As a part of the 2996 Project

I originally wrote this in 2006. I intend to post it every year just so no one forgets Mr. David William Nelson and his family and all of the other victims of 9/11. Some of those victims didn’t die that day, but they’re still victims.

I am honoring David William Nelson today. He was a very good friend to many people, they all pray for him now. He died in the attack on America that happened on September 11, 2001.

Mr. Nelson was at the World Trade Center because that’s where his office was. He was on the 92nd floor of the North Tower on 9/11. The plane that hit the North Tower, American Flight 11, hit the building at floors 94-98. I read a report from someone who was on the 91st floor and he said that there were big huge piles of sheetrock and debris that were blocking everything above the 91st floor from coming down and everything below the 91st floor was blocked from coming up.

There were 1,344 people on the 19 floors above the 91st floor. All 68 of the people in the Carr Futures office on the 92nd floor survived the plane crashing into the building but every single one of them died because they were sealed off from getting down just one floor where they could have made it to safety. Mr. Nelson and his friends at Carr Futures didn’t have any chance at all because they were one floor too high.

Mr. Nelson was married to a lady named Elizabeth Crawford who is an artist who paints still life oil paintings and they have two children, one of them is named Ingrid, who was 8 when her daddy was killed and the other is Frederick, who was only 4 at the time. On September 8, 2001 Mr. Nelson and his wife celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary. He lived in Park Slope, which is a part of Brooklyn, New York. He was a Senior Vice President at Carr Futures and he was only 50 years old.

Mr. Nelson did a bunch of things in his life even though he didn’t get to live a long time like he should have. He once told his mom, who is named Betty, that there was no reason why he could only have one career, so he was going to have several. His very first love of all was music but he found out it was hard to make a living doing that. At one time he played with the St. Louis Philharmonic.

So first he got a degree from a college called Johns Hopkins, and he was a social worker in Baltimore for a year. But he got shot in both legs by a drug dealer who thought that he had reported him. He then decided to move to Boston where he worked as a bartender and played the French Horn. Next he went to work for his father at Clayton Brokerage, in Clayton, Missouri. After that he made his way to Wall Street and worked for Dean Witter before he wound up at Carr Futures (which is now called Calyon Financial).

Mr. Nelson’s dad is Warren Nelson and his mom is Betty Nelson. He has a brother named Robert Nelson and his sisters are Barbara Goldman and Marcia Wilson.

Mr. Nelson was born in St. Louis, Missouri. It was hard to find information about Mr. Nelson, most of the people who wrote things about him only told a couple little things here and there. I think he was a very quiet man who probably just liked to be with his family. Everyone who said anything about him says how nice he was and how much they miss him.

His mom says: “Someone wrote that there aren’t many men in this world you can trust, but he was one of them. What was special about David, I think, is that he was sensitive to other people’s feelings.”

I worked really hard to find information about Mr. Nelson. I even wrote a bunch of emails to people and I posted on some sites that talked about him. I keep hoping that someone will write me back some day with more information about Mr. Nelson because I would like to tell you more about him and what kind of a man he was. I will update this every year as I find more stuff. For now, this all I know about Mr. David William Nelson.

Update: 9/11/06 at 8:09 a.m. … Here is Mr. Nelson’s quilt block from United in Memory. I got their permission to use it! Yay! Thank you! If you click on the picture it will open up a new window and the picture will get bigger so you can see the block better. There is a whole quilt made for the people who died on 9/11, some of the people only have one block, some people have more than one. Mr. Nelson only has one but it is beautiful. I think he would like it, don’t you?

This tribute is part of the 2,996 Project. I have decided I want to keep a permalink on my sidebar to this entry. That way people can always read about Mr. Nelson even if his entry is way down in my archives and that way he can be remembered better. I don’t want him to ever be forgotten because he was such a nice man and he didn’t deserve to die. None of them did.

The timestamp on my entry is 10:28 a.m. on September 11, which is about the time the tower Mr. Nelson was in collapsed back in 2001.

People who were on their cell phones with people they loved told them that all of the people at Carr Futures had lived from the plane crashing into the building above them, but they were all trapped and could not get out. I do not think Mr. Nelson was able to make any telephone calls but I am not sure. If he did, no one has put it in any story I read and I read a bunch of them. The last person to hang up from there was at 10:26 a.m., which was two minutes before the building collapsed. Mr. Nelson probably died in the collapse, or maybe sometime between 10:15 and 10:28.

I do not know of course but I am hoping that Mr. Nelson died very quickly. I want to think he just died in a blink without any pain and suddenly there he was in Heaven with bunches of people he loved surrounding him with love and comfort.

Tags: 9/11