“I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes you don’t know why in the moment. But if she wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be here today.”
—PAUL ESPOSITO, SURVIVOR
The cacophony of screams and panicked footsteps was fading away like a train disappearing into the distance. Paul Esposito lay on the metal floor, staring up at the sky and admiring the passing clouds, visible now through the collapsed ceiling. A sense of calm settled over him, a mental clarity that allowed him to weigh the choice that lay before him. His legs were gone. If he survived at all, life would be different. He could just close his eyes and peacefully let go. Or he could stay awake and fight.
Paul! Kerry Griffiths spoke sharply, leaning her own face over his to try to capture his attention. Don’t close your eyes on me. Don’t you dare leave me.
“Paul!” I called out a bit too cheerfully as I entered his hospital room. “It’s great to finally meet you. How are you feeling today? You look fantastic.”
I tried to focus only on Paul Esposito’s handsome face, framed with his perfectly tousled dark brown hair. I willed myself not to let my eyes drift down his rumpled hospital gown to the negative space where his legs used to be. The legs that used to prop this twenty-four-year-old man up to his six-two stature, now reduced to thighs only, everything gone below the knee. He smiled broadly as I walked into the room. He was less than two years younger than I was, and our shared youth afforded us an instant connection.
Did Paul actually “look fantastic” two days after his legs were violently amputated? Of course not. But I was there to interview him on camera for Eyewitness News (ABC7) in New York, and I wanted Paul to feel comfortable, even confident. With other reporters waiting their turn, my banter with Paul felt like news speed dating, our brief relationship consummating in an emotional TV interview. We both understood the trade: Paul provided information and I extracted it. Still, we greeted each other like old friends.
Maybe it was his height—or what used to be his height—but Paul reminded me of my fiancé Scott. My wedding was less than six weeks away and I was multitasking in the live truck on the ride from New Jersey to Staten Island. Trying to keep the pen in my left hand steady, I wrote thank-you notes for serving dishes and crystal vases as we made our way to Paul. The photographer played jazz on the radio and tried his best to navigate around the potholes. I worried about whether I had forgotten any songs on the wedding band’s request list. I wondered if we had selected the right appetizers. I leafed through my turquoise binder from The Knot to consult the wedding checklist to see which tasks remained to be done. The certainty of my future could not have felt more assured as I approached an interview with my contemporary who was going to have to learn to walk again.
The Staten Island University Hospital public relations staff had granted our request for a bedside interview and would chaperone our visit, making sure that we didn’t linger too long or report anything inaccurate about their care. Unlike knocking on someone’s door and making the pitch to the family directly, a hospital interview is carefully choreographed in advance. The fact that we were allowed inside Paul’s hospital room meant he had given his consent to the hospital, and the hospital had decided it would be in their best interest to publicize the treatment he was receiving there.
Paul’s miraculous survival made international headlines, and my story on the evening news would be one of many to tell the tale of the young man who lost his legs in the Staten Island Ferry crash. He would have been the accident’s twelfth fatality, if not for the angel on the boat who knelt down in the blood pooling around his body while others streamed by, averting their eyes and assuming he was already dead.
One hundred ten trips across New York Harbor every day, the orange double-decker ferries traversing back and forth between Lower Manhattan and Staten Island, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. On October 15, 2003, the twenty-five-minute trip was just long enough to finish a chapter of a book, or drink a cup of coffee, or listen to six songs you shared through Napster. People were still reading actual newspapers, and thoughtful commuters would leave discarded sections and magazines on the ferry benches for the next influx of people to enjoy. The sports sections that morning chronicled the oddity of the “Bartman Game,” Game 6 of the NLCS series where Cubs superfan Steve Bartman interfered with a fly ball, preventing outfielder Moisés Alou from making the play and setting in motion a chain of events that would stymie the Cubs—yet again—from a trip to the World Series.
The three p.m. ferry back to Staten Island on that windy afternoon was less than a third full, as it was too early for most of the commuters to be heading home from work in Manhattan. Paul had covered the lunch shift at China Grill, where he had worked as a waiter for the last fifteen months. Was it his dream job? No. But he did well enough to occasionally cover the bar tab over the weekend with friends, well enough to shop somewhere other than his favorite thrift store for new clothes that were actually new. He generally earned good tips from customers, mostly businesspeople in Midtown who assumed he must have been waiting tables while he waited for his big break in show business. With his wide smile, smooth dark brown hair, and biceps that bulged out from beyond the uniform black T-shirt sleeves, Paul was the waiter people whispered about when he left the table to place their order of crispy spinach, Szechuan beef, and $15 lychee cocktails at the bar. In fact, Paul was not an actor but an artist, but he let the customers believe whatever they liked so long as they tipped well. He enjoyed working with the eclectic crew of writers, actors, and musicians who pooled their tips together at the end of their shift and sampled the new Asian fusion dishes the chef concocted.
The weather was partly sunny and just above sixty degrees that afternoon, but the forty-mile-per-hour wind gusts made it feel much colder as the boat prepared to pull away from Lower Manhattan. All 1,500 people on board filed on quickly—the ferry has always been free and there were no tickets to collect. Paul decided to take his usual spot sitting at the back of the boat. His car was parked at the St. George ferry terminal, so he wouldn’t need to rush off with the rest of the crowd to compete for a seat on a commuter bus to complete his trip home.
After five hours of standing inside the swanky dark restaurant, it was refreshing to sit and admire the expansive view from the Andrew J. Barberi ferry. Paul turned his face to the sun, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. In his mind, he reviewed the plan for the rest of the day: go home to his parents’ house on Holden Boulevard, relax, and meet his friend Marie from high school at Burrito Bar on Staten Island for dinner at eight. He had already changed out of his waiter’s uniform into what he planned to wear that night: brand-new American Eagle low-rise jeans, a navy-blue sweater with a white stripe across the chest, and Payless black sneakers with a trendy cream-colored detail. Paul was sure Marie would notice and appreciate his improving fashion sense as they reminisced about their past and planned their futures.
As the ferry made its way south, with the Statue of Liberty on one side and Governor’s Island on the other, Paul thought about reaching into his backpack for the book he had checked out of the library, the one about nutrition that recommended lower carbs and more protein. But given the impending trip to Burrito Bar, he wasn’t in the mood to read advice that he would ignore only a few hours later. He considered walking a lap around the boat, traversing the decks where he would inevitably bump into a friend from his neighborhood, or someone who worked with his parents, or an acquaintance who knew one of his three siblings.
Instead, Paul decided to simply sit, zone out, and let his eyes relax as he set his gaze west toward New Jersey. The water was choppy as the boat sped along. Hundreds of people spread out on the upper and lower decks, mostly tourists at that hour, with their cameras poised to get the perfect shot of the Statue of Liberty to show their friends back home. The invention of the iPhone was still three years away, so selfies weren’t yet the ubiquitous method of documenting excursions to a new place.
One of those tourists was Kerry Griffiths. A thirty-four-year-old nurse from Wales, Kerry was on the ferry for the first time and was drinking in every moment. She had taken a week off from the operating room and had come to visit New York City, fulfilling a longtime wish. She marveled at the Statue of Liberty as the ferry jaunted by, cutting a sleek path through the water.
Like Paul, Kerry was also thinking about her next meal. She had read in a guidebook that Staten Island had the best Italian food in the five boroughs. She was planning a late lunch of pizza and pasta— easier to find the restaurants when it was still light out. Safer too. Kerry pushed her curly brown hair out of her eyes and used her hand to shield them from the afternoon sun trying to push through the clouds. She pulled her green hooded sweater closer to her body to stave off the chilly breeze.
As the boat drew closer to the St. George ferry terminal, Paul snapped out of his reverie. He could hear the roar of the engine, so he surmised that he still had time to run upstairs to the bathroom before the ferry stopped. He had ridden the ferry hundreds of times and its machinations were second nature.
Heading back down the indoor stairs from the men’s room a few minutes later, Paul caught a quick look out the small windows in the doors at the bottom of the staircase. The ferry was charging in off-kilter, careening away from the slip where it normally stopped. It was going way too fast to be this close to land. While many other passengers were still absorbed in their reading or their music or their conversations, one other young man also sensed trouble.
Oh shit! he yelled.
Paul’s reflexes told him to turn away from the doors. His long legs had time to carry him two steps away from the wall before it came crashing down on him.
The 600,000-pound ferry was traveling at full speed when it barreled into the maintenance pier. The ferry’s angled path prevented a head-on collision, but its momentum caused the boat to sideswipe the concrete pier. The massive force of the impact tore open a 250-foot gash, almost the entire right side of the boat, exposing a tangle of broken glass, twisted metal, and collapsed concrete staircases. Hundreds of people were sent flying into the seat in front of them or knocked off their feet onto the ground. There was no alarm, no warning whatsoever from the crew. Fifteen hundred passengers screamed, cried, ran, froze. They hobbled around on what remained of the deck with blood dripping down their faces, running down their arms and legs, their clothing torn by the flying debris after the ferry collided with the pier at thirty knots per hour. The roar of concrete ripping through metal reverberated for several city blocks like a bomb. One commuter later told CNN, “It looked like a giant can opener came and opened up the boat.”1
The handful of crew members were themselves shocked by the impact, making dazed efforts to tell the injured people that help was on the way. Some people put on life preservers, fearing the boat was taking on water. The ferry drifted for twenty agonizing minutes before the crew pulled it away from the crash site and into its normal slip, where dozens of people ran over from the terminal to help. Rescuers quickly established a safe way for the people who could move on their own to exit the ferry, to feel the assurance of solid ground beneath their feet again.2 The disoriented expressions on their faces, coupled with their blood-stained clothes, gave them the appearance of zombie extras in a horror movie.
Some of the steel that was ripped from its bolts in the crash was supporting the wall that collapsed onto Paul, the wall that guaranteed he would never see his legs again. Seconds after the impact, Paul looked up at where the ceiling used to be and willed himself to stand up. Something felt off, felt weird.
He picked his head up several inches off the floor and looked down toward where his feet should have been. Everything below his knees was missing, his new American Eagle faded jeans turning deep red with his own blood. His pelvis was crushed. As he was knocked down, he had instinctively covered his face and chest with his arms. The force of the debris flying at him practically severed the middle finger of his left hand. Under any other circumstance, the dangling finger would have been cause for alarm, but then it seemed more like an afterthought.
The pool of blood Paul was lying in was getting wider by the minute. People staggering past him searching for a way off the boat turned away from the grotesque nature of his injuries. Most figured that if he wasn’t already dead, he would be soon. They were in survival mode. They needed to get off the ferry, needed to call their family to reassure them they were all right, the familiar voices on the other end of the calls proof that they had indeed survived the terrifying crash. People weren’t sure if it was an accident or an explosion, and they didn’t want to linger to find out. It was just two years after 9/11, and New Yorkers had learned the painful lesson not to wait around for help, but to escape as quickly as possible.
Paul was also intent on escaping. He raised himself up on his elbows and began dragging himself toward the center of the ferry. The middle of the boat would be safer if the ferry sank, he calculated. His brain had not yet processed the pain. Fueled by pure adrenaline, he inched his mangled body across the floor. He considered screaming for help but knew he needed to conserve his energy. He lifted his shoulders to hoist himself over again when he first heard her voice.
Can I help you? Kerry asked, and then repeated the question several more times, her forceful tone rousing him from his overwhelming exhaustion.
You are going to make it off this boat, she said. Do you understand me? What is your name?
Paul, he managed to say. He was cold now. Shivering with shock. Kerry took off her sweater and wrapped it over his shoulders, carefully tucking it in on the sides. His eyes lingered on her face as he tried to process what was happening.
Kerry had other plans. With the amount of blood draining from his femoral artery, she was going to lose him if she didn’t work quickly. She took off Paul’s belt but needed a second one.
Give me your belt, she called out to a passing commuter. She was still on her knees next to Paul and had to wave the guy over.
Take your belt off and give it to me now. I need it to save this man’s life, she ordered. The man tried not to focus on the bloody scene below Paul’s knees and stripped off his belt as quickly as possible. By the time he handed it to Kerry, his face was already pointed in the other direction toward the ferry exit.
Kerry expertly fashioned tourniquets above Paul’s knees to stop the bleeding. Back home in the United Kingdom, she was part of an operating room team. She was accustomed to the sight of blood, but it was always in a sterile and controlled setting. But there she was, solely responsible for a gravely injured man. He was growing pale. She sat on his thighs to help stop the bleeding. After the jarring impact of the crash, her own neck was sore and getting tighter. She closed her eyes momentarily, said a silent prayer, and then snapped back to reality. She heard sirens approaching.
She held Paul’s good hand, the one that didn’t have a dangling appendage. She gently rested the injured one on his chest. After what seemed like an eternity, the crew finally pulled the ferry into its slip and the desperate crowds started filing past, determined to get to safety and away from the hellish scene on the boat. Some of the injured sat slumped with their backs resting against the side of the boat. Some of the dead lay on the floor, their bodies fixed at unnatural angles. The air hung heavy with the smell of jagged metal, exposed insulation, and fear.
Kerry had tried asking the crew on the ferry for help, but they were panicked and unprepared to assist with the catastrophic injury Paul had suffered. She craned her neck to see if the paramedics had made it to their section of the ferry. She saw a team approaching with a wooden stretcher and waved them down.
We need help over here! she yelled. He’s going to die if you don’t help me right away.
Kerry didn’t want to alarm Paul, but she had to plead her case and compete against the other people who needed help too. There weren’t enough paramedics yet to help everyone, and this crew was in triage mode. They rushed over and put down their gear bags as they assessed the extent of Paul’s injuries.
Sorry, Paul remembers hearing one of the paramedics say. We can’t take him. We can only take people who have a chance.
I need you to help him, Kerry shot back, her tone trending angrier by the second and her face growing flushed.
No way, the paramedic said, beginning to walk away. His partner reached down to pick up his gear bag with the lifesaving supplies. But Kerry got to it first and snatched it up.
You want this bag back? She held the bag by its handles and shook it for emphasis. Then you take him to the hospital first. I’m not giving this back unless you take Paul now.
Kerry had resorted to threats. She was desperate, and she knew these crucial minutes would mean the difference between life and death.
Watching the drama unfold from his position on the floor, Paul managed a weak smile. Kerry was spicy, he thought. He didn’t have to yell and scream for help. She was taking care of that for him.
Realizing they had been overruled, the paramedics got to work. They turned Paul to his side and gingerly lowered him onto the stretcher. It was the first of many times he would feel pain as the reality of his shattered pelvis and missing limbs reached his brain. The team carried him off the ferry to the waiting ambulance. As Kerry updated them on his condition, she gazed into Paul’s brown eyes and reassured him that he was going to make it, that he was going to see his parents and his siblings and the Jersey Shore again.
You saved his life, one of the paramedics told Kerry. It was his subtle way of saying goodbye, of releasing her from any responsibility from that point onward. He turned his back as he went to lift Paul into the ambulance. They hoisted the strapping young man into the back and were about to slam the double doors closed. Paul was stable now, the IV flowing into his vein and the oxygen mask over his face. It would be a short ride to the Level 1 trauma center at Staten Island University Hospital, where he would be the first patient from the ferry crash to arrive.
No, Kerry replied. I’m riding with him.
As the ambulance pulled away from the ferry terminal, the crew made a left at the first traffic light.
You’re going the wrong way, Paul interjected after moving the oxygen mask aside. Kerry’s eyes widened.
Saint Vincent’s is a right turn, Paul continued. He had seen the name of Saint Vincent’s Hospital on the side of the ambulance and assumed he was headed there. The lifelong Staten Islander, who’d had his legs severed less than an hour ago, was giving driving directions.
Kerry exhaled. She knew then that Paul was going to make it. She stayed by his side until they wheeled him into the emergency room. And then she was gone.
Finding the woman who saved their son was the reason the Esposito family first contacted the news media. As the hospital nurse asked Paul to count backward from ten before he was put under for surgery, he recited his mother Audrey’s name and phone number. The nurse’s blue eyes, visible above her surgical mask, sparkled as she remarked how lucid Paul was for someone who had been so gravely injured. Paul knew he had no ID on him—he was always forgetting his wallet—and he didn’t want to languish in the hospital without his family. Audrey and Anthony Esposito were at Staten Island University Hospital by the time their youngest son woke up from the first of what would be twelve surgeries over the next three months.
Paul’s grandfather, Michael Esposito, was the first one to call Kerry an angel. Paul had described how she stayed with him, how she fought for him, and how she believed in him when others were willing to leave him for dead. Without her on that ferry, the Esposito family was sure they would have been planning Paul’s funeral. They were determined to find her and to thank her. All they knew from Paul was that her name was Kerry and that she was a nurse with a British accent. Working with hospital administrators and the NYPD, the Esposito family released the details of their search to the press. Even the haziest details about how Kerry saved Paul set off a firestorm of media attention. The Staten Island Ferry crash was the worst mass-transit accident in at least a generation. We had identified our hero. Now we just had to find her.
After leaving Paul at the hospital, Kerry took a bus back to the hostel where she was staying. She still had blood on her clothes. The next day, she wrote a letter to Paul’s family to ask how he was doing. When she called Staten Island University Hospital to get the Esposito home address to mail it, she learned that the family was desperate to find her.3 Their news conference and reunion were planned for the next day.
Paul first appeared on television two days after the ferry crash. My interview was one of dozens that chronicled the miracle of his survival and the courageous nurse on board who saved him. Paul and Kerry’s story was the lead in every local newscast. They dominated newspaper headlines not only in New York City but also around the world, especially in the United Kingdom where Kerry’s photo and details on her heroics were splashed across the tabloid pages.
The Italian food that attracted Kerry to Staten Island in the first place? She finally had it at the Esposito family home. She was immediately adopted into the family and sat around their dining room table laughing while Paul’s siblings recounted his high school exploits before everyone grew quiet as she detailed what happened on the ferry. Audrey and Anthony Esposito lingered when they hugged her that night. Her very presence was otherworldly, knowing the power of what she had done. Paul thinks of October 15, 2003, as his second birthday, making Kerry his second mother.
Paul remembers his days at the hospital took on an almost predictable routine. Wake up in the middle of the night—he was never a good sleeper. Try to get back to sleep. Wake up again in the morning feeling groggy from all the painkillers. Joke around with the nurses who’d come in to change his bandages and clean his wounds while willing himself to endure the pain. Eat a little breakfast. Get ready for the media.
Truth is, Paul liked the visitors. The seemingly endless parade of photographers and reporters like me filing in and out of his room was a welcome distraction. He was twenty-four years old and contemplating life with no legs. His mind would wander back to the moment of impact, the two steps he was able to eke out that prevented his torso from being severed instead of his legs. Paul’s smile when I walked in to meet him? It was genuine. Because he knew that my questions and our conversation would afford him not only some time away from his darkest thoughts, but also the space to process what had happened to him.
“Telling the story took the power out of it,” Paul said. “Turns out I was doing the right thing without knowing it, talking about the accident over and over again. It made it easier to digest everything.”
Paul’s story of survival resonated with New Yorkers. Post–9/11, the images from the mass-casualty disaster triggered intense feelings and bad memories. The crash killed ten people and injured seventy-two others, one so critically that she would eventually die as well. Seeing Paul’s smiling face on the evening news was a salve to the city. His optimistic outlook gave people hope. In saying that he was going to heal, he was telling New Yorkers that they were going to heal too.
During the first six weeks he was in the hospital, Paul received hundreds of letters and phone calls from people around the world. Some were from fellow amputees, encouraging him and sharing their own stories of survival. That included Paul McCartney’s wife at the time, Heather Mills, who had lost her leg after a motorcycle crash. Paul had been named for Paul McCartney, so that call had a special resonance with his family.
The letter Paul received that struck him most was from a man who said he was severely depressed, even suicidal. “He saw me on TV smiling and being optimistic and it gave him a new perspective. So then I didn’t want to turn down interviews for the news because I thought I might be helping more people.” Paul had become the unofficial spokesman for the Staten Island Ferry crash victims, his sarcastic sense of humor the most New York way of dealing with the pain and trauma.
Kerry’s side of the story was equally compelling and, for us reporters, irresistible. She was the hero: the right person at the right place at the right time. On October 17, Kerry took questions from dozens of journalists at Staten Island University Hospital in a news conference format, seated behind a microphone at a long table like an NFL coach after a game. She was stoic and compassionate, matter-of-fact about how her emergency training had prepared her for a moment like this. When Paul’s grateful father enveloped her in a hug, I had tears in my eyes. Her own face was flushed pink with emotion. She was like a mythical creature, her courageous story so compelling that my broadcast scripts practically wrote themselves. Later that afternoon sitting in the live truck, I wondered, If I had been on that boat, would I be Kerry? Or would I be one of the dozens of nameless people who averted their eyes and kept walking?
Kerry’s capable actions in the face of complete chaos stood in stark contrast to the inept response of the ferry boat crew. While initial news reports cited the strong winds that afternoon as a possible cause for the ferry veering off course, the truth was that the people charged with getting the boat to shore safely had failed. In a violation of procedure, Assistant Captain Richard J. Smith was alone in the pilothouse as the ferry headed to shore at eighteen miles an hour. Smith told investigators he had taken painkillers the night before and blacked out at the controls as a result. Captain Michael Gansas was in the other pilothouse preparing for an inspection, unable to avert the disaster. Gansas later testified that Smith “kept on saying ‘I must have dozed off and fallen asleep’…. He was pretty erratic and throwing his hands in the air. I yelled at him to come back, but he was in another world.”4
After the collision with the pier ripped a ten-foot-tall gash along practically the entire length of the starboard side of the ferry, Captain Gansas transferred power to the rear engines and steered the ferry to its slip so rescuers could board. Once they were securely docked, Assistant Captain Smith ran off the boat, jumped in his car, and locked himself in the bathroom of his home, where police later told reporters he slit his wrists and shot himself with a pellet gun in the heart.5 He survived the suicide attempt and was rushed to the same hospital where some of the ferry crash victims were fighting for their lives.
Captain Gansas was suspended without pay by the city of New York. He was not prosecuted and instead agreed to testify against Smith, who eventually pleaded guilty to eleven counts of seaman’s manslaughter and served more than a year in prison. He told victims’ families at his sentencing that he would forever regret not calling in sick that day.6 His supervisor, Patrick Ryan, pleaded guilty to one count of seaman’s manslaughter and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.
New York City paid more than $100 million to settle all the claims. The victims and their families cited not only the captains’ incompetence in their lawsuits, but also the city for its failure to adequately train its employees. Paul’s notice of claim said, “Disgustingly, members of the Staten Island Ferry crew … ran past Paul Esposito as he lay on the boat battling for his life,” and accused them of “acts of cowardice.”7
The Andrew J. Barberi ferry, one of the biggest in the city’s fleet, underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation and was back on the water nine months after the disaster. It crashed again in 2010, a far less serious incident that still sent dozens of people to the hospital. It remains in service.
Five weeks after the accident, on Thanksgiving 2003, Paul was able to leave the hospital for the first time. It was only for six hours, but it allowed him to sit with his family and give thanks collectively for his survival. They had to move the feast to his great-grandma’s house, where his wheelchair could enter the front door directly into the living room. By that time, Paul had already endured multiple surgeries, including the complete removal of his knees to make wearing hightech prosthetics possible. He had endured so much upheaval at that point that even the barbaric proposal of willingly sacrificing his knees was accepted without much comment. He had his bad days, the days where he could barely make out a smile for visitors. But mostly, his optimism and sense of humor sustained him, even as he needed two hundred staples throughout his body to hold him together.
Paul learned to walk again. His youth worked to his advantage, and physical therapists marveled at his progress, as he transitioned quickly from the awkward gait of a toddler to moving smoothly along on his six-figure C-legs, donated by a local health-care company. Going back to his job at China Grill was neither practical nor appealing. He dreamed of becoming an architect, designing houses for people with similar physical limitations. He visited the Jersey Shore with his friends and family, staring at the waves rolling in and feeling the dueling emotions of peace and anxiety.
Paul’s parents, Audrey and Anthony, took full responsibility for his care once he came home from the hospital. Their house was outfitted with a ramp for Paul to enter in his wheelchair. Getting around with no legs proved a constant challenge, especially in wintertime when the sidewalks were coated with treacherous snow and ice. Paul was frustrated and dejected at times, but his family’s charismatic sense of humor kept his spirits high. “Laughter is the best medicine. We joke about everything, and that was a huge help,” Paul remembers.
For Christmas in 2004, Paul’s brother got him a collector’s set of classic New York vehicles, which included the iconic orange Staten Island Ferry. Paul’s brother quipped that there should have been an ambulance to accompany the boat. Paul’s two brothers and sister never let him feel sorry for himself and did not indulge any pity. They joked with Paul about his missing legs, teased him about his terrible luck, and moved on to the next subject. “Little things like that keep you laughing throughout the whole process. You try not to take it too seriously,” he says.
Across the Atlantic, Kerry Griffiths was trying to chart her own future after that fateful trip to New York City. The truth was far more complicated than Kerry could explain to us at the news conference microphone that afternoon. She was haunted by the ferry crash, the violence of the impact itself and what horror could have befallen her. The smell of the mangled boat, the sounds of people screaming, the look of sheer terror in people’s eyes, and her desperation to save Paul. The miracle of his survival had not dissipated her fear; instead it metastasized into an overwhelming suspicion that even picture-perfect days could end in disaster. She suffered anxiety attacks and nightmares.8
Paul was one of several people who had limbs amputated in the violent crash. Kerry could never explain why she went to Paul first. Tragically, it was a zero-sum equation. Almost six years after the disaster, Kerry’s lawyers told a judge that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on not only by suffering a fall and witnessing the carnage itself, but also by her inability to assist thirty-nine-yearold Debra Castro.9 Castro was heading home to her husband after a doctor’s appointment when the ferry crashed. Just like Paul, both her legs were torn off and she suffered severe internal injuries. It’s unclear if Kerry ever saw Castro, but she couldn’t be in two places at once. Castro endured close to twenty surgeries before dying a couple of weeks before Christmas.10 She never woke up from the medically induced coma that doctors placed her in shortly after she arrived at the hospital.
I reached out to Kerry several times during my research for this book. She did not respond to my requests, and I can’t say I blame her. Reflecting on my own role, I wonder if casting Kerry as the “hero” in my news stories made things worse for her. Did we put too much pressure on Kerry to field our dozens of questions? Should she have been sitting in front of numerous cameras less than forty-eight hours after a major trauma? She was visiting a foreign country and didn’t have the support network around her that she might have had at home in the United Kingdom. Did we ignore her mental health in favor of our hero narrative?
I wonder what it was like for her to be called an angel when she was haunted by the blood she hadn’t knelt in, the people whose cries went unanswered. What it was like to see herself celebrated on the cover of newspapers and on TV, when inside she felt she had failed the other families. She was just a tourist in search of a good meal and instead went home with the heavy burden of survivor’s guilt.
After suing New York City for $5 million, Kerry would eventually settle for $62,300 in 2009 after she alleged that the ferry’s crew utterly failed to help her save Paul. She was unable to return to her job as an operating room nurse, the stress too intense after everything she had witnessed. Paul still speaks with Kerry once a year, and she will always be a part of the Esposito family. They have an unbreakable bond, Kerry being the sole reason for Paul’s life past age twenty-four.
I was shocked that he remembered my name. It had been seventeen years since I interviewed Paul Esposito, since I approached his hospital bed and thought about how it could easily have been me in that hospital gown, so random were the circumstances that landed him there. I had tried emailing and calling other Paul Espositos from Staten Island, only to be met with “this number has been disconnected” messages and bounced-back emails. But as soon as this Paul Esposito picked up the phone, I knew it was him. I remembered his voice.
“Is this Paul? Hey—it’s Jen Maxfield. I interviewed you for Eyewitness News after the accident.” I hadn’t expected him to pick up, given my other failed attempts. I was momentarily speechless, a rare condition for me. I also felt a nagging sense of guilt. Why had I waited seventeen years to call? I had thought of Paul often over the years, but why didn’t I take the initiative to check back sooner?
He responded to me as though I were a long-lost friend. I could hear that despite moving away, he still maintained his Staten Island accent. I could tell that he was smiling. That same wide smile that captivated so many of our viewers in 2003, prompting them to mail him hundreds of get-well cards to the hospital and to his parents’ home. That same smile that reassured New Yorkers that we were going to heal from the collective trauma too. That we were stronger than the mistakes of the people we had trusted to get us across New York Harbor safely.
Paul moved out of Staten Island a few years after the crash and now lives in Broward County, Florida, where the sun shines more than 240 days a year and where it’s easier for him to use his hand-cycle without the obstacles of snow and ice. Owning a one-story house with no stairs is a requirement for him, but that’s what everyone has on his quiet block, where the trees curve out over the street and meet to form an arch down the middle. The tidy ranch houses on either side stretch longer than the eye can see, with no hills to shorten the view as it stretches over the horizon. Paul still goes home to New Jersey to visit his niece and nephew and to Staten Island to catch up with his friends. But South Florida is home now, a place where he has learned to be completely independent as a disabled person.
Paul no longer uses prosthetic legs. He found them hot and uncomfortable, more trouble than they were worth to him. He uses a wheelchair to get around and doesn’t bother trying to hide the fact that he has no legs below his thighs. He loves to exercise and rides a bicycle with hand pedals on the many bike trails around his house. He drives a minivan outfitted with hand controls. After close to an eight-figure settlement with New York City, he doesn’t need to work and doesn’t choose to.
“I’m retired,” Paul says. “I’m content spending my days exercising, gardening, and swimming.” He confesses, dating is a challenge. He says he’s content being single and is thankful for his niece and nephew, since he doubts he will ever have children of his own.
Paul’s decision to forgo prosthetic legs gives him the opportunity to educate other people about living independently as a double amputee. If he was the unofficial spokesman for the victims of the Staten Island Ferry crash, now he is the unofficial local spokesman for not letting physical limitations get in the way of an active lifestyle. Paul will show people how his van’s hand controls work when they approach him in parking lots. He encourages other disabled people and their families to think big, to not let the wheelchair stop them.
“The end result for what happened to me was that I helped a lot of people. Even if I’m just going out to the grocery store in the wheelchair, people want to talk to me,” Paul explains. “Sometimes I feel like a therapist. If my purpose is helping them, I’m more than happy with that.”
He still goes out on boats, but loud noises generally frighten him and bring back dark memories of the crash. He never rode the Staten Island Ferry again. Unlike other victims whose minds erase memories of the specifics of the trauma, Paul remembers every detail with utter clarity. Other than Kerry, he never sought out other ferry crash victims because he was afraid that his vivid memories could trigger things they might have forgotten. “I knew how I was handling it, but I never wanted to push it on anyone else to make them want to talk about it,” Paul explains.
Paul and I discussed the media coverage, the hospital visits from dozens of reporters, and the experience of repeating his story to strangers like me. I wanted to know how it felt to recite the gory details of his own survival from his hospital bed, how it felt to share his suffering with the world. Paul believes it was largely positive, even therapeutic. “Talking about it made it less scary for me,” he tells me. “It doesn’t seem so big and horrible if it’s something you can just casually talk about.”
Paul is frequently asked how he lost his legs, whether in line at a store or at a friend’s backyard barbecue. If he’s in a rush, he’ll just say he was in a boat accident. If he has more time, he will tell his story about how the wall crashed down on him and how Kerry fought for his life and inspired him not to close his eyes and let it all slip away. He is neither angry nor bitter. In fact, he doesn’t even believe October 15, 2003, was the worst day of his life.
“The ferry crash was the start of a new chapter,” Paul says. A chapter in which he takes nothing for granted and savors the beauty of every day, whether it’s planting his garden or watching alligators in the Everglades.
After waking up in the hospital, Paul learned that he had flatlined and that doctors and nurses had worked tirelessly to bring him back to life. He considers everything that happened after that moment a second chance. He appreciates life more now, believing that his mere existence is a miracle. He wonders sometimes—what if he had stayed at China Grill longer that afternoon and got on the next ferry? What if he hadn’t moved from his seat in the back of the boat to go to the top deck? What if Kerry had decided to go in search of Italian food in Brooklyn instead? In a second, his entire life could have played out differently. But he says he can’t complain. He is fine in the end. His resilience and strength helped lift the spirits of a fragile city.
“To this day, people stop me when I do my hand-cycling,” Paul tells me from his Florida home. “They say, ‘I was depressed and then I see you happy as a clam riding your bike with no legs, and you’re smiling.’ I find what makes me happy in life. Even in those dark moments.”