Criminal - Roselle and Michael

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Michael Hingson was on the 78th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He says the first indication that something was wrong was the sound of a muffled explosion. Then the building began to tilt, and he felt the floor drop like an elevator. But Michael Hingson didn’t panic because his guide dog, Roselle, was calm. Michael Hingson’s book is Thunder Dog. Listen to other episodes of This is Love at https://thisislovepodcast.com/. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9-11. So for today's episode, we wanted to share a story from our other podcast, This Is Love, about that day and how one man got through it. I am Michael Hinkson. I happen to be blind. Were you born blind? Technically, no, but in fact, yes. Technically, no, because I was born two months premature and was put in an incubator and given a pure oxygen environment, which caused the retinas to malform, which is what caused my blindness.

So technically, two days after I was born. But for all intents and purposes, yes, I was born blind. Michael Hinkson was born in 1950. These days, he lives in Victorville, California with his wife, Karen. Back in 2001, he lived in Westfield, New Jersey and commuted into Manhattan every day for work. He was the regional sales manager and head of operations for a company that provided data protection and network storage systems. And his office was on the 78th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. In 1999, Michael had gotten his fifth guide dog. Her name was Roselle. They worked well together,

but for all of Roselle's professionalism, she was very afraid of thunderstorms. She gave us about a half-hour warning whenever a storm was coming our way, and she would pant and she would shake and shiver, and there was nothing we could do to get her to calm down. Roselle was a yellow lab. She'd been trained at Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California.

And within two days of her arrival to Michael's house in New Jersey, she was already going to work with him every day. In the early morning hours of September 11, 2001, Roselle woke Michael up. She was panting and shivering, and he knew this meant a storm was coming. He got out of bed and went down into the basement. He had an office down there.

And he put on some loud music and worked at his desk, keeping Roselle company. The thunderstorm literally came over our house, right over our house. I had never heard such loud claps of thunder before in any storm. That's how close it was to us. And there was no way of masking it. So poor Roselle was under my desk, shaking and shivering. I kept her under the desk so she wouldn't see lightning flashes

through our walkout basement sliding door. And at about 2 o'clock, the storm passed us by. So we went back up to bed and slept for three more hours. But on that morning, we got up at 5, did all the usual things in the morning that we needed to do. In fact, I woke up early that day because we were going to be conducting some special training seminars. He was expecting 50 people to come through his office over the course of the day. So he woke up early and got to the office at 20 to 8. They'd ordered catered breakfast for the trainees.

Michael helped the caterer unpack, and then he got to work setting up the conference room. He met with his colleague, David Frank. David Frank was based in California, but he'd come to town for the day's seminars. Some attendees had already arrived and were eating in the conference room. David and I were in my office.

Roselle was asleep under my desk. Roselle's typical job in the office was to be the official greeter. If anyone opened the door, she was up, she'd go out, she'd say hello and visit and then come back and lay back down and go to sleep. On the morning of September 11th, Roselle was asleep under Michael's desk with her head on his foot. He remembers that he and David were discussing the easiest way to get the rest of the visitors through security at the World Trade Center, and decided they would fax a list of names on company letterhead.

I was reaching for the letterhead to create the list when suddenly we heard a muffled explosion. It wasn't very loud. The building kind of shuddered, and then it began to tip. And literally, it began just tipping in one direction. And as I tell people, it seemed to me we moved probably about 20 feet. Michael had grown up in California, so his first thought was to go stand in a doorway, even though he knew this wasn't an earthquake. Ceiling tiles were falling, the building continued to lean, and Michael and David thought it would tip all the way over. And I stood there, and finally David and I said goodbye to each other because we were about to take, we thought, a 78-floor plunge to the street below.

Roselle was still under my desk, asleep. Then, after David and I said goodbye to each other, the building slowed, stopped, and went back the other way. What did you imagine had happened? Had no idea. I could imagine all sorts of things, but there was no way to know. And afterward, of course, a lot of people in the press said, well, certainly you didn't know what was going on because you couldn't see it. And I would say to them, the last time I checked, X-ray vision wasn't invented yet. The airplane hit us 18 floors above where we were on the other side of the building.

No one where I was, no one on my side of the building had any clue about what was happening. Don't blame that on eyesight. We didn't know. Michael says at this point, Roselle got up from her nap. She was calm. And I took her leash. I told her to heel, which meant to come around on my left side and sit. And Roselle was essentially going, who woke me up? What's going on here? This is something I wasn't waiting for. I wanted to sleep. Nobody's coming in. But she went around on my left side and she sat wagging her tail and yawning. And about that time, the building dropped straight down about six feet. Imagine being in a very fast elevator and it's slowing down and stopping. That's essentially

what it felt like. Did it feel like it was never, I mean, did you think the whole building must be going out from underneath me? I mean, what an odd feeling. It was a very odd feeling and something that I never expected in the World Trade Center. And so I had absolutely no clue about what was going on. But as soon as the building dropped that six feet, David, who had been holding on to my desk, turned and looked out the windows at the front of our office and started shouting, Oh my God, Mike, there's fire and smoke above us. There are millions of pieces of burning paper falling outside our window. We've got to get out of here. The building's on fire. I could hear things brushing by our windows, and I didn't know what it was until David explained it. But then suddenly it was very clear. Yeah, there's millions of pieces of burning plate beer falling outside the window.

I believe that, David. The plane had hit 18 floors above them, on the other side of the building. But they didn't know that yet. They assumed that the windows above them had blown out, sending the contents of those offices flying through the air, past Michael and David and their guests. Our guests began to scream and started moving out of the conference room where they were having breakfast. And David kept saying, no, we got to get out of here. The building's on fire. We can't

stay here. We got to get out of here right now. And I kept saying, slow down, David. And then finally, David used what I call the big line. You don't understand. You can't see it. And the problem wasn't what I wasn't seeing. The problem was what David wasn't seeing. That was Roselle. Even with all the screaming and debris falling on her head, she stayed calm. This was the most important information to Michael. They were a team, and he trusted her judgment.

I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love. I knew by Roselle's behavior that we were not in such imminent danger that we could not try to evacuate in an orderly way. I told you what Roselle was like when she was afraid of thunder. She wasn't doing any of that. She was sitting by my side, yawning and wagging her tail, looking for scratches and not giving any indication of fear at all. And so I wasn't distracted by things that I wasn't seeing.

Was that an advantage of being blind? Maybe. And so I focused. First, they got their guests to the stairs. They knew not to use the elevators. So David left and took our guests to the stairs. They knew not to use the elevators. So David left and took our guests to the stairs. There were five, I believe. And I told David, when you're done, come back and we'll sweep the office and we'll leave.

Meanwhile, I called my wife Karen at our home in New Jersey and told her that there had been an explosion or something happened. And I said, we're going to leave. And she said, well, what's going on? I just said there was an explosion or something. We don't know, but we'll get out and then I'll call you. David came back. We swept the office, tried to power down some equipment, discovered we really didn't think we had the time to do it all, just left and went to the stairs and started down. So it's now about 8.50 in the morning, four or five minutes after the attack on our tower. As soon as we got into the stairwell, I began smelling an odor that seemed familiar, but I just couldn't place it.

It took me about four floors to recognize that what I was smelling were the fumes from burning jet fuel, the same thing that I smelled every time I went to an airport. I observed that to people around us, and they said, yeah, we were trying to figure out what it is. You're right, it's burning jet fuel. But we still didn't really know what was going on. We walked down the stairs some more. We got down about 10 floors, and then above us, we heard a voice that yelled, burn victim coming through, move to the side of the stairs. The stairs were wide enough that we could do that, that you could walk two or three abreast. So we all moved to the outer wall and turned facing toward the inside of the stairwell, and this group of people surrounding a woman who was very badly burned over the upper part of her body passed us by. We went down a few floors more and heard the same thing. Burn victim coming through moved to

the side and David said that this person was even worse than the other one. But they were both able to walk and were going down the stairs with help. Each floor had 19 stairs split into two flights. The first flight had 10 steps, then a landing where you turn, and nine more steps. Michael says he doesn't normally count steps. It's the dog's job to pause at the top and bottom of each set. But on this day, Michael says he did count to occupy his mind. He counted and he listened, trying to make sense of what had happened. The other people in the stairwell were quiet and focused. There was no cell phone reception, so they didn't have any information from outside. They just walked.

He said it felt hypnotic, unreal. Sometimes the smell of jet fuel went away. Sometimes it was very strong. Michael could hear Roselle breathing. She clearly had the sense that people were afraid and that something was going on. It was important for me to urge her and encourage her to focus and do her job. Because if she started acting out of the ordinary, then my immediate belief would be there must be something wrong. So it was important for me to focus on encouraging her, good girl, Roselle, what a good dog,

keep going forward, good dog, what a good dog, and doing that all the way down the stairs. The other reason for doing that was that I needed to convey a message to her that I wasn't worried because if I started acting afraid or worried, then she's going to be looking at me and going, are you okay, rather than doing her job. We worked together and we knew each other well enough that I knew that's what she would do. When they made it from the 78th to the 50th floor,

Michael remembers that David said to him, We're going to die. We're not going to make it out of here. And I said, Stop it, David. If Roselle and I can go down these stairs, so can you. And he told me later that that brought him out of his funk. And what he then decided to do was to walk a floor below me. And as he put it, he wanted to think about something else. So he was going to walk a floor below me and describe to me what he saw on the stairs. So he was counting out the floor numbers, saying, Michael, we're at 50, floor 51, floor 49.

So he was counting. When he got a floor below me, then I would hear things like, hey, Mike, I'm at the 48th floor. Everything is clear here. Everything is good. But what David did, and what was most important about what David did, was that as he was shouting, Mike, 47th floor, all clear here, anyone within the sound of his voice heard him and knew that somewhere on the stairs above them or below them, someone on the stairs was okay. And he gave people something to focus on. I think that we had to work together to keep panic out of the stairwell so that, for example, after the two burn victims passed us

by, a woman suddenly stopped on the stairs and said, I can't go on. I can't breathe. We're not going to make it out of here. And about eight or nine of us, we had a group hug. I and other people surrounded her, and we just hugged her. And Roselle gave her kisses, and we encouraged her. And I said, come on, you can do this.

And other people said, yeah, come on, you can go down the stairs. We're together. We're together. We're okay. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter We got to the 31st floor.

David was on the 30th floor, and he said, hey, I'm on the 30th floor. Everything is clear. By the way, firefighters are coming up the stairs. I can see them. Everyone move to the side and give them a place to go by. And I went on down to where David was, and I said, so what do you see? And he said, they're carrying oxygen cylinders, fire axes, shovels, and all the things that they need to fight the fire. And about that time,

the first guy got to us, and he stopped, and he stopped right in front of me. And he said, speaking very loud, hey, buddy, you okay? And did he need to speak that loud? No, because blind people don't see, but we do hear. But I said, no, I'm fine. Don't worry about it. Well, that's really nice. We're going to send somebody down the stairs with you to make sure you get out. And I said, I really don't need any help going down the stairs. I just came down from the 78th floor. We're going on down. He said, that's really nice, but we're going to send somebody with you. Blindness doesn't make me incapable of walking downstairs. Typically what people do if they're going to try to help a blind person is they grab your arm or they want you to grab their elbow, which is fine if I need guiding.

But then when we get to stairs, they kind of lift you up so that you don't fall down the stairs. You can't get lost going on stairs. And there's no greater likelihood that I'm going to fall on the stairs if I'm using a dog or a cane than a sighted person is going to fall on the stairs. But this gentleman insisted that he had to help. And I finally said, I've got my guide dog, Roselle, here. We're doing fine. We really don't need help. And he said again, well, that's really nice, but we're going to send somebody with you. What a nice dog you got. And he starts petting Roselle. And it wasn't the time to give him a lecture about don't pet a guide dog in harness. The dog Roselle. And it wasn't the time to give him a lecture about don't pet a

guy dog in harness, the dog is working. It also wasn't the time to give him a lecture, blindness isn't the problem, it's your misconception that's the problem. So finally, though, I had to get him to allow us to go on and for him to do his job. I said, look, I've got my friend David here who can see and we're working well together. So he turns to David, you're with him? And David goes, yeah, Lee Maloney's good. And so he said, well, that's really nice. And he gave Roselle a few more pats, and Roselle gave him some kisses, and on up the stairs he went. And we continued down. And by the way, then David reassumed his scouting position a floor below us, and again started shouting up what he saw on the stairs. When we got to the 26th floor, David said, people are passing up bottles of water. Somebody opened a water vending machine

and Mike, I'll bring you a bottle, but we're passing up bottles if anybody needs water. So David brought up a bottle and Roselle was getting pretty thirsty with all the people around and we gave Roselle some water. We made our hands into kind of cups as much as we could. And she got water, we got water. And then David reassumed his position and we went on down the stairs. Michael says that more and more firefighters passed them. He says that sometimes the people in the stairwell would break into applause for the firefighters going up. The closer they got to the bottom, the faster Michael wanted to go,

but it was now very crowded, with people evacuating on the right side and firefighters coming up on the left. Finally, Michael was on the second floor and heard David call out that he was on the first floor. David yelled up that the sprinklers were on and that Michael should be prepared to run through water. We got to the first floor, and it was very noisy. I described the curtain as kind of a waterfall. It sounded like a waterfall, and I've been around waterfalls.

It sounded like a little waterfall or maybe a decent-sized one, but there's a lot of water that was coming down right in front of me. I picked up Roselle's harness. I told her to go forward, used a command called hop up, which is to speed up and pay attention, and we ran through the water, came out the other side into the lobby of One World Trade Center. Michael told Roselle she'd done a great job. She rubbed her cheek against his hand, and then David said to Michael, let's go. This guy runs up to us and he introduces himself as somebody from the FBI and he would get us where we need to go. My first question was, what's going on? And he said, well, there's no time to tell you. Now, I wish he had. For me, information is important. And there wouldn't be anything that he could tell me that would cause me to panic as opposed to how do I use that information to stay alive and go where we need to go.

But I got no information. He just said, we can't tell you. There's no time. Follow me. And we ran through the complex, up an escalator, and finally outside as far away as we could be from the Twin Towers. As soon as we got outside, David looked around and said, Mike, I see fire in Tower 2. We didn't know where it came from. I said, maybe when our tower tipped, because it did tip toward Tower 2, maybe the fire jumped across. We had no clue.

They walked north on Broadway. And then David asked if they could stop, because he could see the fire very clearly in Tower 2 and wanted to take some pictures. So we stopped. I called my wife on the phone and could not get through because the circuits were busy. As we learned later, of course, people who were up in the towers were saying goodbye to loved ones. And I had just put my phone away and David was putting his camera away when a police officer yelled, get out of here, it's coming down now. this deafening, roaring sound. You could hear glass breaking and metal clattering and then this white noise sound of the building just collapsing, going straight down. People panicked then, of course. They turned and they ran. I turned with Roselle and started running back

the way I had come. So now running south on Broadway, there was a building on my right and Broadway was on my left-hand side. And I remember thinking, as soon as we started to run, God, I can't believe that you got us out of a building just to have it fall on us. And as soon as I thought that, in my head, I heard a voice as clearly as you hear me, in my head, that said, don't worry about what you can't control.

Focus on running with Roselle, and the rest will take care of itself. And I just felt this immediate sense of security that if we worked together, we'd be okay. And I believed it. So we ran west on Fulton Street, and almost immediately we're engulfed in the dust cloud. All of the dirt and the debris and the fine particles of Tower 2 breaking up and collapsing. We knew we had to get out of that dust cloud. And so as we were running, I told Roselle, right, right, because we're running next to a building on our right, and I wanted to find the first opening and go into the building.

I was giving her hand signals and speaking as loud as I could. I don't know whether she could hear me over the noise. I don't know whether she could see my hand signals. But suddenly on my right-hand side, I heard an opening. But obviously, Roselle knew what I wanted. She turned right into that opening. She took one step, and she stopped, and she would not move. Come on, Roselle, keep going.

She wouldn't move. And I realized, you know, first of all, run with the Roselle and the rest will take care of itself. But more important, I realized maybe she's doing her job. So I investigated with a hand along the wall and stuck out a foot and discovered that we were at the top of a flight of stairs. She indeed was doing exactly what she had been trained to do. And no matter what I said, she was using the system that we call intelligent disobedience. She wasn't going to let us fall down the stairs. She stopped and she waited until she got the appropriate command to walk forward and go down the stairs. Well, before we went down the stairs, she got a hug. And then we went down the stairs.

I told her forward and we went down the stairs. she got a hug. And then we went down the stairs. I told her forward, and we went down the stairs. We walked down two flights, and we found ourselves in this little subway entrance. It's a little arcade entrance to the Fulton Street subway station at that time. Michael heard a woman on the ground asking for help. She said she couldn't see. Her eyes were full of dirt and debris. And she was scared she was going to fall onto the subway tracks. I reached out and took her arm. I said, hey, don't worry.

My name is Mike, by the way. I happen to be blind, but I also know you're about 10 feet away from the stairs going down. You're safe. Try to clear out your eyes and what's your name? And she introduced herself and we stood, and she talked a little bit. Then this guy comes up from the subway system into our area, and he said that his name was Lou. He was an employee of the subway system, and he said, I will take you down to an employee locker room. There were about eight or nine of us there, and he said, I'll take you down to an employee locker room where you can sit. There are benches. There's a water fountain and so on. And he took us. We were coughing and hacking and just trying to get the stuff out of our lungs. And then a police officer showed up and arrived and said,

you all need to leave this area now. The air is better up above. You need to leave right now. And didn't wait for a discussion, just turned and walked away. And we all got up and followed him. Michael and David and the other people from the subway station went back outside. And that's when David told Michael that Tower 2 was completely gone. To be continued... rebounding with junk food and empty calories? You don't need to wait for the new year to start fresh. New year, new me? How about same year, new me? You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and

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We thought that probably it was our tower, and David looked back, and indeed he saw a dust cloud coming from our tower. And he told me there was another dust cloud coming. It was pretty confined, so we moved to the side out of the way of most of it, kind of hunkered down and waited for the noise and everything to subside. And once it did, then we stood up. David looked back, and he said, oh, my God, Mike, there's no World Trade Center anymore. And I said, what do you see? And he said, all I see are fingers of fire and flame, hundreds of feet tall and pillars of smoke. It's gone. It's not there.

Michael says his heart broke. He thought about the people still in the tower's stairwell that he and Roselle had just come down. We stood there a moment, then I tried to call my wife Karen on the phone. This time I was able to get through, and she's the one who first told us how terrorists had hijacked two aircraft and crashed them into the towers, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth was still missing over Pennsylvania. That was the first time we really knew what had happened. Michael and David were exhausted. They needed to find somewhere to go, and went to the apartment of one of David's friends.

I couldn't really relax. I needed to get home. I needed to be with Karen. And we were still clearly in shock. That was about 1.30 in the afternoon. So really it wasn't until I got home that I was able to just slow down and start to truly think about it. How was Roselle when you got home? I mean, imagine she was been just exhausted.

She was great. It was just another day at the office for Roselle. Obviously a little bit different, but she did exactly what she was supposed to do. I did ask the people from Guide Dogs for the Blind a couple of days later, the veterinarians, will this affect her? And what I was told was, well, I was first asked the question, did anything hit her? Was she hurt in any way? And I said, no. And they said, no, probably it won't affect her at all because dogs don't do what if.

Nothing bothered her specifically. She focused and did exactly what she was supposed to do. And when it was over for her, it was over for her. So they don't go back and think about, oh my gosh, what if I didn't do this or what might happen to me? It's done. And the proof, the best proof I can give of that is that when we did get home that night, I took her harness off. I expected to take her outside, but she immediately ran off, grabbed her favorite rope bone and started-of-war with my retired guide dog, Lenny. And so they started playing. You know, to trust an animal in an emergency is a remarkable thing. The trust that you had for Roselle and the job that she was going to do? Well, I believe that it's true. Dogs do love unconditionally, but they don't trust unconditionally. The difference between dogs

and people is that we've mostly kind of learned in society not to trust, which is extremely unfortunate because what it also has caused us to be is not open to trust. I think dogs do not necessarily trust instantly and totally, but they're open to the idea of trust. And so when I began working with Roselle, just as two years ago, I began working with Alamo, my eighth guide dog, we had to form that relationship. And I think it takes a year before we truly get to the point where we know what each other's thinking, if you will, where in every sense of the word, we create a team that is that close-knit and can work that well together and that trusts each other completely. So I have learned from working with a number of guide dogs that absolutely it's about trust and that we can trust each other.

So what I learned with Roselle was that level of trust. So it was second nature and was automatic to do that. It's no more amazing than it should be for anyone. But most of us as pet owners, we love our animals, we love our pets and so on. But do we really trust them? More important, do we really understand them? Have we taken the time to develop the kind of relationship with them that results in a complete and total two-way trust. And I think mostly

we don't see that. We see it with good guide dog user teams, but I think it's something that more people could learn to do, and it would help them in their human-human existence as well. Michael and Roselle continued to work together. And then, in 2004, Roselle got sick. She contracted a disease called immune-mediated thrombocytopenia, something that both humans and canines can catch. And typically it's caused by either a genetic issue or by ingesting toxins, which, of course, she did on September 11th. And that's why we think that she caught the disease.

Don't know, but that's what we're sticking with for our thinking on it. They were able to treat the disease for several years, until March of 2007, when Roselle retired. She spent her retirement at home, relaxing with Michael and Karen. In June of 2011, Michael wrote on his website, I have the solemn obligation to inform you that my hero guide dog, Roselle, passed away last evening. I'm sad, of course, because I'll miss Roselle very much. At the end of the post, he addresses Roselle.

He writes, Help us to be better people and dogs, but most of all, be yourself wherever you are. When Roselle retired, Guide Dogs for the Blind also retired her name. No future guide dog will ever be named Roselle. This Is Love is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.

Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer. Audio mix by Michael Raphael. Julie and Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode. You can see them by following us on Instagram. We're This Is Love Show. We'll also post photos of Roselle and Michael. Michael wrote a book about his experience on September 11th. It's called Thunderdog, the true story of a blind man, his guide dog, and the triumph of trust at ground zero. We've got a link on our website, thisislovepodcast.com. This Is Love is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love. Radiotopia from PRX. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox Cosmetic if you have a skin infection. Thank you. or Lambert-Eaton syndrome in medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300.

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