SARASOTA – The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 marked the lives of millions of people around the world.
Including a family on the Suncoast, who lived the first hours of the attack in uncertainty.
“Where is the president, he was with our son, that is when we started to panic,” said Lazaro Dubrocq’s father, Javier Dubrocq.
The 9/11 attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York and attacked the Pentagon 20 years ago shocked the world.
And the presence of then-President George W. Bush at a Sarasota school at the time of the attacks marked the life of this Suncoast family.
Lázaro Dubrocq is one of 16 second-graders at Emma E. Booker Elementary School who witnessed a historic reaction to a devastating tragedy.
“I remember the moment in the middle of when we were reading that a man entered the room to notify the president that the attack occurred,” said former Emma E. Booker Elementary student, Lazaro Dubrocq.
Now 27 years old, he realizes that what he felt that tragic day when he was only 7 years old opened his eyes.
“Obviously a little scared because I was a child and the world for me was my home in Sarasota and the school, I knew what New York was, but I did not know the word terrorist,” said Lazaro Dubrocq.
At the news of the terrorist attack, the school became a makeshift command center, from where President George W. Bush addressed the nation before boarding Air Force One and heading to safety, leaving the students and their families behind, more relieved.
“On television it was the president at the Elementary school and right beside it we watched the attack on the twin towers and we thought it was dangerous,” said Lazaro’s mother, Maria Isabel Dubrocq.
“If they came to that madness of crashing into the twin towers, what would stop them from attacking the school with intentions to kill the president, and they would have killed all the students as well,” said Javier Dubrocq.
“There was a fear that the president was also a target at school, I think that’s why my parents took me out of school early,” said Lazaro Dubrocq.
Today Lázaro is a chemical engineer graduated from Columbia University and he and his family feel that his experience of 9/11 guided him in his life.
“One of the admission essays that Lazaro made to be accepted in the school was about the twin towers, it was about the visit that President Bush made when he was a student,” said Lazaro’s mother, Maria Isabel Dubrocq.
“That day changed me, I now realize, tomorrow is not promised,” said Lazaro Dubrocq.
