The First Wound In The Towers

Around 12:18 p.m. on February 26, 1993, an explosion below the World Trade Center turned an ordinary Friday into a mass emergency. Smoke moved upward. Power and communications failed. Elevators trapped people. Tens of thousands tried to leave a vertical city whose hidden systems had suddenly become part of the danger.

Six people were killed: John DiGiovanni, Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, and Monica Rodriguez Smith. More than a thousand were injured. First responders, Port Authority workers, tenants, visitors, investigators, prosecutors, and families were pulled into a story that did not end when the towers reopened.

The First Wound In The Towers follows the bombing from the working building before noon to the damaged garage below, from smoke-filled evacuation to the crater that became evidence, from vehicle fragments and rental records to arrests, trials, convictions, and Ramzi Yousef's later capture. It also follows the harder work of memory: how the 1993 victims were commemorated, how the original memorial was later destroyed on September 11, and why the first attack should not be remembered only as a prelude to a later catastrophe.

Scott K. Murphy writes with source discipline and restraint, avoiding invented scenes, perpetrator glamour, and operational detail. This is a book about a warning, but also about the people who paid for that warning before the country fully understood what it had seen.