An old newspaper clipping from across the country helped a cancer patient prove he was at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
He said he had no way of knowing at the time that the dust clouding the air would be blamed for the leukemia that ravaged his body nearly two decades later — or that he would struggle to prove he was at the scene to get government benefits.
Cullum and his family were photographed with the Twin Towers behind them just days before they were demolished by terrorists.“We suddenly heard this really loud noise, it flew right over our heads,” Cullum recalled. “Even though it was 50, 60 stories up, it was so loud that I thought it was scraping the ground, like that’s how loud the engines were.”
The clipping featured Cullum’s father complaining that his son was kicked off a football because it took the family so long to get home after Sept. 11, 2001.Cullum and his family witnessed the plane moments before crashing into the towers and watched people jumping from the buildings.When the towers fell, the family joined others inside a downtown business looking for refuge. That’s where the man offered him a piece of cloth to breathe through.
Fast-forward nearly two decades to 2019, when Cullum had just finished up grad school at St. John’s in New Mexico and started a junior-high-school teaching job. That’s when he became gravely ill and was diagnosed with leukemia.“I had hundreds and thousands of dollars in medical debt,” he recalled. The program wanted him to have non-relatives vouch that he was in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. But he only had family with him.