9/11 survivor and a reporter who covered it find common ground at a Georgia horse farm

MILTON, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — I never met Kayla Bergeron before the morning I drove out to Special Equestrians of Georgia to interview her. But there was no ice to break between us.

Bergeron was 68 floors up in the North Tower of the World Trade Center when Flight 11 hit on Sept. 11, 2001. I was on the streets of New York that morning, reporting on what was unfolding.

Twenty-five years later, we both live in Georgia. She moved here to care for her father, while I moved here for my career. And on a September morning at a therapeutic horse farm in Milton, we sat down together, along with my 13-year-old son, Cash, to talk about what that day did to us, and how we’ve spent the last quarter-century learning to live with it.

For those of us who were there, Sept. 11 isn’t history. It’s a physical memory. For my son, born years later, it’s something he’s intensely curious about and still trying to understand.

I brought him with me because I wanted him to hear it directly from someone who lived it. I didn’t expect that the horses would end up telling part of the story, too.

A therapy farm in Milton

Special Equestrians of Georgia is a nonprofit therapeutic horse farm in Milton founded and run by Stacey Edwards. It’s where Bergeron spends her weekends now, caring for rescue horses as part of her own recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s also where my son got to meet a horse who shares his name.

“Let me tell you something about Cash,” Bergeron told him when I introduced them. “The horse I first met here and worked with was named Cash. A little rescue, a little trauma.”

Bergeron was director of public affairs for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the morning of the attacks. She told us the building shook and lurched when the plane hit, then came back upright. Looking out a window with a view of the Statue of Liberty, she saw papers and glass falling outside.

As she moved her staff into the stairwells, the South Tower collapsed beneath them.

“It was like the entire earth shook,” Bergeron said. “The tower twisted, the lights went off, water running everywhere. And as the building twisted, we weren’t able to open the door to get out of the stairwell. That’s the moment you meet your maker. You never know how you’re going to respond. I just told myself, ‘I guess this is it.’”

A Port Authority police officer found another stairwell and led them out just moments before the North Tower fell. Bergeron survived. Seventy-three of her Port Authority colleagues did not. A photo of Bergeron and other survivors emerging from the rubble was published in newspapers all over the world.

What my son wanted to know

Cash asked Bergeron a question I hadn’t heard anyone ask her before.

“What did it feel like when the first plane hit?” he asked.

“I was in disbelief,” Bergeron told him. “I’m like, ‘What happened? What happened?’ It took a few moments until I saw some paper coming from above me... Sometimes you can be in a state of shock, but you keep moving and doing your job.”

I told them both about the moment I first understood, from the street, what I was watching.

“That’s when I realized about my own PTSD, it was from the sirens, the sounds of the first responder trucks and the scene that I saw of people jumping out of the buildings,” I said. “At first we didn’t know what it was, and then we realized that they were people... and that’s when it really became clear what a nightmare this was.”

Whether you were reporting on the street or evacuating a stairwell, adrenaline kept you standing that day. The trauma, it turns out, would last for much longer. For Bergeron, it caught up years later.

The mental health diagnosis

It never crossed Bergeron’s mind that she had PTSD.

“I didn’t know what it was until years later, when the wheels came off and I was finally diagnosed,” she said. “The racing thoughts all the time, the inability for my mind to slow down... And the other side is how people minimize PTSD, because it’s invisible. There’s a stigma there. If it’s invisible, it must not be real.”

Bergeron struggled with substance abuse and found her way to treatment through an accountability court. Then, she moved to Georgia to care for her father, surviving a 9/11-related cancer diagnosis along the way. Today, she works full-time in addiction recovery and spends her weekends at the equine center.

I asked her what these weekends with the horses do for her.

“It’s non-judgment,” Bergeron said. “It’s a break from the hustle and the bustle, and to get that unconditional love. It’s just a peaceful experience... You don’t have to have been in a tower or a burning plane. You can heal. It doesn’t go away, but it lessens.”

‘Follow the light’

I watched my son pet one of the therapy horses alongside her, both of them smiling.

Twenty-five years later, we tell these stories not to hold on to the pain, but to show the next generation that resilience is real, scars can be invisible and healing often starts in the quietest places.

Before we left, Bergeron had one more thing she wanted Cash to hear — the same words that guided her out of the North Tower.

“If you can see the light, follow the light,” she told him. “And that’s how we got out.”