7-Year-Old Says He Was in 9/11 Plane Crash – His parents discover chilling truth

It was quite a surprise seven years ago when my son was born. It was an amazing experience, of course. The first time I held Cade in my arms was amazing because I wasn’t supposed to be able to have children. Cade was different; he was like an old man. He wasn’t like the bouncy baby. He just always looked at you like,

“What are you, and who are you?”

Cade was an early crawler, early talker, early walker, early everything. At one and a half, two years old, he was using very intricate words, very intelligent words. He could hold conversations with adults.

It was around the age of three that Cade started talking about that he remembers dying. I would be in bed, and Cade would just start crying in the middle of the night, and he would wake up screaming about working in a tall building, that he could see the Statue of Liberty from his office. He told me he dreamed that he was falling with the building, like the way he died. It’s surreal for a three-year-old to be talking about New York and talking about death. Honestly, I started to think, could he have been… could it be… could he have been in the World Trade Center?

But there was a huge part of me that said, wait a minute, that can’t be. It can’t be. We didn’t show him anything, there’s no way he could have known about it. It was before school, it was before preschool. No one in my family knows anyone involved in the World Trade Center, and he’s never been to New York. I noted it, but I never thought anything of it. I noted it as a sign of autism; I just thought he had a vivid imagination.

A little bit later, he became obsessed with planes. At first, Cade was totally petrified by the airplanes, like they were monsters. He wasn’t scared of them being in the air; it’s more like he was scared of where they were going. It was obsessive. Cade wasn’t just into planes, he was obsessed with planes. Driving through downtown was hard for him. He wouldn’t get out of the car and walk around, and he had a fit if planes flew over downtown.

Cade is a seven-year-old now, and to this day, acting around tall buildings is frantic for him. It feels creepy, like, to look up.

“I would not like to go in that tall building.”

He doesn’t want to be around them, he doesn’t want to be close to them.

“That big shiny one looked just like the Twin Towers. It brings back a lot of memories, but I’m not going in, okay.”

I was worried, I was concerned. We would make excuses. I’d say,

“Well, you know, that’s his personality.”

And it finally did get to the point where I couldn’t deny it anymore. He just flat out said that he was in a building that was hit by something, but it exploded, and that he had fallen. Pieces suddenly came together like a puzzle: the planes, the tall buildings. This person was at the World Trade Center.

“The plane hit the World Trade Center, then it got stuck in the building. When I was falling, I was still alive, and then all the rubble hit me. I don’t feel anything because I died.”

I’m feeling very sad for him because I don’t imagine a man going through this, I imagine my baby going through this. And so, I still to this day, I can’t make the difference in my head. When he describes it to me, it’s my Cade. This is happening to him. I don’t know how you get past that. I mean, life has so many things happen that you have to get past. How do you get past remembering that?

At this point, Cade started asking me to change his name, that he didn’t like Cade. He was just very insistent that Cade was not his name. He had a name now. So I went online, and I posted Cade’s story on a web board, hoping that other people would maybe help me find answers. And it was actually another mother who sent me the link, and she said there was a man that worked in the World Trade Center, and he died on 9/11.

His life mimics what Cade describes his life, and his death was… it was absolutely shocking. Absolutely. I had to tell everyone I found it. I pulled up the obituary, the pictures, but I’d never thought about contacting the victim’s family. Continuing to follow through with anything to do with 9/11 may interrupt their mourning process. But also, what would you say? What would you say to somebody?

“Your son didn’t die, he is just someone different now.”

What would you say? I mean, I would imagine if somebody called me with that, I would hang up the phone. I’ve done the investigation, I’ve made the connection. Now I know. I know the truth, I know who he was, I know how he died.

But as a mother, I’m feeling very helpless. I can’t make this memory go away. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to fix this. My husband and I have been lost for seven years on how to raise this one. Cade’s situation now in the neighborhood is bleak. There are people in the neighborhood who don’t want their kids to play with Cade. Cade has a hard time with the other kids his age, and it’s making his childhood miserable. Every friend he’s ever told the story to has called him a liar and laughed at him. Teachers tend to not like him because he was scaring the other children or he was disrupting the class.

I’m heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken. You just want everybody to like your kid. If they would open their eyes, if they would just open their mind a little bit and understand. My priority now is to just make life as easy as possible on Cade. Try to help him to be comfortable in his Cade body. Every parent is told to affirm their kid, that they’ll be more successful than you are, and they don’t have to work as hard as you in life, and that, you know, eventually one day people will be able to understand him. I know he is because I love him. I wouldn’t trade him in for anything in the world. I need him to learn to be Cade, to learn to be a kid again, to learn to laugh. And I think we’re going to get there. I do.