On Sept. 11, 2001, former U.S. Secret Service Special Agent Darin Kinder was inside the World Trade Center when chaos began.While he witnessed the destructive power of evil that day, he also watched ordinary people refuse to stand aside amid the flames, confusion and destruction as strangers bled and buildings burned. “I like to say that on Sept. 11, 2001, I had a front-row seat to pure evil.
But I also saw the best of America,” Kinder told The Christian Post. “And those scenes, those individual scenes in my mind are still very powerful for me to this day.” With Friday marking the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, Kinder remembers how an ordinary morning turned into one of the darkest days in American history.
Employed as a Secret Service agent for about a year and a half, on Sept.
11, 2001, he and the other agents were in the locker room of the New York field office, located in World Trade Center Building 7, getting dressed for what was supposed to be "a boring day of meetings." It was after 8:46 a.m. — the time when hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 (from Boston to Los Angeles) crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center — when the agents were ordered to evacuate the building.
When he walked outside and stood across the street, Kinder saw flames everywhere and wounded people walking around as he stood. "When I came out onto the street after evacuating, I looked up and saw flames pouring out of the tower," the former agent explained. "I really did not know the enormity of what had happened. I knew that what I was looking at — I don't know if it was training or instinct or whatever —