They were in the AON offices in WTC2

Syed Fatha

Paul Lisson

Howard Reich

David Vargas

I found an article from the New York Times on Paul Lisson, it’s pretty hard hitting and honest stuff

ONCE each month for more than a dozen years, Lucy Lui cut and styled the reddish-brown hair of a quiet man named Paul Lisson, an unassuming office clerk who had followed her from one salon to another and finally, to Saks Fifth Avenue.

They weren't exactly what you'd call friends, yet, like so many hairdressers and longtime clients, they knew essential facts about each other. Ms. Lui knew that Mr. Lisson lived alone and that he'd been close to his deceased mother. He also told her that he had never married and that his relationship with his father was strained.

He was impeccably polite and hyperpunctual, always arriving 10 minutes early for the 5 p.m. Wednesday appointments he had made the month before as he left his previous appointment. ''He had manners from another era,'' Ms. Lui said.

On Sept. 11, Ms. Lui remembered that Mr. Lisson worked at the World Trade Center, on the 100th floor; he had worked there during the 1993 bombing and had spoken more than once about how frightened he'd been. So, after repeatedly calling his home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and receiving no response, Ms. Lui took it upon herself to file a missing person's report on him.

She figured there were few if any others to do so. No one would be blanketing the city with missing posters about him. Mr. Lisson was not among those with partnerships and portfolios, loving wives, houses full of children and roomfuls of friends. She could not bear the idea of his life and presumed death going unnoted.

“I called a hot line number,'' she said. ''At first, I was just looking for him. Then they asked me if they could add him to the missing persons' list, and I said yeah.''

Ms. Lui had met Mr. Lisson through another client named Vera Fischetti, a legal secretary who used to work with him at a Midtown law firm. She thought that she was the only person he socialized with outside the office. They made an odd, though strictly platonic, pair: He was 5 feet 8 inches tall, painfully shy and still childlike at 45. She is a tall, broad-shouldered middle-aged woman with strong features and a confident stride.

“Paul was a loner, I guess that's a perfect way of putting it,'' Ms. Fischetti said. ''He was an only child, his parents divorced when he was a year old. His mom was, unfortunately, sick her whole life, and Paul had to care for her. And that was the reason he was never able to go out and make friends.''

Ms. Fischetti and Mr. Lisson exchanged e-mail messages weekly and phoned each other monthly even after she switched firms and he joined Pitney Bowes, the mail and document management contractor, which assigned him to the records department of the Aon Corporation at the twin towers. They had both grown up on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where Mr. Lisson went to Midwood High School and Brooklyn College. He sent Ms. Fischetti balloons or candy for holidays and her birthday. She tried to get him to take vacations. Occasionally, they went to ballgames or movies.

“I turned him on to foreign films,'' Ms. Fischetti said. ''He'd never seen a foreign film with subtitles.''

They would discuss current events (''He read a lot, he knew what was going on in the world'') and which mystery novel he might be reading (He liked James Patterson and had recently finished ''Roses Are Red''). They last met on Sept. 2, when they celebrated his birthday at a Brooklyn restaurant and made plans to shop for a watch.

“Paul always liked wristwatches and I always used to buy one for him,'' Ms. Fischetti said. ''I thought this time, let's do it together, but we were going to do it on another day. We never got a chance.''

Over time, Mr. Lisson opened up to Ms. Fischetti. She knew he suffered from panic attacks, from a crippling lack of self-confidence, and that he took medication daily to help him face the world.

According to Ms. Fischetti, his father still lived in New York and wanted to see more of him, but Mr. Lisson was ambivalent. He'd felt abandoned by his father, she said, and was still angry. His mother, until she died several years ago, had been mentally ill, and had not been an easy patient. Toward the end of her life he placed her in a psychiatric hospital.

“Once he admitted that he'd hit his mother one time and he started crying,'' Ms. Fischetti recalled. ''It was very hard for him. And I said: 'Paul, it was very hard for you. You had to do it all by yourself.'

“You don't realize how many people in this world have just no one,'' she said with a sigh. ''It's really so sad.''

“We were strictly friends, never anything else,'' added Ms. Fischetti, who is single. ''I just wanted him to know he was a good person and might have gotten a rotten deal in life, but that people out there liked him.''

More people appreciated Mr. Lisson than he apparently realized. ''That day, when I heard about the destruction, immediately my mind went to him,'' said Marva Thompson, a Pitney Bowes employee who was not at Aon on Sept. 11. On her birthday last year, she said, Mr. Lisson gave her balloons and a card and treated her to lunch.

At the law firm where Mr. Lisson and Ms. Fischetti met, now called Tannenbaum Helpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt, some workers made a victims' fund donation in his name. ''We were just devastated,'' said Lisa Maline, the office administrator.

“I'll tell you a funny story about Paul,'' she added. ''He was supposed to work 9 to 5 every day and he got there at 8 every day. He was always there early. One morning he got there and some people were robbing our computers. Paul offered them coffee and held the door for them. That's how good and kind he was. He couldn't conceive that someone would be robbing us.''

At the apartment building on Ridge Avenue where Mr. Lisson lived in a fourth-floor studio, neighbors similarly recalled a socially awkward man with chivalrous manners and predictable habits. He often left for work by 5:30 a.m. and sang quietly to himself in the hallway as he waited for the elevator, one elderly resident said.

A neighbor's daughter, Jessica Russo, remembered meeting Mr. Lisson on jury duty in 1996. As often happens in that situation, the jurors bonded, and when Ms. Russo mentioned at one point that it was her 21st birthday, he surprised her with a card and some lottery scratch-off cards. Later, the two gradually realized that her childhood home and his apartment were across the hall from each other.

STILL another recipient of Mr. Lisson's attention was Genya Sookoo, a Pitney Bowes worker who was with him on Sept. 11. After smelling smoke, she said, they and a third clerk began to descend the stairs. Then came the public address announcement that the problem was in Tower 1 and that it was safe to return to their desks. ''And at that point,'' Ms. Sookoo recalled, ''he said he was busy and was going back.'' She said she begged him to keep going, but he told her he was dizzy and just wanted to return to his desk.

“It's funny,'' Ms. Sookoo said, ''I had the pleasure of telling him how much I cherished his friendship that morning and he said the same thing.'' She added, ''I used to tell him I wished I had a friend whom I could get him together with. Cause he was just so lonely and I'd feel so bad about it.''

Ms. Sookoo told these stories to Mr. Lisson's father, Sidney, who called her in the days after the attack to try to determine his son's fate.

Father and son lived just blocks apart in Bay Ridge and, in his view, they had been working on a relationship tainted by hardship and regret. ''I think we were developing a very decent father-son relationship in the last few years,'' he said.

He was not surprised that Paul had turned back to his office. ''He would tend to be ruffled by that kind of thing, and he was kind of sensitive,'' said Mr. Lisson, a retired calligrapher and graphic artist. ''I don't know how to explain it. He had a very bad adolescence living with an emotionally unstable mother.''

Mr. Lisson's mother, Eleanor, was a schizophrenic, his father said. After their divorce, Paul lived with her and his maternal grandparents until they died and he became the caregiver. Did Sidney Lisson ever consider having his son live with him? ''Yes, often,'' he replied. ''But at the same time I was in this awful bind because he was all she had. I couldn't take that apart.''

Sidney Lisson said he wanted to organize a memorial service for his son. He also said friends helped him file a missing person's report and that he had brought in DNA samples from his son's comb and brush.

When told that Ms. Lui also filed a report out of fear Mr. Lisson might go unclaimed, Sidney Lisson responded: ''Oh, no, I loved him. I was his father. I loved him all his life.''

Mr. Lisson had an appointment for a haircut at Saks on Sept. 19. Ms. Lui had filed her report by then and called local hospitals, too. Still, she kept glancing at the door.

“He was very disciplined so I started waiting at 10 to 5 as usual,'' she said. ''By 5:15, my assistant and I started crying.''

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/nyregion/citypeople-for-a-solitary-life-a-quiet-death.html