While it was most assuredly not something she intended or wanted to become when she boarded her flight out of Newark Airport on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Marion Britton became a window into a moment of time whose specific details would have otherwise been left to the vagaries of time and speculation but for her efforts and those of several of her fellow passengers. Jurors in the 2006 sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui heard recordings of conversations passengers, including Ms. Britton, had with family and friends on the ground following the terrorists' takeover of the flight. It was Ms. Britton who reported to one of her friends that the hijackers had slit the throats of two of her fellow passengers.
She had the terrible misfortune of flying out of Newark that morning on United Flight 93, the destination of which was San Francisco, California, but the final resting place of which became Shanksville, Pennsylvania and not the murderous cowards' hoped-for targets of the White House or the U.S. Capitol Building, thanks to the desperate courage of its passengers.
Marion Britton spent more than two decades working for the United States Census Bureau. At the time of her death, she was the Assistant Regional Director of the Bureau's New York office. On what proved to be the final morning of her life, she had boarded Flight 93 with one of her co-workers, Waleska Martinez, to attend a conference in San Francisco.
Marion Britton was fifty-three years young at the time of her death.
-AK
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