After last week, Judi Ciasulli isn’t sure she’ll ever be able to go back to New York.

She’s not sure she’ll ever take a five-hour nonstop flight.

Late last week, she jumped when a motorcycle revved its engine. She cried at the sound of an airplane overhead.

Ciasulli is director of administration at the L.A. office of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP. On the morning of Sept. 11, she was working at her law firm’s Manhattan headquarters, on the 36th floor of the skyscraper at 180 Maiden Lane about a block from Wall Street and half a mile from the World Trade Center.

Then it happened and nothing would ever be the same.

“I was so scared. I was so scared,” she said. “It was like, ‘There’s no way to escape. This is getting us.'”

Any number of Angelenos found themselves caught up in last week’s terror. Some were a stone’s throw away from the World Trade Center, working at their firm’s New York headquarters, and viewed the horrific devastation first-hand. Others were desperately trying to get through to their offices. Still others were in Los Angeles, wondering whether a similar attack might be launched here at any moment. Here are first-hand accounts of these three Angelenos:

Judi Ciasulli

That morning, she was scheduled to meet with various administrators in the headquarters office to go over some new software demonstrations. Having arrived before the other administrators, Ciasulli checked into her temporary office to check her voicemail and e-mail messages.

Only four people were in the office that early, none of whom she knew well.

A few minutes later, one of them asked, “Is there a ticker tape parade today?” She looked out the window. Thousands of 8 & #733;-by-11 sheets of paper were fluttering through the air, and one of the World Trade Center towers was on fire. The papers floated so close to the glass she could see the words. Then she saw burnt paper.

“At that point, I was even thinking of going back to work,” she said. “Watching a fire doesn’t hold a whole bunch of attraction to me.”

Before she got a chance, she looked to her right and saw a large blue plane headed straight for her building. At first she thought that maybe it was coming to drop water on the World Trade Center. But it was flying way too low.

“I just screamed, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!'” she said.

Terrified, the four employees scrambled to the elevators then thought better to take the stairs.

Other employees met them in the building. No one was talking. Some stopped on various lower floors because they were too tired to continue. When she reached the bottom, Ciasulli said her legs felt rubbery and she decided to sit on a concrete planter outside. Everybody around her was talking about just going home, or staying to watch the fire.

She spotted a colleague from the office, who wanted to go inside the lobby. Ciasulli called her husband and daughter on her cell phone to let them know she was OK.

That’s when the people outside started to run.

People were rushing away from the World Trade Center, heading toward the East River. She reached for the exit door in back of the office building since the front was crammed with the running crowds but it was locked.

She and a few others in the lobby yelled to the guard, “Open the doors! Open the doors!”

When she ran outside, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“People were looking panicky,” she said. “I looked back at the direction people were running from and there was this rolling cloud of dust. I didn’t know what happened; I thought another building got hit.”

She told her colleague to cover her face with her clothes and start walking. But everyone was walking in separate directions. She and her colleague headed off in one direction, realized the smoke was getting thicker, and then backtracked toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

At the bridge, thousands were crammed at a ferry dock.

That’s when she heard a loud noise.

Before the second building fell, she said she saw other people around her who had ash-white hair and chalky faces. Now, she and her friend looked just like them. Behind her was a billowing dark cloud of dust rushing toward the crowd of people.

She took off the top of her sweater set and covered her face, breathing through her nose. Her friend did the same. And they just kept walking.

“People just looked determined,” she said. “They were going to save themselves.”

About 15 to 30 minutes later, they reached the other side of the bridge, where emergency vehicles were blocking the street and ambulances were racing out of a nearby hospital. She asked a police officer where the nearest hotel was. About two miles. She took her dress shoes off.

When they reached the Marriott, an employee was checking IDs to make sure anyone without a reservation could not get in.

“My husband calls me a ‘goody two-shoes’ because I never break a rule, but there was no way I was going to stand in line to have them realize I didn’t have a reservation,” she said.

So she raced up an unattended flight of stairs and asked to make a reservation. The hotel was booked.

By 2:30 that afternoon, the hotel was inundated with the injured. Hotel workers converted a conference room into a first-aid room with Red Cross officials and police officers. In that room, Ciasulli met several other people trying to get to New Jersey and they all had stories to tell.

By 9 that night, Ciasulli and her friend realized they would be stuck at the hotel for the night, so they camped out with 40 other people in the conference room. The hotel furnished them with blankets and sheets and pillows. Some people put chairs together to construct makeshift beds.

Ciasulli only slept an hour that night.

At 4:15 the next morning, she woke her friend and they arranged to have a cab take them to New Jersey. Her friend’s husband, who lived in New Jersey, couldn’t get into New York, but the highways outbound were open.

The cab couldn’t make it.

That’s when a private car showed up in front of the hotel and a young man speaking broken English asked if she and her friends needed a ride. The car was unmarked but resembled the same vehicle that had taken her to the office 24 hours earlier.

He took her, her colleague, another couple and a New Jersey businessman 45 minutes to New Jersey.

“He stopped and we said, ‘What do we owe you?’ and he said, ‘Give me whatever you’ve got.'”

James DeSarno

Lying in bed next to his slumbering wife, DeSarno ignored the screech of his alarm clock. But when his cellular phone began ringing, he rushed out.

“I knew that it was not good at 6 in the morning,” said DeSarno, head of the Southern California region for one of the nation’s largest security firms. “Generally, I do not get calls that early.”

It was Gus Lipman, one of the top executives of Guardsmark Inc. Upon being informed of the attacks, DeSarno was told to place the managers of all 11 Guardsmark branches in the region on 24-hour standby and ask them to submit client lists.

Twenty-five years in the FBI did little to prepare DeSarno for what followed. Despite having taken part in the investigation of the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, DeSarno was rattled by the spectacle.

Shortly after 7 a.m., DeSarno was behind the wheel, on his way to see one of Guardsmark’s highest-profile local clients. Listening to reports about the attack on his car radio, he wondered what might be in store for the city. “It was a question of, ‘Are we next? We’re the next largest city and what will happen here?,'” he said.

As head of the FBI’s L.A. office, DeSarno saw the threat of terrorism first-hand in 1999 when associates of terrorist organizer Osama bin Laden were found to have plotted an attack on Los Angeles International Airport. Ahmed Ressam, who was carrying explosive materials when arrested at the Canadian border, later told authorities he had been trained in the camps of Bin Laden.

“I’m, of course, thinking about what we went through during the Millennium here,” DeSarno said.

During the commute, DeSarno called the FBI’s local office to find out if there were any viable threats to security in the area. He was told there weren’t.

But he worried about the Guardsmark client. (The company has a policy of keeping its customers’ names private.) When DeSarno arrived, the few employees milling about seemed nervous, so he set about reassuring them that increased security would be provided as needed. One guard was asked to serve as a receptionist because all the workers were sent home.

By 10 a.m., DeSarno had turned an empty conference room at the site into a temporary office and was holding a conference call with the managers of the area’s Guardsmark branches, which are scattered from Burbank to San Diego.

DeSarno asked the managers to assess the needs of each client and the type of threat they might be facing in order to figure out which facilities would need additional security officers.

David Takata

When he boarded a Continental flight at 7 a.m. in Newark, N.J. Sept. 11, Takata had no idea it would be the last time he would see the World Trade Center.

Senior vice president of research at the Los Angeles office of investment banking firm Gerard Klauer Mattison & Co. Inc., Takata was traveling to his firm’s Boston office that morning.

He wasn’t even supposed to be flying, except that his original flight which originated in Orange County and connected in Newark the day before was delayed due to thunderstorms in the Newark area.

He spent the night in Newark. “It was a nice day, it was clear outside, good visibility,” he said. “Taking off at Newark you could see the skyline of Manhattan and you didn’t see anything unusual. You could see the World Trade Center it was pretty clear from miles away.”

He landed a little after 8 a.m. and took a 20-minute cab ride to GKM’s Boston office, on the eighth floor of a large skyscraper in the city’s financial district. When he arrived around 8:30 a.m., the day was beginning as usual: the 20-or-so employees were busy on the phones, talking to institutional clients like Fidelity Investments and State Street Bank. Takata said a few hellos and switched his computer on. He was scheduled to spend the day visiting with Boston clients about investments in technology stocks.

Ten minutes later, he looked up to the 35-inch TV.

“I looked up immediately and saw that the first building was on fire,” he said. “It looked like it was just a fire. Within a period of a minute or so, people had kind of stopped their conversations and focused on the TV. People were wondering out loud about people they knew in those buildings.”

After the second plane slammed into the World Trade Center, Takata’s colleagues tried to call friends, family and colleagues in New York. But all the lines were jammed. Takata used his cell phone to let his wife know he was OK.

One assistant in the office was transfixed to the TV, completely mute. Another was talking with bravado about signing up for the army and taking the enemy on.

But less than an hour after the first explosion, most of his colleagues decided that staying in a major financial building in Boston was not a very safe idea. So they left the building. And they weren’t the only ones.

All the other financial firms were evacuating, and people hurriedly rushed down the street heading, Takata assumed, toward a subway or train station to get out of town or home to their families.

Takata, who had to have a colleague help him find his hotel, needed to go the opposite direction.

The gridlock made it difficult for him to get a cab, so he lugged his bags for 15 to 20 minutes to get to his hotel. When he reached the front desk, it was full of people trying in vain to get any available room.

Almost immediately after checking in, the phone started ringing from the West Coast. In between calls, he gathered up some work to determine what his projections might be when the markets reopened. What companies would be impacted by delays in shipping? What portfolios would be affected by the catastrophic losses of the management firm’s headquarters?

At 5 p.m., he looked out the window and didn’t see a single car on the street. “That’s how dead this city was,” he said.

Takata wasn’t sure which airport would be the better option Boston, Newark or Pittsburgh none of which had reopened yet.

He opted for a 7 a.m. Amtrak train from Boston to Newark the next day, Sept. 13, and a flight from Newark at 3:40 p.m.