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9.20.2001 08:39
Cranston boy asks: One of the planes was Mommy's, wasn't it?
• Paul Newell, husband of American Airlines Flight 11 passenger Renee Newell, tells of the days since the tragedy and his vision for the future.
BY MARK ARSENAULT
Journal Staff Writer
CRANSTON -- He couldn't talk last week, he says, not so soon
after terrorists killed his wife. Paul Newell had a son to worry about first.
He had to tell his son about his mother, and he had to watch him, to make sure
he was all right. His boy is 8 . So Paul Newell couldn't talk last week.
This week he can. He needs to. To tell the community whom it has lost.
He invited reporters to his home yesterday. The house on Glengrove Avenue, where
Paul and Renee Newell were raising son Matthew, is in the cute and crowded neighborhood
of Eden Park, near Blackamore Pond in the heart of Cranston.
He wore a white T-shirt and shorts, and a twist of red, white and blue ribbon
pinned to the shirt. He sat alone in a white fabric chair, against a stark off-white
wall in the living room, not far from framed photographs of his wife and son,
and of the family together.
Matthew was in school. He went back to school last Thursday.
"He's a tough little kid," Paul Newell says.
Paul Newell, 45, very calm and with an occasional quiver in his voice, had no
notes, nothing to read from. He rambled, stream of consciousness-style, about
his 37-year-old wife who died on American Flight 11, the first jet to crash into
the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.
Renee's obituary said she liked boating and bowling, and, sure, she did, Paul
Newell says. But that's not a person. Boating and bowling don't make a person.
He picked at a loose thread in the chair's upholstery and spoke about the person.
She loved to cook and to bake.
She collected Beanie Babies.
She never said no to a friend.
She fixed the home computer when the software got fussy.
She liked butterflies. Since the accident -- that's what he called it, the accident
-- the family has noticed butterflies all over the place.
Their son Matthew "was everything" to Renee. She loved watching him play sports
-- baseball, soccer and bowling.
Paul and Renee married 10 years ago in St. Rocco Church in Johnston. Renee loved
that church, she loved how the church's choir sang.
Her memorial Mass will be at St. Rocco on Sept. 29.
PAUL NEWELL was working last week when the news came by telephone, from
Renee's sister. He had no doubt about the flight. American Flight 11 -- that was
her flight.
Renee was a customer service agent for American Airlines, and the local representative for the airline credit union. She was flying to a conference for the local credit representatives, he says.
Renee took her friend, Carol Bouchard, of Warwick, on the trip. It would be fun, they thought. Renee's employee privileges could get them bumped up to first class.
"At least -- at the end -- she was with someone she cared for," Paul Newell says.
Paul left Matthew in school that morning, Sept. 11. He left his son safe and insulated at St. Rocco's School for as long as Paul could stand it. After lunch, he picked up his boy and took him home.
Some real bad men had crashed four airplanes, he told his son.
Matthew said: One of them was Mommy's plane, wasn't it?
Yes, one of them was.
Matthew wanted to know more. To help explain what had happened, Paul Newell put on the TV. They watched the pictures together.
He explained to his son that it wasn't just his mother who was gone; it was lots of other mothers and fathers, too; the people working in the building. And the firemen who had rushed up the tower, to try to save his mom.
PAUL NEWELL
wants to assure his friends and family and his community that he and his boy are going to be all right.
"We're going to mourn her and remember her and we're going to move on because she'd want that," he says. She'd want her son at baseball practice, and she'd definitely want him in school. "She would be adamant about the school, and she spit more seeds than the baseball players watching him play.
"I need to let the parents of his classmates know what their children have done for my son with their letters and cards. They touched him and they really touched me," he said.
"He's being taken care of," Paul Newell says of his son. "I've got help lined up, when he does fall."
Matthew tells his daddy that he wants to see the place his mother's plane hit in New York City.
Someday they will, Paul Newell promises.
Someday they will see it together.
The Renee Tetreault Newell Memorial Fund will be split between the Rhode Island Alzheimer's Association and a scholarship fund for children from St. Rocco's School, where Matthew is a fourth grader. Donations may be made at Citizens Bank, or sent to P.O. Box 3764 in Cranston, 02910.
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