Bradenton woman’s granddaughter killed on 9/11

MANATEE -- Although she gets around Bradenton’s Freedom Village on a walker these days and can’t get her fingers to sew anymore, 88-year-old Marcia Roger still has the famous Roger family smile.

Roger, whose name goes back six generations in Louisiana and is pronounced “roj-ay,” proudly holds a picture of another family member with that same French Louisiana smile.

It’s a picture of her 24-year-old granddaughter, Jean Destrehan Roger, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 that departed Boston on Sept. 11, 2001, bound for Los Angeles.

Roger’s flight, filled with 20,000 gallons of fuel and 81 passengers, never made it to L.A.

Instead, five terrorists on board turned it around and flew it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.

“She was a darling girl,” Roger said. “She was smart and talented. It was a terrible waste.”

Jean Roger, who loved to fly, was on standby on Sept. 11 and only got the job when another flight attendant called in sick, her grandmother said.

Marcia Roger was sitting in her bright and comfy Freedom Village apartment Friday, re-watching DVD episodes of “The Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero.”

It’s the television series about the 9/11 memorial, which will be unveiled Sunday in New York after years of planning and execution.

The entire six-episode project, which has mesmerized Roger not only because her son, Tom; daughter-in-law, Eileen; and granddaughter, Jean, are in it, will be broadcast from 5 to 11 p.m. Sunday on the Science Network, which Marcia Roger says is Channel 100 locally.

It was hard for Roger not to cry when watching her son, Tom Roger, read his daughter’s name as part of an audio history from 9/11 that will be part of the museum on Ground Zero, set to open in about a year.

“Very, very emotional,” Roger said quietly. “Most of my friends here on my hall know about Jean. My son will be in New York on Sunday for the memorial.”

Both Marcia Roger and her son believe Jean, a Penn State grad who had been flying for only 18 months, stayed at her post and followed guidelines.

Roger and her 10 crew mates had no idea at that time that this wasn’t a typical hijacking, where the plane is landed after demands are met.

“I believe she was serving breakfast to her passengers and it happened instantaneously,” Marcia Roger said of the crash.

“She had a job to do,” said Tom Roger, a Rochester, N.Y.-based engineer and lawyer who is not only one of the founders of Families of Sept. 11, but is on the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum Foundation that is building the Memorial. “Like all the uniformed people that day, she did what she was supposed to do.”

Richard Dymond, Herald reporter, can be reached at 748-0411, ext. 6686.

This story was originally published September 10, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Bradenton woman’s granddaughter killed on 9/11."