Devastating true story behind 'dust lady' who looked frozen in time after 9/11
The woman who became one of the unwitting faces of the horror of 9/11 wound up meeting the tragic end she always feared.
Countless startling images have come to define the September 11 attacks of 2001, when two aeroplanes were flown into the World Trade Centre in the heart of New York City, killing thousands.
Be it live news footage of a second plane flying into the South Tower, and the dreaded realisation that the first crash was no accident that accompanied it, balls of fire and plumes of smoke floating into the crisp blue Autumn sky, or perhaps most sobering of all, the Falling Man, they all lay bare the senseless loss of 2,606 lives in the Twin Towers.
The 'Dust Lady', however, came to epitomise what it meant to survive the Al-Qaeda terrorist attack, with all the trauma and health issues that followed.
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A stranger had pulled a woman covered head to toe in dust from the collapsed South Tower into the lobby of a close-by office building, where photographer Stan Honda took her picture, leading to a famous image of her 'frozen in time' that soon spread across the world and became an enduring symbol of the tragedy.
Her name was Marcy Borders.
What happened to Marcy Borders, the 'Dust Lady'
Though Borders survived, she would go onto be haunted by the events of 9/11.
She suffered severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which led to substance abuse.
Borders was plagued by a recurring nightmare in which Osama bin Laden, the orchestrator of the attack, bombarded her home from the sky, the Guardian reported.
She only ever returned to Manhattan once more, despite living just a few short miles away in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Borders only went back when her eldest daughter, Noelle, graduated from middle school and they celebrated by hiring a limo.
They drove into the city, but she refused to leave the limo.
Borders also lived in fear that the dust and debris that embalmed her on 9/11, being breathed into her lungs as well as caking her skin, was poisonous and would damage her long-term health.
“For years, her main concern was that she was going to get sick, that 9/11 would catch up with her,” Mechelle Taylor, her best friend, said.
Borders kept her fractured mental state hidden from her family and friends for years, but told the New York Post in 2011: “It was like my soul was knocked down with those towers. My life spiralled out of control. I didn’t do a day’s work in nearly 10 years, and I was a complete mess.
"Every time I saw an aircraft, I panicked. If I saw a man on a building, I was convinced he was going to shoot me.”
In 2011, she checked herself into rehab for drink and drug addiction. A week later, Bin Laden had been killed, finally giving her 'peace of mind.'
She left rehab in May and recovered from her demons but, in a tragic twist of fate, her biggest fear came to pass three years later.
Borders was diagnosed with stomach cancer in August 2014, with her and her nearest and dearest believing the dust - which contained asbestos, glass fibres and silica - was to blame.
“I’m saying to myself ‘Did this thing ignite cancer cells in me?’ I definitely believe it because I haven’t had any illnesses. I don’t have high blood pressure … high cholesterol, diabetes," she told the Jersey Journal.
“How do you go from being healthy to waking up the next day with cancer?”
After a year-long battle which left her in crippling debt, Borders died aged 42 in 2015.
How 'Dust Lady' survived 9/11
Borders was 28 on the day of the attack and was working on the 81st floor of the North Tower when the first plane hit 12 floors above where she was working, on floors 93 to 99.
“My supervisor thought a small jet plane might have nipped us," she told the Jersey Journal 13 years later. "We had no idea what was going on. I began to panic.
"They tried to calm me down, told me to relax, take deep breaths, but the way the building was shaking, I couldn’t sit there.
"You felt the building shaking, you heard the explosion, you saw chairs coming out the windows, office supplies, what I know now were people.”
The clerical assistant for Bank of America fled down the stairs, passing people injured with burns, lacerations and impalements, and made it out to the street after about an hour.
Surviving the catastrophe, she was then engulfed by concrete dust and ash as the South Tower collapsed.
“I took chase from this cloud of dust and smoke that was following me,” Borders told the Journal. “Once it caught me it threw me on my hands and knees.
"Every time I inhaled my mouth filled up with it, I was choking. I was saying to myself out loud, I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want to die.”
She was dragged to shelter by a man, and Honda, who was working for AFP, snapped his infamous image. He would go onto track her down soon after and was relieved to find she survived.
He later said on the picture: "This woman came in completely covered in dust. It was a strange sight. "She paused for a second, and I took one photo. It was just that one frame – I really only had time for that shot, then somebody took her upstairs and she was gone.”
The 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, which killed 2,977 people in total, is on Friday.
Topics: US News
Daniel Murphy