Local teacher shares firsthand account of 9/11 with Huntersville students

HUNTERSVILLE, N.C. — There were moments when students at Bonnie Cone Leadership Academy grabbed their shirts to brush off tears during a special 9/11 presentation. They weren’t alive during 9/11, but hearing David Milligan’s story made them feel something.

“Emotions are a good thing,” Milligan said, “It don’t make you weak. It actually makes you strong.

Milligan is an academic facilitator at Piedmont IB Middle School but he was talking to students at Bonnie Cone Leadership Academy in Huntersville. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was teaching students in New York.

“See if you can visualize this. You’re sitting there, parents looking frantic, coming in grabbing their kids and run out out of the building—and you’re sitting there and no one comes to get you.”

Milligan says he made sure about a dozen kids got home safely that day, before he managed to walk miles back to his own family.

“I didn’t want to leave them with a negative feeling, so I told them, no, it’s everything’s going to be okay, your family will be fine,” Milligan said. “In some cases, it ended up being a lie. Their families weren’t okay.”

Milligan says when students finally returned to school, all he cared about was their well-being.

“Having that push to make sure those students get home safely, check on those students or be that counselor for those students that’s going to sit with me,” student Angelo Meadows Jr. said.

Meadows, a 12th grader, said he was greatly impacted by the video Milligan showed about a child who lost her father on 9/11.

“As somebody who has lived through the loss of a parent, it’s very like important to get those feelings out,” Meadows said.

This story is part of the many stories Milligan says he’s told over the years since he moved to Charlotte. He says it’s also healing for him to talk about his former basketball teammate who died in the World Trade Center.

“I’ve always felt that my 9/11 presentation-it’s therapy for me,” Meadows said. “It allows me to talk about my teammate Terrence Aiken. Of course, I always think about him, and I think about his family on this day, and it helps me cope with some of the things that I saw, some of the things that I smelled; it helps me deal with all of those things in a positive way.”

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