Special Agent W.M.
Retired Special Agent W.M. was the supervisory senior resident agent at the Mon Valley Resident Agency in Pennsylvania. The RA at the time included Shanksville in Somerset County, where terrorists crashed a plane on September 11, 2001.
Video Transcript
We didn't have things that were obviously identifiable as aircraft parts.
I saw a lot of honeycomb-looking material on the ground. I believe that was insulation.
One ironic and kind of eerie thing is the Major and I were walking up to the impact crater: the first thing that we saw on the ground that was recognizable as a personal effect was a bible, just lying in the road.
We went on to the impact crater and then we saw a, I believe it was a tire over in the woods. The woods were still on fire and the local fire department were still on the scene to extinguish the flames there.
Every day we were recovering items we believe of possible evidentiary value.
We had two FBI agents who are pilots here in Pittsburgh. And at least once a day they would fly from the Johnstown airport down to D.C. to take evidence that we had recovered from the impact crater.
From an evidentiary standpoint, talking generically, I think we were very, very successful in recovering a number of items of evidentiary value.
Some items that may have been used as weapons.
The first items that I think was of significant evidentiary importance: the evening of 9/11, the first night, a trooper standing post in the vicinity of the crash site found the wallet of one of the hijackers.
And it's amazing, but the things that survived intact and the other things that didn't.
Nobody complained once that I heard about anything. Nobody complained about the long hours, the work we were doing.
I think it, for a lot of people, I think we all took inventory and realized how fortunate we really are.
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