Stanley Praimnath and Brian Clark survived the South Tower on September 11, 2001, escaped after gripping, faith-filled moments and split-second choices, and have remained close friends for 25 years.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Stanley Praimnath had already evacuated the South Tower once and reached street level with about 20 coworkers. After learning the South Tower was safe, he and others returned upstairs, only to be warned later by a panicked colleague at the Fuji Bank Chicago office that they needed to leave again. Looking out a window toward the Statue of Liberty, Praimnath saw United Airlines Flight 175 barreling toward the building and felt instantly terrified.
“I saw the entire plane coming at eye level,” he later said. In that moment he called out inwardly and acted instinctively. “And as I’m staring, I dropped the phone and said, ‘Lord I can’t do it, you take over’ and I dove under my desk,” he recalled, believing that prayer and timing spared him when the jet banked and struck the South Tower.
Debris tore through his office and the 82nd floor collapsed onto his desk, leaving him buried and temporarily deaf from the blast. “It’s like God pushed this plane from me,” Praimnath said, describing a doorway where the plane came to rest about 20 feet away. Many who had descended with him and returned to the tower did not survive; “All the people who came down with me on the first hand and came back were gone on impact,” he said.
Three floors above him was Brian Clark, a Euro Brokers employee and a designated fire warden who organized a group and began guiding coworkers downward. Partway down they stopped when a woman warned the stairs were impassable because of smoke and fire, and most in Clark’s group decided to go back up. While others debated, Clark heard desperate banging and a voice crying for help and he stayed behind to investigate.
That voice came from Praimnath, who had crawled through damaged offices until he reached a wall. With his hearing still compromised, he heard Clark instruct him to knock and then began a frantic exchange. “I said I couldn’t breathe,” Praimnath remembered, and he pressed Clark for reassurance about faith: “I said, are you a Christian, and do you go to church? I said I have to know your convictions. I want you to pray with me. I said, ‘Lord, I don’t want to die. I want to see my wife and children.'”
The two men worked to break through a partition until the hole was large enough for Praimnath to be pulled free by Clark. After getting him out, Praimnath urged swift escape: “We have to get out. This building is going.” They pressed downward and encountered a man with a broken back who implored them to contact his wife; calls to emergency services failed, but Clark and Praimnath reached their spouses, Diane and Jenny, by phone.
As they descended they passed Jose, who carried a walkie-talkie and resolved to head back up to help others, while Clark and Praimnath kept moving out. Praimnath felt a strong pull to get to Trinity Church and his intuition, along with Clark’s choices, led them off the tower before the South Tower collapsed. Outside, the strangers exchanged business cards and, over time, became tight friends.
Both men later realized the narrow margins that saved them: Clark thinks he survived because he split from his original group to answer those cries, and Praimnath believes his prayer and quick action did the same. They were among a handful who made it out from above the impact zone in the South Tower, and that shared survival forged a lasting bond. They stayed in touch and watched families grow in the decades since.
Twenty-five years on, Clark and Praimnath have retired from their careers and built family lives away from Manhattan; Clark lives in northern New Jersey with his wife and a large extended family, while Praimnath, now 69, lives on Long Island where he serves as a pastor and enjoys grandchildren. When he speaks about that morning Clark told reporters, “I don’t have to teach history anymore – the textbooks have that covered,” noting that his talks focus on the emotional reality of survival and resilience.
This anniversary finds them keeping the memory alive in different places: Clark plans to attend a local memorial service in New Jersey while Praimnath will tell his story at a church in Virginia. Their friendship, born in the worst of circumstances, remains the durable human detail at the center of what they lived through and what they share now.
