Local man exits twin tower in nick of time
Cantor Fitzgerald employee bittersweet about his fortune
By linda denicola
Staff Writer

Millstone resident Chris Pepe says he feels like the luckiest man in the world, but he can’t be happy about it.

On the morning of Sept. 11, when kamikaze terrorists crashed into the first tower at the World Trade Center, more than 600 of the 1,000 employees of the company for which he has worked for about four years were in the building and are now either confirmed or presumed dead.

Pepe works for Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond trading company that occupied floors 101-105 at One World Trade Center, above the impact point of the plane. Pepe worked on the 105th floor.

Pepe said he arrived at his office at 8:05 a.m. after driving in, as usual, with Millstone resident Mark Sefcheck, who worked at Two World Trade Center.

Sefcheck also escaped before the buildings collapsed. The two men drove home together.

"I got a call from a customer at about 8:20 that morning. He wanted me to go to his office, away from the World Trade Center," Pepe said. "I left 10 minutes before it happened. I left all the people who were up there."

As soon as Pepe arrived at the client’s office, he was told about a plane crashing into his building.

He was able to call his wife to reassure her.

"It was less than 10 minutes after it happened," said the father of three children — Christopher, Justin and 3-month-old Juliet.

"So many guys I worked with had new babies. There were young pregnant women working there too," Pepe said.

"On the trading desk, you sit shoulder to shoulder with people. I know all the people from Cantor Fitzgerald whose pictures you are seeing on the TV," he said.

In fact, Pepe said, he is getting calls every night from families of missing people wanting to know if their loved ones said anything to him or if he saw them before he left.

"People are reaching for anything to hang onto," he said.

Pepe said that after he found out what had happened, he tried to get back to the building but couldn’t get through.

He has been told by some of the spouses he has spoken to that they received calls from their loved ones.

"When it hit, they couldn’t get out. All the stairwells were severed," he said.

"At Cantor Fitzgerald we’ve assured the families that they will be taken care of as best [as possible]. We are running things out of our London office, and we have a disaster recovery office in Rochelle Park. We also have a place in Texas, and I’m working out of my house," he continued.

Pepe said customers have reached out and offered them office space in their companies and that "all our customers have been very generous."

As of Monday there were very few surviving of the 900 or so people that worked in the north tower. Company Chairman Howard Lutnick was another lucky employee. He was taking his child to school.

Chris Pepe knows he is lucky, but it is bittersweet knowledge. "I feel really, really sad. There are no words to describe the way I feel," he said.

Millstone Township Committeeman William Kastning is a neighbor of the Pepes and knew that he worked in the World Trade Center. Kastning was in Chicago the morning of Sept. 11, at O’Hare Airport, expecting to board a flight back to New Jersey.

"Carol (Kastning, his wife) and I were scheduled to come back on an 11 a.m. United flight," he said. "We didn’t turn on the news in the morning and the airport was conspicuously empty. We were told to go home."

"I was heartsick because I knew people who worked downtown," he said.

Kastning said he frantically called people he knew, but he kept getting busy signals. "I finally got through to Steve Lambrose’s wife who said everyone he knew was accounted for." Lambrose is a fellow Millstone resident.

Kastning had been visiting his mother-in-law. "We decided to drive back with my mother-in-law, even though they were saying airports would be open around noon the next day," he said. "We took my mother-in-law’s car and drove all day.

"We drove right through Somerset County, outside of Pittsburgh, where the third plane went down. That was another grim reminder of events," he said.

In addition, he said, there were various electronic signs on the Pennsylvania Turnpike instructing drivers to avoid New York City and also the New Jersey Turnpike.

They arrived home without a hitch, he said. "The next day I went over to Chris Pepe’s house."