Children Trapped in Elevator Fight Fear

Six-year-old Saphronia Sallard takes the stairs wherever she goes, and if her mother thinks there are too many stairs, she doesn’t go at all. It has been more than a year since she visited a cousin who lives on the eighth floor.

Saphronia has refused to set foot in an elevator since the World Trade Center bombing trapped her in the smoky, coffin-like darkness of a stalled elevator for five hours.

“My stomach strangles” just talking about the field trip she and 16 other classmates took a year ago, Saphronia said.

Saphronia, now a first grader, sat in her old kindergarten classroom at P.S. 95 in Brooklyn and talked haltingly about the bombing and the last year. Her mother, Deborah, says her daughter has been seeing a therapist once a week.

She tells of nightmares “about the elevators, being in the dark.” And she recalls the vanilla and chocolate-chip ice cream that was waiting for the children when they returned, at last, to their school.

Saphronia and other children from her class are still struggling to overcome the trauma of that winter afternoon--the smoke, the darkness, the sound of their small fists banging on elevator walls for help.

Some are experiencing sharp mood swings--sudden spells of anger and bouts of crying, as well as periods of withdrawal from their families. Nightmares still interrupt their sleep. One girl is still wetting her bed. Another has breathing problems.

But other children came out of the ordeal apparently unscathed.

Robert Kornak, 7, suffered no ill effects from the smoke, experienced no sleepless nights, has no fear of the dark and doesn’t object to elevators, said his mother, Elizabeth.

How does she explain his resiliency? “He fell asleep most of the time in the elevator, so he didn’t know what was going on,” Elizabeth Kornak said.

Florence Manglani, the school psychologist, said about a third of the 17 children stuck in the elevator had extreme reactions to the experience. At least three have sought therapy outside.

Taina Rodriguez, 6, will get in an elevator--but only if her father is with her, says her mother, Millie. And then she will have such a look of terror that Rodriguez wonders if they shouldn’t just let her take the stairs.

“She stares at the window of the door that closes and she will just stare at it and count ‘1, 2, 3’ to herself like that and if we talk, she will not listen, her mind is just at each floor as she counts them.”

Taina is seeing a psychiatrist, as is her mother, who was with her daughter on the Trade Center trip. She pleads to move to Oklahoma, where her aunt lives, Rodriguez says, because she thinks “there are no elevators . . . no big buildings there.”

Then there is Dena Ortiz, also 6. Her mother, Shirley Perez, says the child suffers from breathing problems that she never had before the bombing.

At school last spring, she hyperventilated and had to be taken by ambulance to a hospital.

When fall came, Dena refused to go back to P.S. 95, and her mother transferred her to a new school.

“I didn’t want to go there because of the trips,” Dena said in her family’s small third-floor walk-up above an Italian eatery in Brooklyn.