THE DAY THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

Arkansas woman remembers husband's call from hijacked plane on 9/11

Wife says he was calm, told her to tell kids he’d be home

Deena Burnett-Bailey with her husband Rodney Bailey 09/01/2021 in Little Rock (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)
Deena Burnett-Bailey with her husband Rodney Bailey 09/01/2021 in Little Rock (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)

Deena Burnett Bailey was getting breakfast ready for her three young girls in San Ramon, Calif., on Sept. 11, 2001, when she saw on the news that an airplane had crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

Her husband, Tom Burnett, was in New York on business, but she wasn't immediately worried. Both her mother and her mother-in-law called, and she told them she was sure Tom was fine and not to panic.

"And then the second plane hit the second tower," said Burnett Bailey, a Dermott native. "That's really when I began to say, 'OK, this is serious. I need to figure out where he is.'"

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States that left 2,977 people dead, according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Two hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York, a third crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., and a fourth plane, which Tom Burnett was on, went down in a Pennsylvania field.

Burnett, 38, traveled frequently for work as the national director of a dental implant company, and Burnett Bailey didn't always keep up with the details of his trips. His secretary always gave Burnett two copies of his itinerary -- one he took with him and one he left at home.

[20 Years After 9/11: Read more stories in this series at arkansasonline.com/after911/]

While his wife was searching the house for it, the phone rang.

"I answered, and I just said 'Tom?' and he said, 'I'm on United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, and the airline has been hijacked.'"

Burnett Bailey wrote the flight information on a dry erase board on her refrigerator.

"When he said the plane was hijacked, I just kind of stopped and froze. I do remember saying to him -- it took me a while to remember this -- but I said, 'Wow. You really are having a bad week.' And he said 'Can you believe this?' He just sounded like he was irritated like, you know, he's trying to get home and this is happening and he was just irritated.

"He said 'I need you to call the authorities. They've already knifed a guy.' And he said he would call me back, and he hung up the phone."

[9/11 VICTIMS: List of Arkansans not appearing above? Click here » arkansasonline.com/911arkansas7/]

Burnett Bailey had no idea who to call and started thumbing through the phone book. She decided to call 911. She was first connected to local police, then the sheriff's office, then back to local police and finally the FBI. As she was talking to the FBI, her husband called back.

She told him about the planes hitting the World Trade Center towers, and he peppered her with questions. Did she know anything about the hijackers? What did they want? Where are they going? What are they going to do with United Flight 93?

"Both of us were very calm on the second phone call," she said. "On the first phone call, he seemed irritated. On the second phone call, he was just very calm, especially when I told him other planes were being hijacked -- they are hijacking planes down the East Coast.

"I told him we don't know who they are, and we don't know how many, and we don't know what kind of planes. And he just started asking questions, and I could hear him relaying that information to the people around him. He was just very matter of fact, and I remember at one point he said 'It's a suicide mission.'"

In his third phone call, Burnett told his wife that he was putting together a plan with several other passengers to take back the plane. "He said 'Everything is going to be OK. Don't worry. We are going to do something.'"

She told him the girls -- 5-year-old twins, Halley and Madison, and Anna Clare, 3 -- wanted to talk to him.

"He said, 'Tell them I'll talk to them later. I'll be home for dinner. I may be late.' But he was calm. He was more quiet than usual, and it just led me to believe he was thinking about what had to be done.

"He never sounded afraid. He never said goodbye. He was just very adamant about helping me to know everything would work out."

She believes her husband thought they were going to take back the plane.

"I really do. I think if he really felt that this was his end, he would have said goodbye, and he certainly would have talked to the girls," she said. "I also think he would have called his parents if he thought this was goodbye."

During the third phone call, she listened intently for background noises. She never heard anything, but the sound of the engine -- no other voices or conversations. He told her he would call her back after they retook the plane.

After she called 911, several police officers, firetrucks and ambulances showed up at her house. She was still trying to get the girls ready for school. She remembers the firefighters took her daughters outside to show them their truck -- anything to distract them.

EMTs tried to check her blood pressure, heart rate, and asked her questions about how she felt.

"I wasn't having any of it. I just wanted everyone to leave me alone," she said. "I was just waiting for the phone to ring. The police that had been assigned wanted me to give them the phone. I was like, absolutely not. If he calls, I am talking to him."

After her husband hung up from the third call, she held the phone for several hours waiting to hear his voice again. A fourth call never came. Instead, a police officer who was with her told her there had been another plane crash, and they believed it was her husband's flight.

"I ran over to the television -- phone in hand -- and saw that they were showing video of this crater in the ground," she said. "There was absolutely no sign that an airplane made that crater. There was nothing, nothing there. I realized at that point that there were no survivors.

"Even though my mind went to that place, I kept saying, 'Did anyone survive? Did anyone survive?' And the policeman just said 'I don't think so. I don't think so.' And I just kept looking, hoping to see some sign of the plane in the video that they were sending through the TV.

"And I wouldn't put down the phone. I just kept thinking that he would call. He said he would call."

United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania, never hitting the terrorists' intended target. There were no survivors.

TELLING THE GIRLS

Burnett Bailey knew she would have to tell her daughters that their dad was dead, but she wanted to wait until the next morning -- giving her a chance to rest and gather her thoughts.

Earlier that morning, she called two friends and asked them to take the girls to school.

"I did not want them to be surrounded by the chaos all day because I did not know how it was going to play out," she said.

After school was dismissed, a friend picked up the girls and brought them home early that evening. By that time, there were hundreds of people on her front lawn -- news trucks, satellite trucks, police officers, paramedics, firetrucks, reporters.

"I took them upstairs, and I remember sitting on Anna Clare's bed and the girls were looking out her window toward the street and asking who are all of these people? Why were they there? What is going on?"

She said she realized she couldn't wait to answer their questions, fearing someone else would tell them their father was dead.

"I said, 'Girls, do you remember when I was talking to Daddy on the phone this morning?' And they said, 'Yes. Where is Daddy? He is supposed to be home.' And I said, 'Well, your daddy had a little problem on the plane. There were some bad people on the plane that made the airplane crash. And when it crashed, everyone on board died, including your dad.'

"They began yelling 'No! No! No!' One of them climbed onto my lap, and Madison asked me if we could call him on his cellphone. And I said 'No. He's in heaven with Jesus. He's an angel now.' And one of them said 'But he didn't say goodbye.' And I explained to them that there was no time to say goodbye and this was not what he wanted. And he would be here if it had been his choice, but it was not his choice.

"We talked a little bit about what it meant to be an angel, and Madison asked if we could send him a letter and if he would get it in heaven," she recalled. "It was clear they didn't fully understand what was going on and what death meant, and they didn't understand he was not coming back."

To keep his memory alive with the girls, she would talk a lot about their father. During dinner, she would tell her daughters they were eating his favorite chicken dish. Or if they were driving, she would point out her husband's favorite shade of blue.

"I would just look for ways for the girls to know him and remember him in ways that they perhaps had not remembered him."

The family moved to Little Rock at the end of June 2002 to be closer to her parents. Burnett Bailey waited because she wanted them to finish the school year in California, saying "they'd been through enough."

KEEPING HIS MEMORY ALIVE

Burnett Bailey met Tom Burnett in Marietta, Ga. She was a new flight attendant with Delta Airlines, and he had just taken a job as a regional manager at a dental implant company and was searching for an apartment in the area.

She and about 20 of her flight attendant classmates were celebrating finishing training at a restaurant. He was there having a drink. Her roommate started talking to him and invited him to their table. The group ended up going to another bar, and he went with them. By the end of the night the roommate gave him all of their phone numbers.

He ended up calling her apartment and left a message, inviting Burnett Bailey and her roommate over for dinner. She called him back and agreed to meet him at a restaurant. They ended up closing the restaurant.

It was a long-distance courtship. He moved twice during that time and was frequently required to travel.

"There were times when I would get off work and get on an airplane that he was on, and our date would be sitting in first class watching a movie and having dinner, and then he would go to his hotel and I would fly back home."

They dated almost three years before they married April 25, 1992, at a small Catholic church in McGehee. She became a stay-at-home mom when they had the twin girls in 1996. Two years later, Anna Clare was born.

RETURNING HOME

"One of the things that Tom had been really great at is we had talked about what I should do if anything happened to him, as well as what he should do if anything happened to me," Burnett Bailey said. "One of the things he always said is I will have to have help. 'And I think moving back to Arkansas to have the help of your family would be the best thing you could do.'"

In 2006 she married Rodney Bailey, an insurance agent who has a son, Tanner, from a previous marriage. They met through a mutual friend and fell in love.

"That was Tom's idea too," she said. "I remember conversations that we had about single-parent homes and expectations for education and experiences that we wanted our kids to have, and he once said to me if anything ever happened to me, 'Not only would I want you to remarry, I would expect you to.'

"That made it easier. That made it a lot easier because I knew that he wanted that for the girls and me."

Now, Halley has graduated from Pepperdine University with a finance degree and Southern Methodist University with a master's in business administration. She works at a private equity firm in Dallas as an asset manager analyst.

Madison got her undergraduate degree at Texas Christian University and her master's degree at Vanderbilt, and is a speech language pathologist in the Katy Texas School District.

Anna Clare graduated from Pepperdine with a degree in interpersonal communications and is in software sales in Dallas.

"You would never know they were children of 9/11," Burnett Bailey said. "It's not something that comes up in conversation. It is not something they tell people about. I am pretty sure a lot of their friends know about Tom. But it took them quite a while to find out."

The girls remember their father mostly through conversations, videos and photographs, but they have some distinct memories. A few years ago, Anna Clare asked her mother about whether one of her memories really happened. She recalled her father catching her after she sneaked out of bed. She jumped back in bed, pulled up the covers and pretended to snore.

"She said, 'I opened my eyes and Dad's face was about 5 inches from mine, and I started laughing and he started laughing, too.' And I said, 'That actually happened, and the reason I know that happened is because your daddy thought it was so funny that you were snoring that he came downstairs and told me about it.'"

Now, 20 years after 9/11, Burnett Bailey said she is grateful that people still want to hear her story.

"There are times when I read my own story, and I think, 'Wow. I can't believe I've lived this,'" she said. "It's a lot. It's a lot to lay down at night and close my eyes and let it run through my mind -- everything that occurred on that day, everything that has happened in the 20 years since. I think it's a beautiful reminder of what faith in God and family and friends can do in your life. I also think it is a wonderful tribute to love in a marriage.

"Even though my life has taken on a new direction and a new joy, those memories transcend death."

Deena Burnett-Bailey with a photo of her late husband on 09/01/2021 in Little Rock (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)
Deena Burnett-Bailey with a photo of her late husband on 09/01/2021 in Little Rock (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Cary Jenkins)
Federal Bureau of Investigation investgators comb the crater left by the crash Tuesday of United Airlines flight 93, a Boeing 757 in Shanksville, Pa., on Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001.  The plane crashed about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh after first flying near Cleveland and then turning around. The plane was said to be flying erratically and losing altitude. Analysts said recovery of Flight 93's cockpit voice recorder could be key in determining what happened. FBI assistant agent in charge Roland Corvington said that more than 200 investigators were on the scene and that the search might continue for three to five weeks.(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
Federal Bureau of Investigation investgators comb the crater left by the crash Tuesday of United Airlines flight 93, a Boeing 757 in Shanksville, Pa., on Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001. The plane crashed about 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh after first flying near Cleveland and then turning around. The plane was said to be flying erratically and losing altitude. Analysts said recovery of Flight 93's cockpit voice recorder could be key in determining what happened. FBI assistant agent in charge Roland Corvington said that more than 200 investigators were on the scene and that the search might continue for three to five weeks.(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Print headline: On 9/11, husband on hijacked plane said plan in works

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