Israel Matzav

9/11's first victim

I thought I had talked about him before, and I'm sure I have - but on my old Matzav list from 2000-04, and not on this blog. So we're going to rectify that.

Daniel Lewin HY"D (may God avenge his blood) was seated in the first class section of American Airlines Flight 11, just behind Mohamed Atta. At some point Daniel, who had served in the IDF's elite Sayeret Matkal unit (the same unit in which Binyamin Netanyahu, his brother Yoni HY"D, and Ehud Barak all served), realized what was going on. A big, strong man, Daniel got up and tried to stop Atta. The passenger seated behind him slashed his throat with a box cutter, killing him instantly. Daniel Lewin was the first person to die on 9/11.

Lewin was sitting one row behind Mohammed Atta and apparently tried to stop the terrorists as they were taking control. Flight attendants who phoned airline officials from the plane reported that Lewin’s throat was slashed, probably by another terrorist one row behind him.

“I’m sure at some point it became clear to him what was going on,” said Todd Dagres, an investor in Akamai Technologies, the company Lewin co-founded. “And I’m sure he acted. And I’m sure that someone on that plane — maybe more than one — paid. But he couldn’t get them all.”

Lewin was always out in front. He was a math wunderkind whose algorithms made the Internet faster. He was a billionaire in his 20s. He was also a former commando.

Lewin’s family moved to Israel from Colorado when he was a teenager, where the Israel Defense Forces eventually drafted him.

“And there was no question whether he would serve,” remembered friend Marco Greenberg. “And there was no question he would serve in a combat unit. And there was no question in his mind that he would serve in the country’s most elite unit. And that’s what he ended up doing.”

Lewin ended up doing everything with that same drive. He studied applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Oh yeah, Danny stood out,” recalled Tom Leighton, Lewin’s advisor. “At MIT he stood out!”

Together, Leighton and Lewin developed algorithms and systems to make Internet traffic flow faster and more efficiently.

“In fact, we wanted to get other people to take the technology and use it!” Leighton remembered. “We had to decide, are we gonna let it go, or would we do it ourselves?”

Lewin and Leighton did it themselves. They co-founded Akamai Technologies. One of the executives brought in to help was Paul Sagan, who remembers Danny as an incredibly intense leader.

“He was very demanding, and he was relentless,” Sagan said.

Danny would often burst into a room where people were working and tell them: “You’re behind!”

“He had this infectious nature of making you want to take on big challenges and not back down and never quit,” Sagan remembered. “Danny was so competitive, and never a quitter. And if you were around that at all, you picked that up.”

Read the whole thing.

Akamai has a memorial to Danny on their website here.

Here's more on Lewin's role on 9/11:

A leaked Federal Aviation Administration memo written on the evening of Sept. 11 contains disturbing revelations about American Airlines Flight 11, the first to hit the World Trade Center. The "Executive Summary," based on information relayed by a flight attendant to the American Airlines Operation Center, stated "that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B at 9:20 a.m. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al Suqami." The FAA has claimed that the document is a "first draft," declining to release the final draft, as it is "protected information," noting the inaccuracies in reported times, etc. The final draft omits all mention of gunfire. Lewin, a 31 year-old dual American-Israeli citizen was a graduate of MIT and Israel's Technion. Lewin had emigrated to Israel with his parents at age 14 and had worked at IBM's research lab in Haifa, Israel. Lewin was a co-founder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies, and lived in Boston with his family. A report in Ha'aretz on Sept. 17 identified Lewin as a former member of the Israel Defense Force Sayeret Matkal, a top-secret counter-terrorist unit, whose Unit 269 specializes in counter-terrorism activities outside of Israel.

The FAA later changed its conclusion from shooting to stabbing.

Danny's mother has been my children's pediatrician for more than twenty years. His father, who is also a doctor, once picked up one of my kids, put him in the car and ordered my wife to take him straight to the hospital. He promised my wife that they would call me to come straight to the hospital from work, which they did.

Today, Danny's mother is also the pediatrician of those of my grandchildren who live in Jerusalem. She's an amazing woman and a fabulous doctor. The apple did not fall far from the tree.

May his memory be blessed.

Labels: 9/11, American Airlines, Daniel Lewin

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:19 AM