She Lost Her License Fleeing Cleveland on 9/11. 25 Years Later, She Still Wants to Know Who Sent It Home
Jody Hagemann was stranded at Cleveland Hopkins as the September 11 attacks unfolded. She eventually made it home to New York, where her mother had just been diagnosed with cancer and friends were still missing. Days later, the driver’s license she had unknowingly lost while fleeing the airport arrived in the mail with a note signed only “a Friend in Cleveland.” Twenty-five years later, she still wants to know who sent it.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — If September 11, 2001, was one of the worst days in American history, September 12 deserves to be remembered among its greatest. Not because the fear was gone. It certainly was not. Smoke still hung over Manhattan, families were still searching for people who would never come home, and no one knew whether more attacks were coming. What changed was the question people seemed to ask instinctively once the initial shock began to settle; What can I do to help?
That is why Cleveland 13 is publishing this story on September 12.
Amy Roth remembers the difference between those two days. Roth, a local tailor, worked at the Coast Guard Exchange in Cleveland in 2001. On September 11, her manager initially told her to stay home, then called again and asked her to come in. She was one of five employees chosen to work through the week, partly, she remembers, because they were compassionate people with calm voices. The instruction was essentially to worry less about running the store and more about answering the phone. Military members and relatives were calling because they were frightened and needed another person to talk to.
September 11 felt like shock, Roth said. September 12 felt different. People got up, made their coffee and began asking what they could do. “There was a feeling of hope. There was a feeling of, how can I help?” she remembered. “Everybody was working together. It was a great feeling of love.”
Twenty-five years later, that response may be as important to remember as the horror that caused it.
There is a plaque inside the Cleveland 13 News office honoring a man who understood the importance of remembering. His name was Harry John Roland, although visitors to Ground Zero knew him as the “World Trade Center Man.” Cleveland 13 met Harry there in 2023, where he had spent years stopping strangers, correcting misconceptions and teaching anyone willing to listen about the place where they were standing. He had worked on the 82nd floor of the South Tower and lost his nephew in the attacks. His mission afterward became almost relentless: “People need to know.”
Harry had another phrase that stuck: “History, don’t let it be a mystery.”
He died in 2024, before reaching this 25th anniversary. The plaque remains because Harry understood something that becomes more obvious with every passing year. Eventually, the people who remember an event firsthand are outnumbered by those who learned about it from someone else.
There was an almost eerie Cleveland connection in our reporting on Harry. While Cleveland 13 was interviewing him at Ground Zero, we were also tracing the origins of pieces of World Trade Center steel preserved back home in Northeast Ohio. A beam displayed in Euclid was eventually traced to the area between the 82nd and 83rd floors of the South Tower; the same floor where Harry had worked. The people establishing the steel’s provenance had not been told that detail about Harry beforehand.
History has a way of leaving threads behind.
Jody Hagemann has been holding onto one of them for 25 years.
In 2001, Hagemann was 25, a native New Yorker, an only child and a business traveler in Cleveland. She was scheduled to leave Hopkins for Madison, Wisconsin, shortly after 9 a.m. Back home, at around 8:45 that morning, doctors called her parents with the terrible news her mother had lung cancer.
At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03.
Hagemann’s flight never left Cleveland. It took off and immediately landed back on the runway at Hopkins. Passengers were taken off the aircraft and gathered around televisions in the terminal. She remembers people rushing to banks of public telephones to call New York and getting nothing but busy signals. “That’s when we put two and two together,” she said. “This isn’t just a little plane crash. This is much bigger than we think it is.”
Then an announcement came over the airport loudspeaker warning that a plane believed to have a bomb aboard was entering Cleveland airspace and everyone needed to evacuate. Hagemann ran outside with hundreds of others, spilling toward a nearby roadway as traffic came to a stop. Then everyone looked up.
The sky was bright blue and eerily quiet.
Twenty-five years of investigations have since sorted out details that were impossible for the people at Hopkins to understand in real time. United Flight 93 was actually being hijacked while under the control of the FAA’s Cleveland Center. Controllers heard sounds of a struggle and later a transmission saying there was a bomb aboard before Flight 93 turned east over Ohio and ultimately crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. At nearly the same time, Delta Flight 1989, another transcontinental Boeing 767 from Boston, was mistakenly suspected of being hijacked and was diverted to Cleveland. In the chaos of that morning, the two emergencies understandably became tangled in memories. The people running out of Hopkins did not know which plane was which. They knew only that New York had been attacked, and they had just been told to leave.
Somewhere in that rush, Hagemann dropped her driver’s license without realizing it.
Once people understood they would not be flying anywhere, another remarkably human scene unfolded at the rental-car counters. There were nowhere near enough cars, so stranded travelers started calling out destinations: Detroit, Albany, New York, Madison. Strangers headed in roughly the same direction began pairing up. Hagemann stayed with the man who had been seated behind her on the plane, a New Jersey resident named Bob Mengert. He arranged a rental car and hotel rooms, and the two decided they would figure out the rest together.
They bought toiletries at an almost-empty Target, tried to reach people back home and eventually recovered their luggage from the grounded plane. Hagemann finally reached her boyfriend and heard the roar of a crowd around him; he was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.
At around 11 that night, Mengert knocked on her hotel-room door. His boss was stranded near Detroit and needed to get home to New Jersey. Nobody was sleeping anyway, so they drove five hours west, picked up another stranger in the early morning and then turned east. Three people who barely knew one another spent the next several hours in a rental Hyundai headed toward New York, listening to the radio and deliberately talking about almost anything except what had happened.
The closer they got, the harder that became.
From a high stretch of highway in New Jersey, Manhattan finally came into view. Hagemann saw the smoke.
Until then, September 11 had existed for her through televisions, radio reports, airport announcements and phone calls that did or did not go through. Now she could see where the towers had been.
Mengert eventually dropped her at her car at Newark Airport. He and Hagemann are still in touch. Every September 11, they tend to reach out and acknowledge the experience that introduced them.
Hagemann drove to her parents’ home. Her mother and father were sitting in the living room when she arrived. Her father stood and finally told her the news they had learned near the beginning of that terrible morning. Her mother had cancer.
Hagemann fell to her knees. Her mother died a little more than a month later.
In the meantime, New Yorkers were trying to figure out who was alive. Hagemann went to homes of people who were missing and attended funerals for people who were not coming back. At one point, she and other friends in their 20s agreed to meet at a bar, partly because they simply needed to see one another in person. As she remembers the thinking now, it was essentially, 'whoever is still alive, meet us there.'
The bouncer asked for her identification. That was when Hagemann realized her driver’s license was gone. She had unknowingly traveled for two days during a terrorist attack without ID because Mengert had handled the rental car, hotel rooms and much of the journey home. Now she had one more problem to add to a list that already seemed impossible.
The next morning, an envelope arrived.
There was no return address. Inside was her license and a note:
“I found your license on the floor of the Cleveland airport and wanted to return it to you. I wish you and all of your fellow New Yorkers peace during this time of tragedy.”
It was signed only “a Friend in Cleveland.”
For Hagemann, it was not merely a nice gesture. Identification mattered enormously at that moment, and the anonymous stranger had removed a real burden from her life. More than that, she noticed that the note did not only wish her well. It extended that care to New Yorkers as a whole.
“It wasn’t just about me,” Hagemann said. “That license came back to me and it cared about everybody.”
She has told the story for 25 years. Earlier this year, she happened to sit beside two Cleveland Hopkins employees at a bar in Orlando, told them about the license and heard from them again as the anniversary approached. That encounter only sharpened the question she has carried for a quarter-century; in a world of search engines, social media and instant communication, how have she and the person who mailed that envelope never found each other?
What people remember
The large facts of September 11 belong to history. The smaller things belong to people.
Amanda Kurland lives in the Cleveland area now, but in 2001 she lived at Second Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan and worked in SoHo, less than a mile from the World Trade Center. She started that Tuesday listening to NY1 while getting ready for work. When she heard the first plane had struck the North Tower, she assumed it was an accident. Walking south, she heard people talking about terrorism and still thought they must be wrong. Then she reached a street with a clear enough view downtown and saw both towers burning.
Kurland spent much of the morning on the roof of the five-story building where she worked. At first, she and others watched what looked like debris falling. Then someone pointed out that some of it was shaped like human beings.
She went downstairs and washed the dishes.
“So silly when I look back,” she wrote this year, “but I just needed something mundane.”
It does not sound silly at all. When the mind cannot comprehend what it is seeing, a sink full of dishes is at least something familiar.
Kurland later returned to the roof and saw the first tower fall. Afterward, she remembers a huge, silent crowd moving slowly north on Greene Street, people covered in pale gray soot because transportation had stopped and walking was the only way out. For days she carried a scarf to cover her mouth because of the smoke and dust. The smell remains in her memory alongside the images of people falling and survivors walking uptown.
She happened to write her recollection this year at 8:46 in the morning, exactly 25 years after the first impact. Her final thought was simpler than everything that preceded it: “Hug your loved ones and be thankful for your lives.”
Here in Northeast Ohio, people remember televisions being wheeled into classrooms, parents suddenly arriving to pick children up, empty roads and a blue sky without contrails. One person recalled being in fifth grade and wondering why so many classmates apparently had doctor’s appointments on the same day. Another remembered being young enough to be annoyed that news coverage had replaced the usual children’s programming.
A University Heights resident approaching her 30th birthday this year carries an even more unusual connection to that morning; September 11 is her first memory. She remembers being picked up from pre-school early, not understanding why staff members around her were crying and feeling an unease she was too young to name. She went home, and for the next two days her and her siblings sat in front of the television with much of the rest of the world, waiting to see what would happen next. The memory remains vivid enough to produce a visceral reaction two and a half decades later. It was her first remembered experience and embedded in it is not only fear, but what she saw afterward. Adults around her helping one another and a country that, for a time, seemed determined to stand together.
That is the strange dividing line of this 25th anniversary. Some Americans remember exactly where they were. Others were children whose earliest memories were formed by it. A growing part of the country was not alive yet.
Harry worried about that.
Twenty-five years later, Northeast Ohio remembered
On September 11, 2026, Northeast Ohio marked the anniversary through names, bells, wreaths and physical endurance. At the Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ & Sailors’ Monument, the morning ceremony followed the timeline of the attacks beginning at 8:30. Wreaths were placed and taps sounded at the moments corresponding with the impacts, collapses and the crash of Flight 93, while biographies of Ohio victims were read aloud.
The Monument identified 13 victims with Ohio connections, 11 of them directly tied to Northeast Ohio: William Moskal of Brecksville; Kathleen “Kit” Faragher, who grew up in Russell Township; Joseph Heller of Rocky River; Christina Ryook, who grew up in Westlake; Debbie Medwig, formerly of North Olmsted; Susan Getzendanner, who grew up in Shaker Heights; John Hart, who lived in Cuyahoga Falls and worked in Cleveland; George Spencer III, who grew up in Shaker Heights; Todd Weaver, who grew up in North Canton; Terrance Michael Lynch, who grew up in Youngstown; and Lt. Col. David Scales, who lived in Cleveland and Berea. The exhibit also included Peter E. Mardikan because of family ties to Parma and Wendy R. Faulkner of Mason near Cincinnati.
Elsewhere, people climbed. At Progressive Field, first responders, members of the community and employees connected to Cleveland’s professional sports teams climbed the equivalent of the World Trade Center’s 110 stories. Hudson held its own 110-story climb at Memorial Stadium. Akron’s evening climb honored the first responders killed that day, and Canton firefighters climbed at the McKinley National Memorial while memorial aircraft flew from MAPS Air Museum. There was something especially fitting about airplanes being used as tribute when so many people’s memories of September 11 center on looking up and discovering an empty sky.
At Ground Zero, relatives once again read the names of those killed. For the first time, the ceremony included a seventh moment of silence for first responders, recovery workers, Lower Manhattan residents and others who survived the attacks but later died from 9/11-related illnesses. At the Flight 93 National Memorial, the names of the 40 passengers and crew were read and the Bells of Remembrance rang near the Wall of Names; the observances continued today, Saturday, with 40 candle lanterns in a luminaria ceremony and another Tower of Light over the Pennsylvania landscape.
Millions of Americans also marked the anniversary through service. The 9/11 Day organization planned meal-packing events in 50 cities, including Cleveland, involving roughly 50,000 volunteers and 20 million meals. The idea that September 11 should be answered with service feels particularly appropriate when listening to Roth describe September 12 or Hagemann describe what happened among strangers at Hopkins.
Nobody had instructed those travelers to trust one another. Nobody told Mengert that he needed to take responsibility for a young woman he had just met. Nobody ordered the stranger who found Hagemann’s license to pick it up, put it in an envelope and send it home.
People simply began doing the next useful thing. That is the part of September 12 worth preserving.
The day before had shown the country a level of cruelty almost impossible to comprehend. The following day showed something else. People made coffee, went to work, donated blood, searched for strangers, comforted people on telephones, hung flags from porches, stood in lines to volunteer and asked what they could do. The fear did not disappear, the grief had barely begun, and the country was far from understanding what the attacks would mean. Still, for a moment, helping each other felt less like an ideal than an instinct.
Harry’s fear was that eventually we would remember September 11 only as a collection of numbers and familiar images. The people who shared their memories with Cleveland 13 suggest otherwise.
History tells us that Flight 11 hit the North Tower at 8:46. Memory is Amanda Kurland walking to work believing it had to be an accident.
History records when the towers fell. Memory is washing dishes because looking at the sky has become unbearable.
History records the grounding of American aviation. Memory is Jody Hagemann standing outside Cleveland Hopkins and realizing she cannot hear an airplane.
History records nearly 3,000 deaths. Memory is a child wondering why everyone at school is crying, a Coast Guard employee being told that her job for the week is simply to talk to frightened people, or siblings sitting together in University Heights and learning, through the television, what a united America could look like.
The statistics are essential, but they cannot preserve those things by themselves, nor can they explain why a driver’s license matters.
Hagemann came home to a city in mourning, friends who were missing and a mother who was dying. Within that enormous amount of loss, one tiny thing moved in the opposite direction. Something came back.
The person who mailed her license could not have known that Hagemann would remember the envelope 25 years later. They did not know about her mother, the funerals ahead of her or the strange journey that had gotten her home. They apparently did not want recognition. They simply saw something belonging to another person on one of the worst days in American history and decided to return it.
Hagemann already knows what she would say if that person is found.
“You took a tremendous burden off of my life,” she said. “I couldn’t be more grateful.”
Perhaps someone remembers finding a New York driver’s license at Cleveland Hopkins. Perhaps a parent, spouse or grandparent once mentioned mailing it. Perhaps the anonymous sender has spent 25 years telling the other half of the same story without ever knowing that the young woman on the license has been searching for them too.
There is still a plaque for Harry Roland in our newsroom office. His reminder feels especially appropriate today, on September 12, after a day spent remembering what America lost and on a date worth remembering for what people chose to do afterward.
History should not become a mystery.
This history has survived. Now Cleveland may still be able to solve the one mystery left inside it. Who sent that license back to Jody?
If you found Jody Hagemann’s driver’s license at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on September 11, 2001, mailed it to her in New York, or believe you know the person who did, Cleveland 13 News wants to hear from you. Send us a message at tips@cleveland13news.com using the subject "Returned License on 9/11".
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