Years Later 10


A steering wheel recovered from the World Trade Center site.


[ THAT TERRIBLE DAY ]


The ‘Dust Lady’ Finally Gets Her Life Back


By David Wright S


HE WILL FOREVER BE KNOWN AS “the dust lady” — the terrifi ed young woman covered from head to toe in ash and dust billow- ing from the crashing twin towers, whose iconic picture captured the horror of 9/11.


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Marcy Borders escaped death that day, but it has taken a decade for her to start liv- ing again. At 38, she is fi nally emerging from a hell of addiction to alcohol and drugs that she says began as she relived the nightmare of America’s worst attack. The children she lost to her addictions have fi nally been returned to her. And the face of Osama bin Laden is haunting her no more.


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nd den


Borders was working at Bank of America in the north tower, when the fi rst plane hit.


t Bank of wer when


She fought her


way down a stairwell to the ground just before the building collapsed in a heap of rubble.


Huge clouds of powdered con- crete blanketed Borders, turning her into an eerie, ghost-like fi gure. Forgotten after the iconic picture was published around the world, she remained traumatized by what she had seen.


At home in Bayonne, N.J., “my life became a garbage can,” she told Britain’s Mail Online. “I was taking pills, crack . . . anything I could get


my hands on. Alcohol would make me numb, and it helped me forget being trapped in the tower and look- ing at that photograph.”


She became obsessed with fears


that Osama bin Laden was going to attack again.


Finally, just last April, Borders cried out for help. She was admitted to the Sunrise Foundation, a New Jersey drug rehab center. She was there on May 1 when word came of the death of bin Laden. “Now I have peace of mind,” she says.


Marcy completed her 28-day


rehab program on May 20 — and welcomed home her daughter Noelle, 18, and 3-year-old son Zay- den, who’d been cared for by con- cerned relatives.


When visitors come by, Borders sometimes pulls out the plastic bag she hides behind her sofa. It holds the clothes she was wearing in the famous photograph.


“You can still smell the fi re on


them,” she says. “It makes me feel sick — but I just have to keep them.”


SEPTEMBER 2011 / NEWSMAX / 9|11: A DECADE LATER 57


REBORN Marcy Borders on 9/11, and with son, Zay-den (inset).


d death en a


WHEEL/NYS MUSEUM/GETTY IMAGES / BORDERS/STAN HONDA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES / INSET/GLEN MCCURTAYNE/COLEMAN-RAYNER


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