Father Recalls Losing His Son In WTC Attacks

Father recalls losing his son in WTC attacks

http://www.timesherald.com/site/news...id=33380&rfi=6

(Gold9472: The same reporter who interviewed me.)

By: KEITH PHUCAS, Times Herald Staff
09/11/2006

UPPER DUBLIN - It took recovery workers just two days to discover 26-year-old Bobby McIlvaine's burned remains amid tall mounds of pulverized debris at the World Trade Center.

Nearly five years later, the victim's father, Robert McIlvaine, recalled that dental records were necessary to positively identify his son on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2001.

"It was brutal," McIlvaine said.

Bobby McIlvaine, a Princeton University graduate, was hired to work in Merrill Lynch & Co.'s offices across from the World Trade Center just weeks before the horrific attacks on Tuesday, Sept. 11.

That day, after getting news of the attacks, Robert and Helen McIlvaine waited for their son to call.

"I wasn't overly concerned, because Bobby didn't work in the (World Trade Center) towers," he said.

But Bobby didn't call the couple's Oreland home.

On Wednesday, McIlvaine and his younger son, Jeffrey, took a train to Manhattan and began a frantic search for information about Bobby's whereabouts.

"(Jeffrey) was optimistic we'd find Bobby (alive)," McIlvaine said.

In New York, the McIlvaines checked for the missing man's name on a list posted at a center located at 26th Avenue and Liberty Street. They found nothing.

"There were thousands of people all over the place," he said. "It was very chaotic."

Bobby's friends Ken Senior and Andre Parris also aided in the search.

Eventually, the family learned that Bobby, an assistant vice president of media relations, had attended a banking conference on the 106th floor of the North Tower.

At Merrill Lynch, he specialized in investment banking and was routinely in contact with financial reporters covering Wall Street.

The 61-year-old father said Bobby, who majored in English and aspired to be a writer, had been inspired by award-winning author Toni Morrison, one of his Princeton professors.

At Upper Dublin High School, Bobby had played basketball and soccer. In the ninth grade, he developed an interest in writing.

At the time of his death, the young media executive was planning to marry his fiancée, Jennifer Cobb, a senior product specialist employed at Campbell Soup Co. in Philadelphia.

"Here's a kid that did everything right in his life, and he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," McIlvaine said.

Five years after his son's death, the Oreland father remains deeply suspicious about the 9/11 Commission's findings about the attacks.

He was optimistic when the commission was created, but became disillusioned after sitting through many of the hearings in 2003 and 2004.

"It was ridiculous," he said.

In particular, McIlvaine was irked by then National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice, now Secretary of State, who refused to answer commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste's pointed questions about the Aug. 6 Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." that mentions the possibility of terrorists using hijacked airplanes.

"She was sitting up there filibustering," he said. "She would just not answer questions directly."

Persistent lobbying of the Bush administration by Sept. 11 survivors Lorie Van Auken, Patricia Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Kristen Breitweiser, dubbed the "Jersey Girls," was decisive in getting the commission created.

The survivors urged commissioners to be aggressive in "pointing fingers" in its investigation, according to former 9/11 commissioners Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton in their new book, "Without Precedent."

On Friday, Kean and Hamilton appeared at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

"We had an up and down relationship with the (survivor) family members," Hamilton said. "They were often critics of ours."

McIlvaine had hoped government officials would be compelled to take responsibility for the lapses that enabled the tragedy.

"The only way we're going to survive as a country is to hold these people accountable," he said. "My son was murdered."

Kean said commissioners debated about issuing subpoenas to government agencies to get documents but worried the probe would get tied up in protracted litigation.

"We were advised to a take a confrontational role and issue lots of subpoenas," Kean said. "But we figured they'd be in court indefinitely."

McIlvaine, Van Auken, Casazza, Kleinberg and Breitweiser are interviewed in a new documentary, "9/11: Press for Truth," that questions many of the commission's conclusions about the terrorist attacks. On Sunday, the movie was shown in New York City, Washington, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Portland, Oregon.

Today, film producer Kyle Hence and survivor family members will appear at the National Press Club in Washington at 11 a.m. to demand a new Sept. 11 investigation. The event is slated to air live on C-Span.

McIlvaine said the government's past covert activities raise many troubling questions about the U.S. intelligence community's role in the attacks.

"To me there's enough circumstantial evidence that the U.S. was involved," he said.

To skeptics who scoff at the idea of government agents killing Americans as a pretext to waging global war, he cites a 1962 Joint Chiefs of Staff memo that proposed blowing up a drone aircraft disguised as a passenger airliner over Cuba in order to justify invading the Communist country during the Kennedy administration.

"I think it was an inside job," McIlvaine said, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Countering conspiracy claims, Hamilton said the commission did the best it could given the probe's time and budget constraints.

"We had a limited amount of time and limited amount of money, and you can't go down every path," he said.

The commission report concluded the failures before and during the attacks were attributed to government incompetence rather than conspiracies.

"The whole system failed," Hamilton said.

Keith Phucas can be reached at kphucas@timesherald.com or 610-272-2500, ext. 211.