/11 remains one of the worst days of his life. The attacks were part of a coordinated al-Qaida plot involving four hijacked airliners that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Glock remembers seeing people jump from the towers, walking for miles through an eerily silent Manhattan and being unable to contact his wife, Sharon McCoy-Glock, for several hours after the towers collapsed because cell service had failed.

Having moved to Southern Nevada in 2006, Glock still avoids watching documentaries or news specials about the terrorist attacks, and he has no desire to return to ground zero.

“I just don’t want to be reminded of it,” Glock said. “It’s 25 years later, and I still have that same feeling of dread.”

While a number of memorials and community gatherings are scheduled to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Glock and his wife say they are planning to treat it like any other day.

And that’s by design.

“The rest of the world says we can never forget — we kind of have to forget,” McCoy-Glock said. “We can’t keep reliving it.”

‘I gotta go’

Glock said two things motivated him to get home that day.

The first was returning to see McCoy-Glock and their three children, who were 13, 14 and 16 at the time.

“I just want to hug my wife and kids, lay down in my own bed because I was exhausted at that time,” he said.

The other was his father, also named John Glock, who died Sept. 11, 1989.

“I kept thinking, ‘I’m not dying on the same day my dad died,’ whatever it takes,” Glock said. “That was like a driving force to get me home.”

After leaving the World Trade Center, the rumor from people nearby was that a small plane or helicopter had crashed into the north tower, Glock said. As Glock walked farther away and saw the impact for himself, he realized a commercial airliner had struck the building.

Papers fell from several stories above. So did bodies.

“I remember a guy with red hair wearing a suit fall from the top to the ground,” Glock said. “A few seconds later, more just started. I’m like, ‘I can’t watch this. I gotta go.’ ”

Glock tried to call up to his office to tell his co-workers to leave the building at all costs.

Then United Airlines Flight 175 hit the south tower. Glock said it took him almost two weeks to fully comprehend what he had witnessed.

“I was standing on the street, and I heard the loudest roar I’ve ever heard in my life, and then a bang,” Glock said. “It was the (jet) engine. It was so low that it was just the roar.”

Almost immediately after, a large piece of metal — about the size of a school bus, Glock estimated — fell from the sky and landed roughly 100 feet away.

Glock ran in the opposite direction and never looked back.

“I just turned and ran down the middle of the street until I couldn’t run anymore,” Glock said.

Getting home

Glock said he eventually got tired and stopped to rest at Sixth Avenue and Grand Street, more than a mile on foot from the World Trade Center. After several attempts to call his wife on his cellphone, he reached her hours later and let her know he was safe.

“I just blurted it out, ‘I’m on Sixth Avenue and Grand Street,’ ” Glock said. “She had no idea where that was, I had no idea where that was.”

Glock said after the towers collapsed, Manhattan, which was usually loud with the hum of cars and people, was dead silent, save for emergency sirens distant in the background. He tried taking the train back to Long Island but each station he walked past was closed. Corner store owners handed out bottles of water and slippers to women in high heels.

“I thought, man, there’s humanity coming together,” Glock said. “Didn’t charge anybody anything. Didn’t ask anything.”

Eventually, Glock said he crossed a bridge into Queens and found his way to another transit station. He found a train that would take him to Long Island’s North Shore, about 40 minutes away from his house.

That was good enough, he said.

“I got through to my wife and I told her I’m on a train heading home,” Glock said. “My car was still at the train station.”

20 years in Las Vegas

Within days, Glock said he was back to work. Many of Glock’s co-workers didn’t survive, including many from his company’s offices in the north tower, where he had been assigned just months before the attack, he said.

“I lost a lot of close friends up there,” Glock said.

By 2006, Glock and his family were looking for a change of scenery. Commuting through Manhattan, particularly underground, made him feel vulnerable.

Two of his children chose to attend UNLV, and the family moved to a condo in Spring Valley shortly afterward. Glock got a job at a local company, where he worked until retiring five years ago. They moved to a home in Summerlin.

In Las Vegas, the topic of where he was on Sept. 11, 2001, hardly ever comes up.

He previously spoke with the Las Vegas Review-Journal about his experience in 2011.

Inside their Summerlin home, Glock only keeps two physical reminders of the World Trade Center. One is a replica subway sign for the World Trade Center. The other is an imperfect concrete cylinder, about 3 inches long and 1 inch in diameter, that a construction worker drilled from the floor of Glock’s office while installing fiber optic cables in the 1990s.

When the worker gave the concrete pellet to Glock, he never expected it to become a piece of history, Glock said.

“I was the only one in the office when the guy was drilling,” Glock said. “He asked me if I wanted a piece that came out of the floor. So I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Why not? Might be a neat souvenir,’ and lo and behold, 25 years later, that’s a piece of 2 World Trade Center, 53rd floor.”

Glock’s days now often include trips to hardware stores and unwinding at night with the TV.

So far, that is the only thing on Glock’s agenda this Sept. 11, which is how he prefers it.

“In the beginning, it was a little tougher on 9/11, but now it’s basically just like any other day,” Glock said. “My daughter will call me at like 9 o’clock in the morning, and then the rest of my day, I just forget about it and just go about my business.”

Contact Casey Harrison at charrison@reviewjournal.com. Follow @Casey_Harrison1 on X.