REMEMBERING THE HEROES AMID THE TRAGEDY The Everyday People Who Saved Countless Lives on 9/11
Passengers of Flight 93 While two planes hit the World Trade Center towers and one plane hit the Pentagon, another plane that headed for the White House never reached its destination. That’s because passengers aboard this flight, upon learning their plane had been hijacked, decided to rush the cockpit and overtake the terrorists. They caused the plane to crash in an empty field in Pennsylvania, saving the White House but killing everyone on board. Sad though their deaths may be, these heroic men and women continue to inspire people even 20 years later. We should never forget the tragedy of 9/11, but we should also remember these regular people who decided to take extraordinary lengths to save others.
attendants, used the crew phone to call their colleagues and give them information about their attackers, including what they looked like and what seats they had been sitting in. Both attendants perished, but the information they shared helped the FBI jump-start their investigation. Rick Rescorla A Vietnam veteran who had earned a silver star for his service, Rescorla was no stranger to stressful life and death situations. As the head of corporate security for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower, he defied orders from Port Authority to stay put and instead escorted 2,700 people out of the building before it collapsed. After that, he headed back in to look for stragglers. That was the last time anyone saw him.
As we approach its 20th anniversary, Sept. 11, 2001, remains one of the darkest days in American history. Almost 3,000 people lost their lives when terrorists flew passenger airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. The infrastructural damage was severe, but the damage done to thousands of families across the country was even worse. While 9/11 remains a day of remembrance of these tragic events, it should also be a day to remember the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives to save others. These are just a few of their stories. Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney After five al-Qaida terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, Ong and Sweeney, two flight
Text Messages Can Be Legally Binding
the intervening decade, the use of email “has advanced immensely and become commonplace,” he noted. In the case before him, the judge said, the text was “a writing,” and similarly, when “read in the context of exchanges between the parties, it contains sufficient terms to state a binding contract.” The case is St. John’s Holdings, LLC v. Two Electronics, LLC .
A Massachusetts Land Court judge ruled in 2016 that a text message can satisfy the Statute of Frauds and seal a real estate transaction. As reported in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, the parties spent a month haggling over the sale of a Danvers office building. The seller believed it was free to accept another party’s offer and proceeded to enter a written purchase-and-sale agreement and set a tentative closing date. But the first purchaser thought they had a binding contract to acquire the property, based on a text message the seller’s agent had sent. The text message said that the buyer just needed to sign copies of a letter of intent and deliver a deposit check, which they did, only to learn that the seller later signed a purchase-and-sale agreement with another party. The first buyer filed a complaint with the Land Court seeking to enforce what they felt was a binding contract, along with a restraining order to block the other sale. The Land Court judge agreed and entered an indefinite restraining order blocking the subsequent sale. In deciding whether a text message could satisfy the longstanding Statute of Frauds requirement that a real property deal be memorialized in writing, the judge relied on precedent from cases involving email. In
The lesson for attorneys and real estate agents is to take great care when sending text messages and emails during negotiations. Where attorneys and agents can add written disclaimers to their email signatures stating that electronic communications will not create a binding contract until a formal offer is executed, this is not possible to do with simple text messages. So, especially where parties have been in negotiations for a time, and the material terms of the deal have been discussed, agents need to pay significant attention to this relatively informal means of communication, which may unwittingly seal the deal!
4 2
Published by Newsletter Pro • www.newsletterpro.com
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software