Chattanoogan will be face-to-face in Guantanamo with her brother's 9/11 killers

Born in Pakistan, Marvina Baksh, 54, came to America to reside in New York at the age of four. Baksh is headed to Guantanamo on Monday to view pre-trial hearing for the men accused of killing her brother Michael in the Sept. 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.
Born in Pakistan, Marvina Baksh, 54, came to America to reside in New York at the age of four. Baksh is headed to Guantanamo on Monday to view pre-trial hearing for the men accused of killing her brother Michael in the Sept. 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.
photo Born in Pakistan, Marvina Baksh, 54, came to America to reside in New York at the age of four. Baksh is headed to Guantanamo on Monday to view pre-trial hearing for the men accused of killing her brother Michael in the Sept. 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

Sometime Tuesday, two days after leaving her East Brainerd home, Marvina Baksh will walk into a courtroom at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, and come face-to-face with the men the U.S. government says killed her brother.

But she says she will have no hatred for them, more than 15 years after the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and shattered her tight-knit family.

"You are wasting time on hating someone," she said in a recent interview. "I don't think about them. I think about what that did to their parents, to their families."

Baksh's story is different from the usual one of family members grieving all of these years about what happened early on that Tuesday morning.

The Bakshs are Pakistani, and Christian, and Seventh-day Adventists, and their 9/11 story is intertwined with their own struggle as immigrants to find their place in the U.S.

And just at that moment when Marvina's brother Michael, the pride of the family, had reached - literally - the peak of success in America, it was all wiped away.

Baksh's mom and dad were both nurses in an Adventist hospital in Pakistan, near the city of Lahore, when they decided to move to the U.S. - first Morris, in 1967, and then Martha, in 1968. Opportunities were limited for Christians in predominately Muslim Pakistan, Marvina Baksh said.

At that time, immigrants who were professionals living in the U.S. could sponsor fellow professionals from their country for entry into the U.S., and the Baksh home became a welcome center for dozens of fellow Pakistanis, Baksh said.

Baksh attended Adventist schools and after graduation worked in Manhattan, designing furniture and commercial spaces. She moved to California and helped a friend open a restaurant and discovered she loved restaurant work. She was living in Denver and had just opened a second Colorado restaurant on that morning in September.

Her brother Michael was a talented musician, singer and songwriter, and he found a job with music producer Russell Simmons and his Def Jam hip-hop label. With his good looks, wavy hair and sunglasses, Michael Baksh looked the part of a music rep, criss-crossing the U.S. and making trips around the world with musical acts.

But after he married, he and his wife decided he should find a job that didn't involve so much travel. Marsh & McLennan, a large professional services firm that offered insurance and other services, lured him to their offices on the top floors of the World Trade Center. A few days before starting work, Marvina Baksh said, he called his family to tell them about his corner office on the 94th floor, overlooking New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty.

He had an 8 a.m. meeting with 25 other new hires on his first day at work, Sept. 11, 2001.

At 8:46 a.m., according to the official U.S. report on the terrorist attacks, American Airlines Flight 11, hijacked after leaving Boston's Logan Airport, crashed into the north facade of the North Tower between the 93rd and 99th floors.

Marvina Baksh and her husband were just leaving the gym in Denver, she said, when she saw on a TV screen that the World Trade Center had been attacked.

Her husband reassured her Michael would be fine. "I already knew my brother was gone," she said. "Michael was the type of person, if there was any way he was alive, he would have let somebody know."

Marsh & McLennan occupied the 93rd through the 100th floors of the World Trade Center, and every one of its 295 employees at work that day were killed.

Michael Baksh's body was never found.

Marvina Baksh said she believes her brother never knew what happened.

"My thinking is that Michael was sitting in the board room having his meeting, and he never had a chance to be scared or worried," she said.

Her brother's death reverberated through her family, Baksh said. Her father had always loved to dance but his mood darkened.

"Dad died when his son died," Marvina said. His kidney problems worsened and he died in 2007.

Baksh lost her Denver restaurant and her marriage fell apart.

Her sister, Maureen, eventually decided to follow in her parents' footsteps and become a nurse, enrolling in the University of Tennessee's Homeland Security Nursing program. She and her mother moved to Chattanooga, where she teaches at Cleveland State, and Baksh followed, three years ago. Her mom died in November.

Baksh now helps coordinate exchange student visits for area high schools, particularly students who are Muslim.

"After 9/11, we started giving scholarships to Islamic countries so the youth there have gained a different view of America," she said. "These Muslim kids are coming from families where they are taught to be respectful. Their ideology and belief systems are good, and when people find out that they all believe in the same God, it is an amazing thing."

She was set to leave Chattanooga today with her 25-year-old son to fly to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. On Monday, she and other 9/11 family members selected in a lottery to go to Guantanamo will board an airplane contracted by the government. While there, they will stay in military housing while observing the pretrial motions for at least a week.

Among the other observers are the sibling of the wife of the pilot of Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon; a police officer whose twin died in the attacks; and a couple who lost their son, daughter, and granddaughter on one of the hijacked aircraft.

For Baksh, seeing the faces of her brother's killers is less important than meeting other family members who have shared her own experience. "Because I think they are the only people on Earth who understand how I feel," she said. "I'm just hoping it is cathartic for a lot of people."

Contact staff writer Steve Johnson at 423-757-6673, sjohnson@timesfreepress.com, on Twitter @stevejohnsonTFP, and on Facebook, www.facebook.com/noogahealth.

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