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9/11 'dust lady' dies of cancer blamed on attack

August 26, 2015

A 9/11 survivor who appeared in one of the most haunting photos of the atrocity has died of stomach cancer. Bank worker Marcy Borders blamed her cancer on dust she inhaled as she fled the World Trade Center.

https://p.dw.com/p/1GLkr
9/11 survivor Marcy Borders has died of stomach cancer, which she blamed on inhaling dust during the attacks.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/AFP

Marcy Borders, who earned the moniker "The Dust Lady" after she was photographed covered in a thick layer of ash as she ran from one of the collapsing towers, has died at the age of 42.

Her family first announced her death Monday on Facebook following Borders' year-long battle with stomach cancer, which she had blamed on her exposure to chemical pollutants in the dust she inhaled during the attack.

Borders, who was 28 at the time of the attacks, was just one month into a job at Bank of America in one of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 in New York.

She had been working on the 81st floor of the north tower when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the building, and she ran out into the street rather than remaining at her desk as her supervisor had ordered her to do.

As one of the towers collapsed, she took refuge in a nearby office building, where news agency AFP photographer Stan Honda took the striking photo of Borders, shrouded in a cloud of dust, that was beamed around the world.

"I can't believe my sister is gone," her brother Michael Borders wrote on Facebook, asking for people's prayers.

Her cousin Elnardo Borders wrote: "My emotions are all over the place right now."

Borders suffered years of depression following 9/11 attacks

After the attacks, Borders fell into a decade-long spiral of depression and alcohol and drug abuse, losing her job at Bank of America, where she ignored repeated offers of a transfer.

Though she eventually recovered, she spent much of her time in her two-room flat in one of the poorer parts of Bayonne, a community in New Jersey over the bridge from Manhattan.

"I still live in fear. I can't think about being there, in those targets, the bridges, the tunnels, the (sub­way) stations," she said in a March 2012 interview.

"The father of my daughter took her; I can't take care of myself, so I can't take care of her."

Borders went into rehab in 2011, and had said that news of the death of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden helped her find peace and recover from her trauma.

mh/jil (AFP, dpa)