Vito DeLeo survived the 1993 truck bombing at the World Trade Center but died on September 11, 2001.
When Vito DeLeo's wife called me on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was traveling on a city bus on Northern Boulevard in Queens, trying to get to Manhattan. It was the biggest news emergency of our lives.
"Have you heard from Vito?" Sally DeLeo asked frantically, not long after the first of New York City's Twin Towers had collapsed.
The North Tower would be down by 10:28 a.m., a casualty of jets hijacked by terrorists that slammed into the downtown landmarks seventeen minutes apart.
"I didn't hear from him, Sally," I told Vito's wife, who was calling from their Staten Island home. I promised to keep in touch.
My mind raced back to the first time I had met Vito DeLeo, then 32, after a truck bomb exploded in the parking garage at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993....eight years before.
I was working for CBS2 News in New York at the time; the staff photographer and I had just left an interview on Fulton Street downtown with the president of the NYPD police union. We instantly heard an incessant blare of sirens nearby, so we called the newsroom. The assignment desk researcher, Wanda Prisinzano, told us something had happened at the World Trade Center, so we should go to the medical center just two blocks away.
As we arrived at Beekman Downtown Hospital on William Street, we saw a parade of ambulances arriving, with people on stretchers and dazed office workers on foot heading into the emergency room. To this day, I have never seen that many ambulances at a single location.
The photographer threw up the microwave mast on our news truck and we started doing "live" reporting for Channel 2. WCBS was one of the few stations that was able to stay on the air that afternoon, because the explosion at 12:18 p.m. had knocked out power for some of the transmitters serving other channels in town.
We grabbed as many interviews as we could, on the fly, but the one that proved most memorable was conducted with Vito DeLeo, an air conditioning engineer who had crawled out of the rubble from under his desk, which was located about 150 feet away from the truck bomb on the B2 level of the parking garage.
Vito and his curly hair were covered in soot.
He was wearing a grey work uniform and said his ear was bothering him.
But his vivid description of the bombing prompted legendary WCBS news anchor, Jim Jensen, to keep Vito on the air as long as possible.
The force of the 1993 blast had created a crater six stories high in the underground garage. It killed Monica Rodriguez Smith, a Port Authority employee who was pregnant with her unborn son, colleagues Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen A. Knapp, and William Macko, purchasing agent Wilfredo Mercado of Windows on the World, and John DiGiovanni, who was parking his car before the bomb went off.
Port Authority employee Monica Rodriguez Smith and her unborn son were killed in the 1993 truck bombing.
We stayed on the air until the 11 p.m. news was over that Friday night, and WCBS asked me to work overnight at the World Trade Center site, an active crime scene.
At one point, police officers familiar with my law enforcement reporting offered me a jumpsuit, so I could go inside to see the massive hole inside Tower One and the charred cars that were destroyed in the bombing.
FBI investigators and police ultimately found the VIN number for the Ryder rental truck that exploded and traced it to a site across the Hudson River in New Jersey, where a Middle Eastern-born terrorist, Mohammed Salameh, had rented it. Salameh made the error of going back for his $400 deposit on March 4th, 1993; an FBI SWAT team arrested him.
Vito DeLeo, a father of two, was at the federal courthouse downtown in 1994, when four terrorists were convicted in the 1993 bombing. Using a hearing aid, he had already returned to work at the Twin Towers, a place he loved with every fiber of his being.
And he helped me with my journalism work when I took a job in September 1993 at PIX11 News, providing me with compelling footage of the FBI at work inside the demolished parking garage. He remained joyful about life and passionate about hockey, teaching his son, V.J. and daughter, Kassiday, how to skate at young ages.
My husband and I even attended a New York Rangers game with Vito and his family.
The first bombing at the World Trade Center made me laser-focused on every thwarted or successful terror plot the NYPD and federal agents came up against. They arrested a blind Egyptian sheik and co-conspirators in the summer of 1993, charging them with plotting to blow up the United Nations, tunnels, and other New York landmarks. The March 1994 shooting of a student van on the Brooklyn Bridge left Orthodox Jewish teen Ari Halberstam dead. It took years to have it designated a terror attack.
When the mastermind of the Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was arrested in 1995, FBI agents flew him over the then-standing Twin Towers and noted he had failed in his mission. Another plot against the transit system in Sunset Park was foiled in 1997. Suicide terrorists exploded a small boat next to the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen as it was refueling in October 2000, killing 17 American sailors.
So here we were on September 11, 2001, trying to put the most devastating terror attack on U.S. soil into context.
By 9:30 p.m. that night, we were getting word that 343 fire department personnel were dead, including the Chief of Department Peter Ganci. The NYPD and Port Authority Police Department also suffered heartbreaking losses. I checked in with Sally DeLeo again, and she still had no word about Vito.
Days later, as we stayed hours on the air and I went into work the first weekend for my anchor shifts on Saturday and Sunday, Sally DeLeo reached out to me and asked me to do a story about Vito, hoping someone might have word on his whereabouts. She was holding onto hope that he might have survived and was injured in a hospital. Sally provided home video of Vito playing hockey with his children.
But it wasn't long before some of Vito's remains were found and a funeral was held at St. Charles Roman Catholic Church on Staten Island. The place was packed. And on this 9/11 anniversary, 23 years later, I found myself looking for memories of Vito.
Some of the nicest tributes can be found on the Legacy.com page online, where people left messages over the course of two decades.
Frank Fuchs, Jr. remembered Vito working as a youth hockey referee in Secaucus, New Jersey, in a post written on 7/27/2008:
"He would always come to the rink in a positive mood, talking about how he helped move HVAC units or refrigerators up one of the towers," Fuchs said.
On 9/11's tenth anniversary in 2011, Diane Reis wrote from the west coast,
"Just donated blood in his memory in Tulare, California. I didn't know him, but I'll never forget."
Anthony Barra of Staten Island wrote that same September, "Still miss 'The Ref.'"
And there was this post from September 2021 from Cindy Roe of Galesburg, Michigan:
"Remembering Vito on the 20th anniversary of 9/11."
We are now marking 23 years since Vito DeLeo didn't survive the second attack on his beloved Twin Towers. The towers didn't survive, either. But Vito's joyous spirit remains with me, along with his heroic efforts to save others. Vito was reportedly two blocks away from the World Trade Center when one of the jets hit his tower. He was last seen heading toward the evacuation efforts.
One of the Twin Tower ‘footprints’ containing the names of those killed in 1993 and 2001.
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