5 – Barrett Naylor Twice Avoided Terror Strikes at the World Trade Center
It is pretty spooky when a premonition comes true. When it happens twice in the same place eight years apart, it is almost terrifying, but this is what apparently happened to Barrett Naylor in 1993, and again in 2001. On the morning of February 26, 1993, Naylor, a Wall Street Executive, was on his way to work at the World Trade Center. It was a regular morning, but when he reached Grand Central Station, he had a sudden and unmistakable feeling of foreboding that he couldn’t describe. Something he couldn’t explain told him to turn around and go back home.
Naylor did just that, and his U-Turn probably saved his life because at 12:17 pm that day, a bomb exploded in the Center, killing six people and injured over 1,000. The terrorists had intended to bring down Tower 1 and force it to crash into Tower 2. Had they succeeded, the death toll would have been in the thousands. Four men were convicted of the bombing in 1994 while two more were convicted in 1997. It was a dark day for the United States, but just over eight and half years later, the nation experienced its worst-ever terrorist attack.
September 11, 2001, now known simply as 9/11, was a day like no other. Naylor was once again getting ready for work in the World Trade Center when he got the same feeling as he did in 1993. Naylor went home, just like he did once before and he was stunned to discover what happened next. To this day, he is grateful that he received the premonitions but also feels guilty that he was unable to help others. To be fair, had he told people about his premonition, would they have believed him enough to go home?
The events of that day need little introduction. The official death toll was 2,996 including the hijackers while over 6,000 people were injured. 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four planes. Two of them were crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center while one was crashed into the Pentagon and another was destined for Washington D.C. until the passengers tried to fight back and the plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Sadly, the terrorists succeeded where they had failed in 1993 and incredibly, Barratt Naylor turned back from disaster not once, but twice.