Terror hits home Machias native flees burning skyscraper

Moments after the first plane crashed Tuesday, 22-year-old Lisle Leonard called her mom in Machias from her 34th-floor office in New York’s World Trade Center.

“She said it happened two minutes ago and she could see the shrapnel and glass flying by her window,” said her mother, Sissy Leonard. Her daughter thought a bomb had exploded. “I told her to get out of there.”

But Lisle, a 2000 graduate of Bowdoin College, said the stock market hadn’t opened and that she and her co-workers with a Japanese securities firm were going to stay put. So the mother and daughter hung up, and Sissy turned on the TV set in Machias. She also called her other daughter, Sarah, who lives in Brooklyn Heights, just one subway stop away from the World Trade Center.

As Sissy was telling 25-year-old Sarah that she’d spoken to Lisle and she was all right, her daughter interrupted: “Mummy, I just heard another explosion.”

Michael and Sissy Leonard were counting their blessings Tuesday after learning later in the day that Lisle had escaped from the World Trade Center just moments before the building collapsed.

The couple spent a harrowing half-hour Tuesday morning after seeing television video of a plane crashing into the tower where their daughter worked as a bond analyst for the securities firm Nomura.

Michael Leonard, who is a lawyer, was just returning to the family home from the Washington County Courthouse, where he had heard about the trade center attack.

“I called Lisle’s cell phone, but there was no answer,” Sissy said.

The couple watched in horror as television cameras replayed video of a plane crashing into the second tower. And then came the shots of the second tower collapsing.

“I was positive she was gone,” said Michael Leonard.

“Michael was just hopeless, but I just couldn’t fathom her being gone,” Sissy Leonard said.

Soon, friends started gathering in couple’s Centre Street living room, assuring them it could be hours before Lisle would be able to get through to them.

Then, about a half-hour after the second tower collapsed, Michael Leonard answered one of the back-to-back phone calls at the house and heard his daughter’s voice on the other end of the line.

“She said the whole building just reverberated and the windows shook,” Michael said.

He said Lisle and her fellow workers ran to the stairwell of the 110-story building and made it to the street.

“They’d gone about a quarter of a mile when Lisle turned around and saw the building collapse,” Sissy said.

Lisle described Wall Street as “a war zone,” her mother said. All the bridges and tunnels into the city were closed to traffic and the streets were “a mess,” she said.

Sister Sarah described to her parents seeing Wall Street businessmen walking across the bridge into Brooklyn Heights. “She said she could see them with their suits covered in soot, coming home with bottles of liquor in their hands,” Sissy Leonard said.

She said she encouraged Sarah to donate blood as a way to help those people who hadn’t been as fortunate as Lisle.

And she said the family has been blessed by her daughter’s survival.

“It just doesn’t seem possible that this could happen in this country,” she said. “You get up in the morning and this is the farthest thing from your mind. And then, just a short time later, you’re worried that your child has been killed by terrorists.”