William Hanna was preparing to drive to New Jersey to help arrange his younger brother’s funeral when he heard his wife cry out from another room.
“Mak, Mak, you’re alive!”
It was the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. For hours, William had believed that his brother, Mak Hanna, a Port Authority engineer whose office was on the 88th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, probably died when the building collapsed. Instead, Mak had escaped. But only after spending much of the morning helping other people get out.
Twenty-five years later, the story has a connection to Wayland through William Hanna, now a Wayland resident, and through the Coptic Orthodox community that has grown in town.
William Hanna recounted his brother’s survival in a first-person column published by Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers on Sept. 9, 2011. He wrote that he was at work in Connecticut when news of the first attack arrived. His mother called from Egypt, desperate for information about Mak. As the towers fell and telephone service failed, the family waited.
By about 2:30 p.m., William wrote, he and his family had decided to drive to East Brunswick, N.J., where Mak lived with his wife and two young children.
“I thought that I was going to arrange my brother’s funeral and mourn with his wife and two kids,” William Hanna wrote. But then the telephone rang.
“The second I heard my dear brother’s voice, I broke down and wept furiously with my wife,” he wrote.
Mak Hanna had begun that Tuesday morning at the Port Authority offices on the 88th floor of One World Trade Center.
In a recorded account preserved in a National Geographic video archive, Hanna recalled that members of the World Trade Center inspection group routinely gathered in the morning for coffee and to discuss the day’s work. Frank De Martini managed the group. At 8:46 a.m., the building suddenly began shaking.
The workers initially did not understand what had happened. Then they saw smoke and fire coming from the northeast side of the building. Debris and file cabinets had been thrown across the floor. Hanna and his colleagues began looking for a usable escape route and directing people toward a stairwell they determined was passable.
But they did not immediately leave. While near the stairwell, they heard banging from the floor above.
Hanna recalled that De Martini insisted they go upstairs even as smoke increased. The men climbed one flight to the 89th floor and found a group trapped behind a jammed steel door. Pablo Ortiz had a crowbar, and the group forced its way through the area around the lock until the door opened.
“It’s a moment I will never forget,” Mak Hanna recalled, describing the reaction of those who suddenly realized they could escape.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum independently documents Hanna’s role. A flashlight in the museum’s collection belonged to survivor Dianne DeFontes, who had been on the 89th floor. The museum says DeFontes descended through a stairwell cleared of debris by Port Authority employees Frank De Martini, Pablo Ortiz, and Mak Hanna.
The Engineering News-Record later reported that De Martini first led roughly 25 to 40 people from the badly damaged 88th floor to a clear stairwell. De Martini, Ortiz and Hanna then went to the 89th floor, where they helped another group of about 23 people reach the stairs. Hanna eventually began descending.
Helping one more person
A Port Authority Sept. 11 awards nomination provides another piece of the story. It says Hanna and fellow employee Frank Varriano encountered Moe Lipson, an 89-year-old World Trade construction employee who was struggling to make his way down. Rather than leave him behind, Hanna and Varriano stayed with Lipson.
The nomination says the men helped him all the way to the lobby and outside, where Lipson was placed in an ambulance. The North Tower collapsed within minutes. The Port Authority recommended Hanna for its Medal of Valor for what it described as his “unselfish commitment to a fellow employee” despite the danger to himself.
De Martini and Ortiz did not survive.
William Hanna wrote in 2011 that his brother was among the last people to escape the North Tower and that the loss of his friends remained part of his brother’s life afterward.
From Mak to Father Mark
Four years after the attacks, Mak Hanna entered another form of service. He became a Coptic Orthodox priest in 2005 and took the name Father Mark Hanna. In a 2016 interview with the Wayland Post, he said surviving Sept. 11 made him think differently about the purpose of the life he had been given.
His ministry continues. In November 2025, the Coptic Orthodox Church identified Father Mark Hanna as the priest accompanying a service group from St. Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church in East Brunswick during a visit with Pope Tawadros II in Cairo.
The Hanna family’s presence can also be found in Wayland. In 2020, Wayland Middle School sixth-grader Isaac Hanna wrote an article for the school’s Orange and Black newspaper explaining the Coptic Orthodox Feast of the Nativity and noting the growing number of Coptic students in the school.
Among the comments beneath the story was one from Dr. William Hanna.
“Please continue writing to educate us more and be a great citizen of your community and the world,” he wrote before signing the message, “Your proud grandfather, Dr. William Hanna.”
Wayland itself became home to a Coptic Orthodox congregation several years earlier. In 2016, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts sold the former Church of the Holy Spirit property on Rice Road to a Coptic Orthodox congregation. The diocese said Father Samuel Hanna, then the priest of the Coptic congregation in Natick, had approached Episcopal Bishop Gayle Harris about finding a new use for the property and helped connect the congregations.
Today, Father Mark Hanna remains in New Jersey, not at the Wayland church. But the story William Hanna told about his younger brother 15 years ago now carries an unmistakably local dimension.
For William Hanna, Sept. 11 was first a day spent believing his brother was dead, then one of learning that he had survived because, in the middle of a burning skyscraper, he and others stopped to help people who could not get out on their own.
And for Mak Hanna, now Father Mark, the life that continued after he emerged from the North Tower became a life devoted to doing much the same thing: helping others.
