By Alexandra Skores, CNN
(CNN) — Hilda Mayol was working in the World Trade Center when terrorists struck on September 11, 2001.
Evacuating, she saw people fleeing beside her hit by the falling debris and covered with dust from the burning skyscrapers.
“Keep going,” she told herself.
Two babies and a husband were waiting at home.
She made the long walk back to her family and safety. Then tragedy struck again.
On November 12, 2001, two months and a day after the attacks, Hilda boarded American Airlines Flight 587. It crashed just after takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, going down about 13 miles from where the World Trade Center had stood.
“I don’t like thinking about it,” Yari Mayol, her daughter, told CNN. “But sometimes, it just pops up how her final moments would have been. I know she would have been so scared. I just don’t know what she would have been thinking.”
Hilda was one of 265 people, most from the Dominican Republic, who died when the Airbus A300 plummeted into a residential area in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens.
It wasn’t another terrorist attack, as most of the world initially feared, but pilot error, the National Transportation Safety Board determined.
Now, 25 years later, and for the first time since the day of the crash, her family is publicly recounting Hilda’s story.
Hilda flees the crumbling World Trade Center
In September 2001, Hilda had just transferred to the Au Bon Pain restaurant on the ground floor of the World Trade Center.
She was a hard worker and had just been promoted to cashier, her older sister, Iris Joshua, said in an interview translated from Spanish. If their family in the Dominican Republic needed something, Hilda would send things from New York and work to support them, any way she could.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Hilda was at her job when she heard a loud, intense crash, Joshua described. At 8:46 a.m., the North Tower was struck by hijacked American Airlines Flight 11. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.
“Run!” Hilda’s boss shouted at her. “Run for your life!”
A firefighter stopped her to give her oxygen but had to go help other people fleeing the building.
She took the oxygen with her and kept running. She lived in Manhattan and needed to get home to her family.
Covered in white dust, Hilda walked home and checked in with family, both in the city and her native Dominican Republic.
Nearly 2,800 people died in New York on September 11 in the hijackings and collapse of the towers. But Hilda was OK.
November 12, 2001
Two months after the attacks, Hilda went back to work in New York and her children were visiting family in San Pedro de Macoris, a city on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic.
She couldn’t wait to see them – they had been away for about a week – so she took time off from her job and booked an earlier flight to pick them up. It was American Airlines Flight 587.
The night before the trip, Hilda called her sister Iris Joshua, in San Pedro de Macoris, to check in. She fixed her hair and was ready to travel.
“Estaba bien bonita,” Joshua said. She was very beautiful.
The next morning, Hilda went to JFK Airport and her husband went to work.
In the Dominican Republic, Joshua heard rumors something had happened when she went to pick up her kids from school. But her family said not to worry. Instead, they cooked for Hilda’s arrival. They wanted to welcome her with a home-cooked meal.
Then, a phone call.
“Did you hear?” the voice asked Joshua.
“Hear what?” she replied.
The caller abruptly hung up.
Not thinking twice about the call or the rumors, Joshua took a taxi to the airport to pickup Hilda. A neighbor next door offered to go with her, just in case something had happened.
On the arrivals boards at Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo, Joshua spotted American Airlines Flight 587.
But that plane would never arrive, having crashed in New York just after takeoff.
Two pilots, seven flight attendants and 251 passengers were on board. Most of the passengers were Dominican. Five people on the ground were also killed. It was the second deadliest plane crash in US history that wasn’t caused by terrorism.
Mental health counselors and priests swarmed the airport in Santa Domingo in case anyone needed attention when they heard of the news.
“I turned around, wondering what was happening,” Joshua said. “I don’t remember anything after that for several hours; I lost consciousness.”
When she finally could understand what was happening, Joshua said the family had gathered at her mother’s house. Everyone was coming to grieve and ask questions. A reporter from The Associated Press spoke to Hilda’s mother, Virginia Hernandez, who said she was still waiting for news about her daughter.
Joshua said investigators had to take DNA swabs from her, her mother and Hilda’s son Ambiory to help identify her.
A month later, Hilda’s husband and the rest of her family buried her in the Dominican Republic. They were told not to open the casket.
The NTSB later found the crash was caused when one of the pilots made “unnecessary and excessive” movements of the aircraft’s rudder, normally used to turn the plane. The forces were beyond what it was designed for and as a result, part of the tail tore off and fell into Jamaica Bay, leaving the plane out of control.
Remembering Hilda
Yari was just 10 months old when her mother died.
She’s 25 years old now and has a family of her own. Yari said she doesn’t remember much of her mom but asked many questions about her while she was growing up and thinks about her often.
“When I’m in the Dominican Republic, I always do try to go to her side of the family,” Yari said. “They always tell me stories about how she was and her character, and they say that that I remind them a lot of her, like physically and the way that I carry myself.”
In Belle Harbor, where the plane went down, a memorial wall stands just steps from the beach. Names are engraved onto bricks including one near the middle that reads, “Hilda Yolanda Mayol.” Every year, Yari attends a service there to remember the victims of the crash.
For Hilda’s older sister Joshua, every time a plane passes her home in the Dominican Republic, she remembers her sister and sheds a tear about the flight that never arrived.
That day she didn’t just lose a sister, she said. She lost someone who was like a mother.
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