WHAT A HEEL!: Phony 9/11 Survivor?
After the hijacked plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center Tania Head crawled through the wreckage on the 78th floor, stopping to take a wedding ring from a severely burned man and promising to give it to his soon-to-be widow. Her own clothes caught fire, and someone put out the flames with his jacket. Though badly burned, she was able to make it down all those flights of stairs with other people’s help and survived – one of only 19 people to make it out of the WTC alive on 9/11. In a coma for five days, she regained consciousness in the hospital to learn that her fiancé – or was it her husband – Dave had perished in the North Tower.
See, whenever Head spoke of her ordeal to college students, Ground Zero visitors and donors to the nonprofit World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, which she headed as the organization’s unpaid president, various details would change in the retelling. It turns out, no one has ever checked out her story. The New York Times reports:
The family and friends of the man to whom she claimed to be engaged say they have never heard of Tania Head and view the relationship she describes with the man, who truly died in the north tower, as an impossibility.
A spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch & Company, where she told people she worked at the time of the terror attack, said the company had no record of employing a Tania Head.
And few people, it seems, who embraced the gripping immediacy and pain of her account ever asked the name of the man whose ring she had returned, or that of the hospital where she was treated, or the identities of the people she met with in the south tower on the morning of 9/11.
The board of the Survivors’ Network has removed her as its president, and the Tribute WTC Visitor Center said Head will no longer be able to volunteer as a tour guide. For her part, Head has retained legal representation. It should be noted that whatever psychological need or motivation she may have had for playing the part of a WTC survivor, she never made a dime off her story.
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