Mobile man tells tragic story of mother's 9/11 death

MOBILE, Alabama
Rodney Ratchford Jr. got out of bed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, in Washington, D.C., feeling queasy. He did not want to go to school that day. He wanted his mother, Marsha Stallworth Ratchford, to stay home from work and take care of him.

She insisted that he go to school, so Ratchford, then age 11, got dressed and went to Leckie Elementary, across the Potomac River from his mother’s workplace, the Pentagon.
By the end of the day, the terrorist attack on the Pentagon would take the life of his mother, U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st class Marsha Stallworth Ratchford, 34, a native of Prichard.

Rodney Ratchford      AP Photo

Rodney Ratchford’s walk to his homeroom class that day took him across the path of his best friend, Bernard Curtis Brown II, who was being rewarded with a trip to California and was only at school for a few minutes before heading to the airport.
“We played basketball together. He had just spent the night at my house about three or four weeks before,” Ratchford recalled last week in an interview.
Ratchford said that he and his fellow students had not been in homeroom long before one of the teachers came in and told them to turn on the television. “TV One was the only channel we could get. The Trade Center had just been hit.
“We had only been watching a few minutes, and then we heard a big boom, and the school was shaking. I got under my desk and started screaming for my mama.”
Soon, numerous soldiers appeared and started escorting the students from the campus. Eventually, the students were allowed to head home.
“Me and my sister had been walking a little girl to school, so we walked her home. When we got to the house, her mother was talking to us, but we didn’t know what she was saying. You know how people talk to you when they are not trying to tell you bad news. My sister and I looked at each other, and we took off and ran straight to the house.”

On TV tonight
The documentary “Children of 9/11” will air tonight at on NBC

Ratchford said that when he walked through the front door, he looked all the way to the back, where the den was. Ratchford said he saw his father sitting back in a chair, holding the telephone receiver in one hand and crying.
Ratchford walked into the room and on the big-screen television, he saw the Pentagon in flames.
“I went to her room and took out her North Carolina Tar Heels sweatshirt and sat on her bed and cried for 6 hours.”
Marsha Stallworth Ratchford was a 1985 graduate of LeFlore High School. She was an information systems technician working in the Pentagon, where 125 workers were dead or missing after hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the western side of the giant office building.

(AP Photo/Mobile Register/HO)

Information Systems Technician First Class Marsha Dianah Ratchford, 34, of Prichard, Ala. died when a terrorist-controlled plane struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. She is pictured in this undated family photograph with her husband, Rodney Ratchford.

She did not work on the side of the Pentagon that the plane struck. Her office was on another side. On that day, she was moving into another office on the Pentagon’s west side.
Ratchford’s best friend, Bernard Brown, was onboard the plane that hit the Pentagon.
The following days were a blur with the funerals for his mother and his friend.
“His was the first funeral I had ever been to.”
In the weeks following the terrorist attacks, Ratchford and his sister were relocated to Birmingham.
Ratchford’s story will be highlighted with several others in the documentary “Children of 9/11” that will air tonight Monday at 9 CDT on NBC. Several adults who were youngsters in 2001 will share their experiences about their lives then and in the years since the terrorist attacks, the show’s producers said in a news release.
Ratchford now lives in Mobile, the place he visited on and off during childhood, even briefly attending school here. He moved to Mobile for good in 2007.
He said that he expects to return to Washington for the 10th anniversary. It will be the first time he has been back in the town since that fateful day.
“I want to see the bench they had for my mom and would like to see the Pentagon. I want to go see my old school and might get a chance to talk to the schoolchildren. And I want to see my godmother.”
Ratchford works with a company contracted at the Alabama State Port Authority. He and his fiancée, Kia Baldwin, are planning a 2012 wedding.
His mother is often in his thoughts.
“I miss being able to talk to her — being able to wake up and know that she’s in the other room. She was fun. She always did things: basketball, baseball, games. She loved pinball. She was an outgoing, fun woman.”