In the summer of 2001, a woman holding a small white dog stepped into an elevator at the Delray Racquet Club in Delray Beach, Florida. A man inside the elevator held it open for her. They were both headed to the same floor and she knew he lived down the hall.
As the elevator door closed, the man extended a hand toward the dog. A mistake. The little guy snatched the hand in its jaws and wouldn’t let go. The woman was terribly embarrassed. The dog never bit anyone before, she told the man as they reached their floor. He stormed down the hall holding his bleeding hand.
Fearful that the man was going to call animal control and that she would lose her dog, the woman decided to act quickly. She called the Delray police to report the incident herself.
Police officer Tom Quinlan answered the service call. “She was nervous and didn’t want to get her dog in trouble.” So Officer Quinlan went looking for the man. “He answered the door,” Quinlin recalls. “He had his right hand wrapped up. But he said it was fine. He didn’t want to do anything about it.”
The woman was relieved. Her dog was safe. As the Palm Beach Post reported: “It seemed like one of those meaningless incident until weeks later, after a band of 19 suicide hijackers conducted a coordinated attack agains America on Sept. 11, 2001.”
In the aftermath, Quinlan found out the man bitten by the dog was none other than Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the Al-Qaeda attack and the one who piloted the jetliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
In an interview with the Post, Quinlan said: “When I was there that day, I could see into the kitchen. There were four or five guys sitting around the kitchen table and they were looking at a blueprint. I thought they must have been engineers.”
We can only guess why the little dog bit Atta, but we like to think that she sensed the man was up to no good, that she should do something to warn her master. The dog couldn’t talk so she did what came natural. She chomped on Mohamed Atta’s hand. His action got the police involved, but that’s as far as it went.
Some days dogs more aware than people.















