Flight 93 at 25: Sometimes You Are the First Responder
Twenty-five years apart, a cabin over Pennsylvania and a drive-through in Idaho asked the same question: who acts when help is not there yet, and who is willing to put their life on the line so that others may live?
Before anything else, this is a memorial. Forty passengers and crew on United Airlines Flight 93 died in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001. They did not clock in as first responders. They were flying to San Francisco and included account managers, flight attendants, a first officer who had flown in Desert Storm, parents, a man who recited the Lord’s Prayer on an intercom and then said four words the country still knows.
They became the response
That is the part worth sitting with on the 25th anniversary. The 9/11 Commission put the outcome in one sentence: The hijackers were “defeated by the alerted, unarmed passengers of United 93.” The hijacker pilot’s objective, the Commission found, were the very “symbols of the American Republic, the Capitol or the White House.” Beyond that Both houses of Congress were in session. Thousands of people were at work on Capitol Hill. But the plane never got there because people already onboard decided that waiting was no longer a plan.
A generation later, the same choice showed up in an In-N-Out drive-through lane in Twin Falls, Idaho. Different tools. Same split second decision making. The official response was still minutes away. The people on scene had to decide whether someone else would handle it.
Sometimes you are your own first responder. Sometimes that means being selfless enough to put your life on the line so that others may live. Flight 93 and Twin Falls are the same story, twenty-five years apart.
What happened on Flight 93
United 93 left Newark at 8:42 a.m., more than forty minutes late because of runway traffic. That delay is why the passengers had something the first three flights did not: information. By the time four hijackers stormed the cockpit over Ohio around 9:28 a.m., the World Trade Center was burning and the Pentagon had been hit. They learned this was not a landing-in-Cuba hijacking. The plane itself was the weapon.
They voted. Then they moved.
Todd Beamer, 32, an Oracle account manager from Cranbury, New Jersey, spent roughly fifteen minutes on the line with GTE operator Lisa Jefferson. He told her the pilots were on the floor, injured or dead. One hijacker in the cabin claimed to have a bomb. Beamer said they were going to “jump” him. He asked Jefferson to pray the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. He asked her to call his family if he did not make it. Jefferson then heard him turn to the others:
“Are you ready? Okay. Let’s roll.”
The cockpit voice recorder picked up the revolt at 9:57 a.m. with yelling, crashing dishes and glass, passengers trying the door. The hijacker pilot rolled the 757 left and right to throw them off their feet. At 10:03 a.m. the aircraft hit the ground in Stonycreek Township at more than 500 miles an hour. Everyone aboard was killed. Washington was not.
The Wall of Names at Flight 93 National Memorial records each of the forty. One white marble panel per person. Todd Beamer’s name is cut into the stone the same way as every other passenger and crew member who rushed the cockpit that morning.
They knew they were probably not walking off that airplane. They went forward anyway. That is the definition of putting your life on the line so that other people, most of whom they would never meet, sitting in offices on Capitol Hill, might live.
The phone calls that changed the plan
Tom Burnett, 38, a California businessman from Bloomington, Minnesota, called his wife, Deena, four times. On the first call he told her the plane had been hijacked and a passenger had been knifed. On the second he said the stabbed man was dead and the hijackers were in the cockpit. Deena, watching the towers burn on television, told him commercial airliners were being flown into buildings. Burnett’s answer, as she remembered it: “It’s a suicide mission.”
On a later call she told him a plane had hit the Pentagon. He repeated it to the people around him. Then: “A group of us are getting ready to do something.” And the line that still reads like a first-responder’s brief, issued from a coach seat:
“We can’t wait for the authorities. I don’t know what they could do anyway. It’s up to us. I think we can do it.”
Jeremy Glick, 31, a national collegiate judo champion and rugby captain out of the University of Rochester, stayed on the phone with his wife, Lyz, while the plan came together. Mark Bingham, 31, a 6-foot-5 publicist and former Cal rugby player, was in the group that decided to rush the front. Lou Nacke was a weightlifter. William Cashman had helped build the World Trade Center and trained in martial arts. Richard Guadagno, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manager, had been trained in close-quarters fighting. Donald Greene held a private pilot’s license. Flight attendant Sandy Bradshaw told her husband she was filling pitchers with boiling water; her last words were that everyone was running to first class and she had to go. CeeCee Lyles, a flight attendant and former police officer, left a voicemail for her husband telling him she loved him and to take care of the children.
They were not a tactical team. They were a cabin full of people who updated their threat picture, voted, and acted with what they had: bodies, boiling water, a food cart, a butter knife, athletic training, and the will to do something.
Twin Falls: the same choice, with different tools
On August 1, 2026, a little after 2:30 p.m., 24-year-old Chad Williams opened fire with an AR-style rifle outside the In-N-Out on Blue Lakes Boulevard North in Twin Falls, Idaho. He shot into the drive-through and at people in the lot. Three people were killed: Ashley Garibay, 23, an In-N-Out employee; Dale Schultz, 66, of Salt Lake City; and Christopher Claunch, 59, of Hagerman. Seven others were wounded. Williams later died of a self-inflicted gunshot.
Police say it would have been worse if the only people on scene had waited for for the police response.
Jordan Salinas, 35, a healthcare worker from Kimberly, was arriving with his girlfriend. He had trained seriously since the 2021 Boise Towne Square mall shooting. He was carrying an FN Five-seveN. He heard the shots and moved toward them. An off-duty Idaho State Police trooper also returned fire. A former Twin Falls officer, Austin James, came face-to-face with Williams and was critically wounded; he did not draw, he later explained through family, because he did not want responding officers to mistake him for the shooter.
Return fire forced Williams off the drive-through, behind the restaurant sign, and toward a visitor-center lot. Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson called the armed citizens “true heroes” whose actions “diverted the shooter, and no doubt saved many lives.” Police Chief Matthew Hicks said those shots “helped drive the suspect away from the scene, preventing further casualties.” By the time the first deputies arrived, the people who had already engaged had lowered their weapons.
Salinas did not go to lunch to be a first responder. Neither did the off-duty trooper. Neither did James, who took a critical wound trying to close distance with a rifleman in a crowded lot. They were there, the attack started, and they accepted the cost so other people in that drive-through could run.
Split second decisions do not care about job titles
First responders ran toward the towers and the Pentagon that morning. Three hundred forty-three FDNY members died doing it. Officers and federal agents died in the stairwells and on Flight 93’s intended flight path. Off-duty cops and armed civilians in Twin Falls worked the same problem from the other side of the clock.
Professionals are not slow because they do not care. They are slow because they are somewhere else. A 911 call, a radio, a drive, a scene size-up, all precious minutes but are a lifetime for the people already under fire. Hijack doctrine before 9/11 told crews and passengers to comply and wait. That script died in the time it took three other airplanes to hit their targets. The people on Flight 93 updated faster than the institutions around them.
- Someone has to be there. Presence is the first skill. On a plane, that meant the people in coach. In a parking lot, that meant the customer who carried that day and the off-duty trooper who did not leave his gun in the safe.
- Information decides whether you act. Flight 93 passengers fought because they learned the old hijack script was obsolete. Situational awareness is the modern version of those airphone calls.
- Selflessness is the hard part. Training and a lawful firearm can make intervention possible. They do not make it easy. Beamer asked an operator to tell his family he loved them. Salinas ran toward rifle fire with his girlfriend in the car. James closed distance and paid for it. “That others may live” is not a caption. It is a bill someone agrees to pay.
Twenty-five years later
On Friday, families will read the names again at Ground Zero. In Pennsylvania, the Tower of Voices, forty wind chimes, one for each person on Flight 93, will sound over the field where the fourth plane went down.
The Commission said the nation owes those forty an eternal debt because the plane never reached its target. That debt is not paid only by a ceremony. It is paid by refusing the fantasy that the only people who ever have to act are the ones with a radio and a duty belt.
Flight 93 proves ordinary people can become the first response when no one else can get there. Twin Falls proves the same thing in a parking lot, with a lawful firearm and an off-duty badge in the mix, and with three families who still buried someone they loved.
Todd Beamer did not say “let’s roll” because he wanted to be remembered. He said it because other people were going to die if the cabin waited. Twenty-five years on, that is still the lesson. Sometimes you are the first responder. Sometimes that means putting your life on the line so that others may live. Better to be ready for the moment. Better still to be the kind of person who will accept it.
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