He worked on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. A shift swap saved his life

A Tuesday Shift Swap on the 107th Floor: How a Routine Favor Kept One Man Alive on 9/11

Sandego.net – On the morning of September 11, 2001, the breakfast cold-food station at Windows on the World — perched 107 stories above Manhattan inside the World Trade Center’s North Tower — had no supervisor. The man scheduled to run that station that day was asleep in his apartment, beside his pregnant wife, when a panicked phone call shattered the quiet. Sekou Siby, a 36-year-old cook originally from Ivory Coast, had traded shifts just days earlier with a younger colleague. That single, ordinary arrangement between two kitchen workers meant he was not standing on the 107th floor when the first plane struck. It also meant his friend was.

Moises Rivas, an Ecuadorian musician in his early twenties who played in a band on weekends, had asked for Sunday off. Siby agreed to cover the shift. On the following Tuesday, Rivas reciprocated, stepping into Siby’s place behind the pass. By the time the towers fell, Rivas was one of more than 2,700 people killed in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. Siby lost 79 co-workers that morning.

The Call That Broke the Morning

Siby was still in bed when the phone rang. It was the wife of Abdoul Karim, a West African immigrant and fellow Windows on the World employee who had helped Siby land the restaurant job years earlier and with whom he shared an apartment.

“Your building is burning,” he recalled her saying. “She was looking for her husband.”

Siby switched on the television and watched, stunned, as smoke poured from the Twin Towers. He dialed the restaurant kitchen. Both phone lines rang endlessly. No one answered. The silence on the other end of the wire told him everything before any news bulletin could.

From French Teacher to Prep Cook

Siby’s path to that kitchen had been long and uncertain. Before arriving in the United States in 1996, he had taught French in the Ivory Coast. He left his wife behind, intending to save enough money to reunite the family. English was barely a second language when he stepped off the plane. For two years he delivered groceries for a supermarket while attending evening language classes, slowly building the vocabulary that would let him work in a professional kitchen.

In October 1998, Karim’s connection opened a door: a prep-cook position at Windows on the World, paying $8 an hour. The job meant peeling enormous bags of onions, potatoes, and shrimp — repetitive, unglamorous labor at the very bottom of the kitchen hierarchy.

“As a prep cook, you are not required to have a knife skill,” he said.

On slow service days, Siby volunteered to assist the line cooks, watching their hands, mimicking their angles. He was learning how to grip a blade, how to chop without slicing his own fingers — the mechanical grammar that separates a prep cook from a cook.

“Learning how to hold the knife, how to chop without hurting yourself … this is how we progress from a prep cook to a cook,” he explained.

The Restaurant at the Top of the World

Windows on the World opened in 1976 and quickly became something without precedent: a fine-dining room wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass, suspended a quarter-mile above the streets of lower Manhattan. At its peak it was the highest-grossing standalone restaurant in the United States. Its guest list read like a who’s-who of the era — Henry Kissinger, Dolly Parton, Donald Trump — drawn by the sheer novelty of eating steak while the skyline scrolled beneath their feet.

Behind the starched tablecloths and rigid dress code, however, the engine of the operation was a kitchen staffed overwhelmingly by immigrant workers. They washed plates, broke down proteins, ran the cold stations, and kept a machine that served hundreds of covers a night running on thin margins. Siby’s diligence earned him a promotion to cook at $12 an hour. By late 2000 his wife had finally joined him in New York, and the couple was expecting a daughter. He was in the country without legal status but had work authorization while his asylum application moved through the system. After years of limbo, the pieces of a life were clicking into place.

A Community Built Behind the Pass

The kitchen at Windows on the World was a microcosm of the city’s immigrant corridors. Co-workers arrived from Australia, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, each carrying the same quiet anxieties about visas, deportation, and whether the next paycheck would come. On weekends, a loose cluster of them gathered at a park in Queens to share food and talk through the immigration fears that followed them home off the clock. Three days before September 11, a group of them played soccer together.

“It was almost like a real window on the world,” Siby said of that small, informal community.

Living With the Question

The tragedy redirected every trajectory in Siby’s life. He carried survivor’s guilt that never fully dissolved — the death of a younger colleague who had simply returned a favor, and the simultaneous erasure of dozens of people he had shared meals, arguments, and jokes with for years.

“They were all gone. I have to live with that,” he said. “Why them? Why not me?”

“You can’t imagine losing the entire morning crew — all of the people you used to interact with — all gone,” he added. “You’re not a soldier to be prepared for something like that. You’re just a simple worker.”

The scale of the loss — over 2,700 deaths across the World Trade Center complex, the Pentagon, and a crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania — made comprehension itself feel impossible for someone whose world had been a single kitchen floor and the people who worked it.

Remembering Through Film

Siby’s story is now the centerpiece of “Top of the World,” a documentary short produced by CNN Films that examines the restaurant’s history and the immigrant labor force that sustained it. The film premiered on CNN on Monday evening at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time, timed to the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It places the human cost of that morning inside the specific, intimate geography of a workplace most Americans knew only as a postcard view of the skyline.

For Siby, the anniversary is not an abstraction. It is the memory of a ringing phone line, a friend’s empty chair at the prep station, and the knowledge that a Tuesday shift swap — the most mundane of favors — is the difference between a life continued and a life ended on the 107th floor.