09/10/2026
We remember one of the unsung heros of September 11, 2001.
"Tell the boys I love them. We're getting ready to do it now. It's happening!" Those were the last words flight attendant CeeCee Ross Lyles said to her husband.
She had spent 6 years as a police officer in Fort Pierce, Florida. She made detective. Colleagues remembered her as someone willing to chase down suspects who ran, and she was up for promotion to sergeant.
Her husband Lorne was a Fort Pierce officer too. She was the one who encouraged him to join the force in 1997. They married in 2000. She had 2 sons, he had 2.
Then she gave it up.
She had wanted to fly since she was a girl. She left the police force, and finished flight attendant training in January 2001.
She had been doing the job for 8 months.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, she was working United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco.
The hijackers took the aircraft about 46 minutes after takeoff. Passengers and crew began making calls from the back, and from those calls they learned what had already happened in New York.
At 9:47 she called home and got the answering machine.
"You have to listen to me carefully. I'm on a plane that's been hijacked. I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much. And I'm so sorry, babe."
Lorne was asleep. He had worked the night shift.
She called again minutes later, and this time he picked up.
She told him the passengers were going to rush the hijackers, and that they were filling coffee pots with boiling water to throw at them.
Then they prayed together.
And then, in the last thing she ever said to him, she told him it was starting.
"Tell the boys I love them. We're getting ready to do it now. It's happening!"
Flight 93 went into a field near Shanksville at 10:03. It was the only one of the 4 hijacked aircraft that never reached its target.
CeeCee Lyles was 33.
There is a statue of her now in Liberty Garden in Fort Pierce, looking out over the water. Police officers and her family have gathered there every September for more than 20 years.
