Now in her early 30s, Mills, a few years after 9/11, flew out to San Francisco to meet her father’s widow and her half-sisters for the first time. Mills got in touch with Burnett’s widow, Deena, who, with Burnett, had three other daughters - Mills’ half-sisters. 11 were right.īurnett and Mills’ birth mother dated in college and decided to give Mills up for adoption when she was born. “I suddenly knew that my dad was the Flight 93 hero from the news.” “I hung up and started sobbing,” Mills said to Cosmopolitan. Less than three years later, Mills requested a copy of her birth certificate, and when her adoptive mother opened it, she admitted to Mills that it was someone “kind of” famous. But throughout the ordeal and the news coverage that followed, Mills said she noticed how Burnett was one of the men who helped stop the hijackers on United Flight 93 and that his story was “everywhere.” Though Mills was adopted (and at the time, she did not know who her biological parents were), when she got home from school, she said she blurted out to her adoptive mother that “one of my birth parents had died,” according to a Cosmopolitan article. The attacks happened when Mills was a junior in high school. Mariah Mills (the biological daughter of Tom Burnett) The four men who prevented the attack posthumously received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award in 2002.Īll but Bingham had children or were expecting children before that fateful day, and those kids, 17 years later, are carrying on the legacies left by fathers they either barely knew or never met. The plan was for the hijackers to crash the plane into the Capitol, the Pentagon or the White House, according to published reports. Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Jeremy Glick and Todd Beamer rightfully are forever immortalized for their role in battling a group of hijackers on United Flight 93 - a flight that ultimately took the lives of everybody on board the plane.Īfter Burnett, Bingham, Glick and Beamer, all former athletes, stormed the cockpit and battled four hijackers, the plane ended up crashing into a Pennsylvania field instead of a Washington, D.C. So I’m just going to do a day with my kids.Thanks to the action of some very brave men, the world won’t ever know the additional destruction it could have seen on Sept. Todd would want me to be there with them. I thought, ‘That’s where I should be,’ just doing the normal things that they need me for, the normal things that I’d be doing had this not all happened. And I looked at the calendar a few days ago and I realized it was my boys’ second day of pre-school. And nothing quite seemed like the right thing to do. Lisa Beamer: I’ve actually struggled with that a lot - different opportunities to go to Shanksville or go to a memorial somewhere. Stone Phillips: How do you plan to mark the one-year anniversary? that is an automatic thing or to say, ‘You know what? David did swim across the pool. Or did you hear that funny thing that Drew just said?’ And I have choices every day when something like that happens to just fall apart and just be incredibly sad that the grief. Lisa Beamer: Not being able to call Todd and say, ‘Hey, guess what? David swam across the pool today. Stone Phillips: What’s the hardest part of each day now for you? Stone Phillips: If you could have spoken to Todd that day on the plane, what would you have said to him? I wouldn’t know for sure what had happened with Todd. Lisa Beamer: You know, if it wasn’t for Lisa Jefferson, I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now. And over the past year, they have stayed in touch. Four days after 9/11, the two Lisas spoke. It was Lisa Jefferson who heard him utter, “Let’s roll” to a fellow passenger as the counterattack began. In his 15 minute conversation with Lisa Jefferson, Todd described the desperate situation on board - and asked her to tell his family how much he loved them. And he thought Lisa would be better able to help him do that than I would, and he was right. He was just trying to do what he could to get out of there. And he was just trying to do the right thing. But he said he didn’t want to upset me unnecessarily. And as I talked to Lisa later on, she said he went back and forth quite a few times whether he wanted her to connect him to me or not, because she could have done that. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t call me. And I’ve always been thankful that I didn’t speak to him. Lisa Beamer: Yes, he spoke to Lisa that day.
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