FLORHAM PARK, N.J. (CBSNewYork/AP) — Mike Catapano was sitting in his sixth-grade music class when panic suddenly filled the room.
His instructor was distraught, having just heard that each of the towers at the World Trade Center, where one of his loved ones worked, had been hit by a plane.
“You’re young, so you don’t really know exactly what’s happening,” the Jets linebacker recalled of the Sept. 11 attacks. “Was it a crash? Was it an attack? You’re just so confused.”
Catapano, the only player on the Jets’ roster who was born and raised in New York, grew up in the Long Island village of Bayville — about 35 miles from lower Manhattan.