Moussaoui Jury Hears the Panic From 9/11

In the long days and nights since Sept. 11, 2001, they testified Monday, children have spent more time at counseling than school. Parents, unable to sleep, spent hours in their children's rooms. A young widow gave up her fight against breast cancer. Another threw herself across her husband's grave.

Other voices were heard Monday too, the voices -- and the final screams -- of the dead.

For the first time, the government played 911 audiotapes of two people trapped inside the World Trade Center, each screaming into the phone as they tried desperately to summon emergency crews to burning offices high above Lower Manhattan.

"I'm going to die, aren't I?" cried Melissa Doi, 32, lying across the floor, trying to find fresh air in a south tower engulfed in smoke and fire.

Sixteen stories above her, on the 99th floor, Kevin Cosgrove cried, "I'm not ready to die!"

Emergency dispatchers tried to reassure them. "We're getting there. We're getting there," they said.

Both callers died in the flames.

So did Peter Hanson, his wife, Sue Kim, and their 2-year-old daughter, Christine Lee, the youngest to die that morning.

They were trapped on United Airlines Flight 175. Twice he called his father. In the last call, describing passengers vomiting as the plane rumbled nearly out of control, he said, "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will happen quickly."

The testimony and recordings were part of the prosecution's case as it seeks the death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui, an admitted terrorist. Jurors last week concluded that Moussaoui had caused at least one death on Sept. 11 because of his failure to alert the FBI to the terrorist plot, making him eligible for execution.

Prosecutors expect to wrap up this final phase of the Moussaoui sentencing trial Wednesday. Monday was devoted to the victims who died in New York, and their loved ones. Today the government plans to provide similarly wrenching testimony from the families of those killed at the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, prosecutors will conclude with testimony from those aboard the fourth plane that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Prosecutors are expected to play, again for the first time, the cockpit voice recording that only relatives of the dead have heard.