Confused, Anthony went to the window and saw paper, metal and fire coming from the upper floors. Along with hundreds of other employees in the building, he began to calmly descend the stairs. On the 35th floor, he heard from other employees that the building had been hit by an airplane. He imagined it had been one of the helicopters that kept circling around there.

He continued going down. Ten floors below, he heard a lower rumble and the building shook a little. A few flights of stairs later, he had to pull over to give way to desperate firefighters and police officers.

That's when Tony really worried. When he arrived on the street, a scene from a movie: everything around him was on fire, huge pieces of concrete and what he imagined to be the remains of an airplane were scattered across the path. While trying to contact his wife on his cell phone, he started looking for his office colleagues.

As he approached the building again, he heard a louder noise. He looked up and saw that the top of the building was tilting. It would fall. Tony ran in the opposite direction and was swallowed by a dense cloud of dust. With his face covered by his shirt, without seeing anything, he groped and moved away to other place.

When he regained his visibility and saw what was happening around him, Tony realized that the 28 minutes spent leaving the building made him the only Brazilian survivor of the biggest terrorist attack in history, on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center, in New York.