Ovi thought his girlfriend was dead. Sara Botkin was supposed to be working on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Instead, the 24-year-old singer had stopped at the underground mall before work to pick up Mariah Carey’s newly released Glitter soundtrack. That detour left Botkin waiting for an elevator when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.
Security personnel initially told people that the South Tower was secure, but Botkin followed others who decided to leave. She was outside and getting away from Lower Manhattan before United Airlines Flight 175 hit her building at 9:03 a.m.
Twenty-five years later, Botkin told PEOPLE that the attacks redirected the life she had been building in New York. She returned to Pittsburgh, married Ovi before the end of 2001 and eventually had three children. She also still has the Mariah Carey CD forever linked to the morning she never made it upstairs.
She Was Holding ‘Glitter’ When the North Tower Was Hit
Botkin had graduated from the University of Virginia in 1999 and moved to New York to pursue singing professionally. She performed while taking temporary jobs to support herself, and in July 2001 she began filling in for an employee on maternity leave at Aon Corporation.
Her office was on the 105th floor of the South Tower. On Sept. 11, however, she had time before her 9 a.m. start to stop at the Sam Goody store in the shopping complex beneath the World Trade Center and pick up Glitter, which was being released in the United States that day. “I was standing in line for the elevator, holding my new Glitter CD, when the first plane hit,” Botkin recalled to PEOPLE.
She initially did not understand what the crash meant. In a 2021 interview with WPXI, Botkin remembered seeing men in business clothes begin to run while security personnel told people in the South Tower that their building was secure. She followed people pushing their way outside.
The timing left her out of the tower before the second attack. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s timeline records Flight 175 striking floors 77 through 85 of the South Tower at 9:03 a.m., 17 minutes after the North Tower was hit. Botkin’s office was 20 floors above the upper end of the impact zone.
Her Boyfriend Thought She Had Died
As Botkin tried to get away from Lower Manhattan, the people who knew where she normally spent her mornings were trying to determine whether she was alive.
She eventually reached Grand Central, found an available phone and called her father’s office in Pittsburgh. The receptionist began shouting that Sara was on the phone, giving Botkin her first indication of how desperately her family had been waiting for news. Her father told her to return to her apartment in Queens and call again when she arrived.
At home, Botkin found repeated messages from her mother pleading for her to make contact. She still had not grasped the scale of what had happened until her mother told her that the South Tower had collapsed.
Ovi was even farther away. He was working as a waiter aboard a cruise ship and knew Botkin normally worked high inside the South Tower. “I thought she was dead,” he told WPXI in 2021. He learned that she had survived only after Botkin’s mother reached him.
Ovi Proposed Two Weeks Later
The attacks changed the pace of their relationship almost immediately. Botkin told PEOPLE that the combination of 9/11 and the fear surrounding the anthrax attacks that followed intensified her desire to leave New York and return to Pittsburgh. Ovi was willing to move with her.
When the couple saw each other again two weekends after Sept. 11, Ovi proposed. “9/11 definitely sped up our relationship,” Botkin told PEOPLE. They married on Dec. 8, 2001. They remain together 25 years later and have three children.
Botkin also changed careers. Her professional biography identifies her as president and financial advisor at Botkin Family Wealth Management and says surviving the Sept. 11 attacks drove her decision to return to Pittsburgh and work near her family.
Mariah Carey Sent Her a Signed ‘Glitter’ CD
The album remained part of Botkin’s story after she left the World Trade Center. PEOPLE reports that Carey learned about what had happened and sent Botkin a signed Glitter CD and photograph in the days following the attacks.
Botkin still has the CD but rarely listens to it. At the time, she remembered wondering whether anyone would care about pop music again after what the country had just witnessed.
The scale of what Botkin escaped was devastatingly personal at Aon. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum records that the company lost 176 employees in the attacks. Botkin has resisted framing her survival as evidence that she was somehow chosen to live while others were not, instead describing the timing as extraordinary luck.
‘Glitter’ Is Getting a 25th-Anniversary Revival
The album at the center of Botkin’s story has now reached its own 25-year milestone. Carey announced an anniversary edition of Glitter in August 2026.
Universal Music said the project will return to vinyl for the first time since its original release, while an expanded digital deluxe edition will add 15 tracks, including rare and previously unreleased recordings. Both are scheduled for Oct. 30. The anniversary campaign also includes a newly reimagined version of “Didn’t Mean to Turn You On” featuring Rochelle Jordan.
She Still Revisits 9/11 Every September
She told PEOPLE that each September she deliberately revisits footage and memories from that morning, carrying both gratitude for the life she was able to build and grief for the people whose families had a different outcome.
The Sunday after the attacks was the first time Botkin left her apartment. She joined her choir at the Plaza Hotel, where families of missing Cantor Fitzgerald employees had gathered. The group performed “God Be In My Head,” but Botkin remembered the experience as one of the hardest of her life as grieving relatives listened and cried.
She continues to sing today and has made a point of telling her three children what happened to her before they were born. “Their lives wouldn’t exist if I would not have made it out that day,” she told PEOPLE.
For Botkin, survival has never erased what happened to everyone else. “I feel gratitude, I feel lucky,” she said, “and I feel deep sorrow for the people whose lives have never been the same since that day.”