Danilo Jorge said 9/11 will always stick with him.
"I got up and turned on the TV and I witnessed the second plane get hit live," Jorge said. " I took that personal. I came to work, and my client, she was in tears, and we hugged. It was hard to process everything."
David Waugh agreed.
"You don't know what the emotion is actually until somebody tells you what it is," Waugh said. "My cousin was four blocks away. He had to run from the trade center. It changed the way I saw the world."
Mik’los Brown was at home, getting ready to go into work.
"Now mind you, my wife is pregnant. Getting ready to deliver," Brown said. "All of a sudden, she say, ‘Honey, something going on.’ It’s like okay, I guess I’m not going to work today."
For Brown, it was a reminder not to take his family’s lives for granted.
" It's a reality check," he said. "Anything can happen any time of day. Like that bell that's ringing right now, it might stop ringing."
For Arab and Muslim communities, the aftermath of 9/11 marked a new, more dangerous reality. Anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US surged, rising from an average 25 incidents a year to nearly 500 after the attack.
"People judge a book by its cover," Brown said. " I don’t care where you’re from, I could care less."
Rob Giardulli is visiting from Canada and, as an outsider, he has suspicions about that day.
"At the time, I thought it was a terrorist attack," Giardulli told KALW. "I don't think it was anymore. I think it was an inside job. Just too many things don't add up. I think the whole point of all this was to start a war, to go into Iraq, and grab their oil. Money, money. It's all about money."
Judy Castro had just moved to San Francisco from New York when the twin towers were hit.
"That experience changed New Yorkers. They were more conscientious about the people that were next to them and what was going on. I think it opened their eyes to our own humanity and I just wish something like that would never happen again."
How did 9/11 change you and how do you think it changed our country?
