Podcast host Rachel Uchitel is remembering her late fiancé, Andy O’Grady, on the 25th anniversary of his death in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
“Twenty-five years ago, I lost my fiancé, Andy O’Grady,” Uchitel, 51, wrote via Instagram alongside a memorial video on Friday, September 11. “He was a managing director at Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor of Tower 2. His was the second tower to be hit at 9:03 a.m., but the first to fall at 9:59 a.m.”
Uchitel, who worked as a producer at Bloomberg at the time, recalled covering the news as two hijacked commercial planes were flown into the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York City. (A third plane was flown into the Pentagon, while a fourth plane crashed into a rural field in Pennsylvania while on its way to Washington due to a passenger revolt.)
“I remember speaking to him, and what he was saying on the phone,” Uchitel recalled of their final exchange. “I remember watching his building fall and not being able to catch my breath. I remember the whole newsroom floor got silent. They had all just watched me watch Andy die. And it was all too unreal.”
The media personality remembered people holding out “hope” that their loved ones would be found at hospitals in the days after the attacks.
“Even though, when you took one look at the sheer magnitude, you could see there was just no hope,” she wrote. “I remember it was hard to eat or sleep, or sit and wait. I wanted to go to Ground Zero [the site of the former World Trade Center] and pick up the rubble myself until I found him.”
Uchitel continued, “The despair of not knowing was beyond words. The fear I had about what he went through and those 56 minutes has consumed me at times during my life. This event changed who I was completely. I had searched for the man who was ‘my one’ all my life, and I had finally found him, and we were planning our wedding, and then this.”
Paying tribute to O’Grady, whom she met in 1998 and got engaged to in August 2001, Uchitel wrote, “I remember his smile like no other. I remember his voice. I remember he was the biggest personality in the room, and I couldn’t believe this life could be taken at 32.”
Uchitel then recalled hearing that O’Grady might have been among the survivors being treated at Bellevue Hospital in NYC.
“I ran over there. And this is where this video was taken of me searching for him … I can see the pain that I have never been able to get rid of still in this video, because of how wonderful this man was,” she wrote. “I remember the amazing outpouring of letters and calls from complete strangers after this photo ran in papers across the world.” (In the wake of the tragedy, global news outlets ran a photo of a tear-stricken Uchitel holding a missing person’s flyer with O’Grady’s photo.)
Uchitel concluded, “Everyone wanted to know about Andy, and for that, I am so thankful because I was so cared about when I couldn’t even bare to wake up every day. It was the honor of my life to have been loved by James Andrew O’Grady. I am thankful that because of the photo that ran on the cover of almost every paper in the world of me searching for him, more people know his name.
