[AMERICA ATTACKED]

Local man
watches jet slam
into trade center

Randall Quan lives just 7 blocks
from the crumbled towers

Isle visitors react

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By Gregg K. Kakesako
gkakesako@starbulletin.com

Hawaii resident Randall Quan was preparing for work when his apartment building was rocked by an explosion.

"I thought it was just a manhole explosion since we had just experienced it," said Quan, a 1988 Iolani graduate.

When Quan, 31, stepped out of his apartment to investigate the cause of the explosion he was greeted by a big hole in the North Tower of the World Trade Center -- just seven blocks away.

And then in disbelief he said a jet plane crashed into the World Trade Center's South Tower.

"It was horrible," said Quan who graduated from Dartmouth in 1992.

As he continued to watch, Quan said, the South Tower fell. "It just crumbled. It was horrible."

"Then a half hour later the North Tower crumbled," Quan said.

Quan said he walks past the World Trade Center daily to his job as a consultant for a nonprofit organization on lower Broadway.

"Just a half-hour later, I would have been in the vicinity and I don't know."

Quan said he doesn't know the plight of many friends from school who worked in the World Trade Center.

"It was just horrible," Quan repeated several times during the telephone interview.

"I was born and grew up in New York before I moved to Hawaii with my parents. I always remembered looking up to the World Trade Center."

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Visitors react with
shock after attacks

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Star-Bulletin staff

Just as he won't forget where he was when President John F. Kennedy was shot, Jim Lozier of Tyler, Texas, won't forget where he was when he heard about this morning's terrorist attacks.

He was watching television in his Waikiki hotel room, and called to his wife, Carolyn: "You gotta see this."

The Loziers haven't been able to get in touch with their son, a pilot at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where President Bush gave a news conference earlier today. "We're a little concerned," he said, reaching for his wife. "We're a lot concerned."

The couple was going to the Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri today, but the national monuments were closed for security reasons.

"In a war we know who to fight," Lozier said. "In a terrorist attack they don't even know who (they're fighting)."

Janine Anthony, on her honeymoon, would have been on a train to work in New York, about 10 blocks from the World Trade Center, when the attack occurred. Her friend works at the World Trade Center. "She called in sick today," Anthony said. "Thank God."

At Hawaii Pacific University, the flag was flying at half staff, as stunned students arrived for morning classes.

"It gives me goosebumps," HPU student Rodney Bagcal said, thinking about a high school friend he knows who works in New York's financial district.

Anthony Pansoy, an Army nursing student, said he keeps thinking of how hard the medical staff at New York hospitals is working now. Though he's not in active duty, he e-mailed his parents in Oregon to assure them that he's OK. "It's something words cannot describe. This is worse than Pearl Harbor," said Yoshi Yoshimura, who was 8 when the Japanese attack occurred. "I hope they get the people responsible for this."