A Life of Service. A New Place to Call Home.
Twenty-five years later, John Sudnik can still remember the sound.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, John, then a captain with the New York City Fire Department, was working on an administrative assignment at FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn when the first plane struck the World Trade Center.
From a seventh-floor office window, he could see smoke pouring from the building. Soon he was heading across the Brooklyn Bridge in an FDNY command car toward Lower Manhattan.
John had gone back to the command car to retrieve firefighting gear for a chief when the second plane approached.
“It sounded like a missile,” he recalls. “I didn’t see the plane. I heard it and then I saw the explosion.”
He remembers ducking from falling debris and feeling the heat from the fireball.
“It was surreal,” he says. “It felt like I was in a horror movie.”
John soon found himself at the FDNY command post across West Street from the World Trade Center, helping direct arriving fire companies into the towers and the Marriott Hotel. He kept a handwritten log of where companies were being sent. Many included firefighters he knew from firehouses where he had served.
Then the South Tower began to fall.
John initially expected a localized collapse. When he realized the entire 110-story building was coming down, he and others at the command post ran into a nearby parking garage for shelter.
Without firefighting gear, a helmet or a mask, John made it only about 15 feet inside before taking cover.
“That’s when probably I was the most concerned for my life,” he says.
The sound was deafening. Dust from the collapse filled the garage, forcing its way into his eyes, nose, ears and lungs. He could no longer see his hand in front of his face.
When the noise finally stopped, John expected to find the entrance blocked by debris.
“That’s when I thought, ‘OK, this is it.’”
Instead, feeling his way through the darkness, he made it back up the ramp and outside.
“It was dead silence,” he recalls.
There was little time to absorb what had happened. John knew firefighters he had seen entering the towers only minutes earlier were almost certainly gone. He made his way north and began helping the department regroup.
FDNY lost 343 members that day, including Chief of Department Peter J. Ganci Jr., whom John had been working alongside shortly before the collapse.
“I consider myself lucky,” John says. “I guess it wasn’t my time.”
Yet he doesn’t consider himself one of the heroes of that day.
“The real heroes are the people who were killed and the people who continue to get sick,” he says. “The people who made the ultimate sacrifice are the ones who are the true heroes.”
John would go on to spend nearly 38 years with the FDNY, rising through the ranks to become chief of department, the department’s highest-ranking uniformed position, before retiring in 2023.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, he worries about what happens as 9/11 moves from lived experience into history. His own 22-year-old daughter wasn’t yet born when the attacks occurred.
What he hopes others remember is not only the horror of the attacks, but the sacrifice of the people who responded and of the civilians who simply went to work that morning and never returned home.
For all that John has witnessed, however, he doesn’t talk about his own life with regret.
“I feel like I’ve had the perfect life,” he says. “I have had a great career that I loved. I have a family I love and I’m fortunate to be building a home in a beautiful place in Florida.”
Florida has been part of John’s life since childhood. His grandfather began coming to Sarasota and investing in property when John was young, and John has visited Sarasota since he was five years old. A two-bedroom condo directly on Siesta Beach, originally purchased by his grandfather, has remained in the family for three generations.
Now John and his wife, Kori, are planning to make Florida their full-time home. They plan to retain the family’s Siesta Key condo while building a new residence in Wild Blue at Waterside in Lakewood Ranch with Lee Wetherington Homes.
When the couple began considering where to live full time, Lakewood Ranch kept drawing them back. They wandered through the vibrant Farmers’ Market in Waterside Place, explored area parks, sampled local restaurants and joined in community events, getting a taste of what life there might be like.
Wild Blue at Waterside offered the amenities, single-story living and opportunities for community they were looking for. They were already familiar with Lee Wetherington Homes. After touring one of the builder’s model homes in nearby Shellstone at Waterside, John says they were “blown away by how beautiful the construction was.” Sarasota friends also spoke highly of the company. With Lee Wetherington Homes also building in Wild Blue, the pieces fell into place.
The couple chose the Cyan floor plan in large part because of its generous outdoor living space and the flexibility to customize the home around their needs and preferences. They enlarged the kitchen pantry and replaced a fixed dining room window with zero-corner sliding glass doors opening to the outdoor living area. The plan also gave them room to design a spacious pool and spa while retaining plenty of space for outdoor dining and entertaining. Inside, they are planning a transitional style, reflected in their choices of cabinetry, flooring, tile and other finishes.
As John and Kori look ahead to their next chapter, they envision a home where family and friends can gather, indoors and out, and where they can put down roots in their new Florida community.
After a career spent responding when others needed help, John is looking forward to a different pace of life in a place his family has loved for generations.
And as he looks back on September 11, he carries with him the people who never had the opportunity to do the same.