Twenty years ago, Domenick C. Stampone, then an assistant Hudson County prosecutor, was on the eighth floor of the Hudson County Administration Building, getting ready to appear in court, when a colleague said there was a fire in one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center.
Gathered with other prosecutors and judges at the windows, with their sweeping, picture-postcard views of Lower Manhattan, he witnessed the second plane strike the south tower.
“At that moment I had this understanding it isn’t what we thought it was,” said Stampone, a former New Jersey State Bar Association (NJSBA) trustee, who was a member of the NJSBA Young Lawyers Division (YLD) and the New Jersey representative to the American Bar Association’s YLD and a coordinator of its disaster response team at the time.
Looking back on the 20th anniversary of 9/11
When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, members of the NJSBA and the state’s legal community felt compelled to take action on one of the darkest days in our country’s history. With more than 700 New Jersey residents perishing in the World Trade Center, perhaps no other bar association outside of New York had as unique a relationship to the events that day.
Like Stampone, those who were NJSBA members at the time recalled the swiftness with which the Association swung into action, its coordination with legal groups and services, and the overwhelming offers from the legal community to volunteer.
The NJSBA’s Mass Disaster Response Program was activated that afternoon, and its initial 40 volunteer attorneys began answering questions and providing guidance to victims and their families almost immediately. Within days, the program set up under tents with other service organizations at Liberty State Park in Jersey City.
It was a place where families could visit a single location to get help obtaining a New York death certificate—a necessary first step to begin receiving benefits but a challenge when so few had evidence of a body— and where they could ask questions and obtain guidance on resources and a multitude of legal matters. And sometimes, it was a place to express their grief.
Nancy Erika Smith, a labor and employment law attorney with Smith Mullin in Montclair and former NJSBA trustee, recalled that challenging time.
“For about three months, every day, instead of going to the office, I went to Jersey City” to volunteer, said Smith, who had signed up with the program six years earlier, when it was created after a pipeline explosion in Edison.
The work helping the families of victims of 9/11 was important, and at times emotionally “excruciating,” she said.
“They would play us the last voice mail message of their loved one saying goodbye so they could get the death certificate,” Smith said.
Within a month, the Mass Disaster Response Program teamed up with the Essex County Bar Association and other lawyer organizations, law firms, law schools and public interest groups to form the New Jersey Legal Response Team, to provide free legal representation for victims of 9/11.
The NJSBA created hotlines to start assisting New Jersey victims on a broader scale. And when the call came from the Attorney General’s Office that attorneys were needed at the newly established Family Assistance Center at Liberty State Park, the NJSBA was able to call on additional volunteers to help staff the center.
“It was a proud moment for the Association because people immediately put down whatever they were doing and came to the forefront and accepted assignments. There were so many areas of need,” said retired Judge Daniel M. Waldman, who was the NJSBA president at the time.
“The services were a great comfort to those who had suffered loss, and to be able to walk them through Liberty Park and get the help they needed was critical. They needed guidance, they needed comfort and they needed handholding. It was a heart-wrenching experience,” he said.
The NJSBA and its partners acted swiftly, setting up a training program for volunteer attorneys. Domenick Carmagnola, now president of the NJSBA and then president-elect of the Essex County Bar Association, helped train facilitators at the first training session at Rutgers Law School in Newark, which attracted 250 attorneys.
“The response from the legal community was heartening. During the darkest moments of 9/11, the NJSBA and legal community showed true compassion, dedication and integrity, helping to shine a light when none seemed possible,” Carmagnola said.