Terror Victims' Names, Stories Emerge

N E W   Y O R K, Sept. 12, 2001 -- Thomas Burnett phoned his wife from hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, and said he was going to die, but he wasn't going quietly.

"There's three of us who are going to do something about it," he reportedly told Deena Burnett.

Minutes later, the plane crashed, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, just after 10 a.m. ET. The aircraft had been scheduled to fly from Newark, N.J. to San Francisco.

Deena Burnett says her husband told her three men had taken control of the plane, and that the hijackers had fatally stabbed one person on board, the family's priest told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Burnett told his wife, "I love you, honey," then the line went dead, the Rev. Frank Colacicco, pastor of St. Isidore's Catholic Church said.

Mark Bingham called his mother from the same plane, 15 minutes before it crashed.

"Mark said, 'Mom this is Mark Bingham.' He gave me his last name, he was so rattled," said his mother Alice Hoglan, speaking to ABCNEWS' Good Morning America from her home in Sacramento, Calif.

The 31-year-old public relations executive, apparently using the airphone built into his seat, said three men had taken over the aircraft, which was scheduled to fly from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco.

"I told him I loved him, and it went dead," Hoglan said.

Only a trickle of information about the victims is coming in, but that trickle threatens to turn into a flood as more bodies are recovered and others are rescued.

Barbara Olson, a former federal prosecutor and wife of U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, was aboard American Airlines Flight 77.

She called her husband on a cell phone to report that the plane had been hijacked and that at least two men had herded the passengers into the rear of the plane.

She asked her husband what she should do.

Shortly afterward, the plane crashed into the Pentagon.

Woman Desperately Searches for Fiancé

With tears streaming down her face, 24-year-old Gillian Volk stood this morning near the rubble of the World Trade Center, where her fiancé worked.

Kevin Michael Williams, also 24, worked for an investment firm on the 104th floor of one of the twin towers.

Volk said he had called after the first blast Tuesday morning to say they were being evacuated. But she hadn't heard from him since.

"I know he's going to come back to me," she said. "I'm not going to lose hope."

The high school sweethearts are engaged to be married on Dec. 1.

Scores of others gathered near the disaster site and nearby hospitals, hoping for news of missing friends and loved ones.

Kristen Logan desperately looked for her brother, passing out fliers with his picture to rescue personnel and the media. "I love him very much," she said.

Gladys McMillan was at the site hoping for information about her niece, Tyra, who worked in the World Trade Center. She had called her husband after the first attack, saying she smelled smoke.

"But the phone clicked off and that was the last anybody heard from her," McMillan said.

Counterterrorism Expert May Be Victim

In an apparent tragic twist of fate, a former FBI counterterrorism expert who led the investigation of the attack on the USS Cole may have been among those killed at the twin towers.

John O'Neill had recently taken a job as head of security for the WTC. O'Neill was the lead investigator in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the attack on the Cole, in October 2000.

He had left Yemen, the site of the Cole attack, because officials feared he could have been a terrorism target himself.

O'Neill had not been heard from since Tuesday morning.

Waiting for Word

Jacqueline Gavagan, seven months pregnant and home with 3-year-old twins, is hoping her husband may have been among those already rescued.

Two friends who worked near her husband, Donald Gavagan, at Cantor Fitzgerald, a legal information firm on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center, have been rescued, Gavagan said. She hopes that bodes well for her own loved one.

"I'm hoping my husband didn't have a wallet on him and he's with them," she said from her home in Brooklyn.

Jackie Rogan has been desperately seeking information about a friend, Billy Wik, who worked for the AON corporation near the top of Tower Two.

"We called every hospital in the tri-state area," she said. But she has found no news about him. She says that she and Rogan's wife are now waiting by their phones, because there is no central assembly areas for worried relatives.

"There is no place to go," she said.

Rogan said Wik had called his wife moments after Tower One was hit.

"He said, I'm gonna get out, but I have to get my people out,'" Rogan said.

No one has heard from him since.

The 44-year-old insurance executive has three children, ages 16, 12, and 8.

A Rescue Worker Phones for Help

Joyce Karnes said she got a call late last night from her brother, a former policeman and Marine who had driven from Pennsylvania to the disaster site in New York City to help in the search.

He found two police officers trapped in the rubble, but couldn't find anyone around him to help get them out.

The officers apparently were in the lobby of one of the towers when it collapsed on top of them.

"They were evidently under a lot of rubble in an air pocket," Karnes said.

Karnes called 911 with details about her brother's location, and they extricated the officers.

"He's doing good. I last heard from him at 9:30," Karnes said. "He was going back in."

Computer Executives, Ice Hockey Officials on Hijacked Planes

David Angell, of Pasadena, Calif., was one of the creators of the television show, Frasier. He and his wife Lynn were also on American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston, which crashed into the first World Trade Center tower Tuesday morning.

There were at least two high-placed computer executives among the victims. Daniel Lewin was co-founder and chief technical officer of an Internet company based in Cambridge, Mass.

The plane also carried Ed Glazer of California, an executive at fiber optics company MRV Communications.

"I made him promise me he would call me as soon as he got to L.A. because I never liked him flying, and then he told me he had to go because they had to take off for the runway," his wife, Candy Glazer, said this morning.

There were two prominent members of the professional ice hockey community,Garnet "Ace" Bailey, director of pro scouting for the Los Angeles Kings hockey team once a star player himself, was on United 175 headed from Boston to Los Angeles. Bailey was 53 and issurvived by his wife and son. On the same flight was Mark Bavitz, a scoutfor the L.A. Kings.

And there are many more. The airlines have begun releasing partial passenger manifests today, and the grueling work of rescuing victims at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has only begun.

St. Vincent's Hospital and Bellevue Hospital, the two main facilities handling casualties from the New York attacks, report a couple hundred injured and four fatalities, but experts say that is hardly good news.

The low numbers show how little progress has been made in searching through the rubble of lower Manhattan for the hundreds, maybe thousands trapped underneath.

Andy Serwer, ABCNEWS.com's Wall Street columnist, said he learned Tuesday that a friend had been killed in the WTC attacks.

"Sending e-mails and making phone calls was like playing Russian roulette," he said.