She held the keys to the cockpit of the hijacked flight 11. That's why she became the very first person k*lled on the 9/11 morning. Her name was Karen Ann Martin. She grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts. Friends called her Type A-plus. Competitive. Organized. In charge, to a fault. She took the steeper slope skiing. She hit from the men's tee golfing. In 1989, she became an American Airlines flight attendant. She celebrated by jumping onto a chair and announcing to her friends: "There is now something special in the air." She loved the long hauls. The hardest routes most attendants tried to avoid. She never married, but her friends' kids all knew her as "Aunt Karen." On September 11, 2001, Martin was the lead flight attendant aboard American Airlines Flight 11, out of Boston, bound for Los Angeles. She was 40 years old. She had the keys to the cockpit. When the hijackers moved to take control of the plane, Martin stood between them and that door. By multiple accounts, she was violently att*cked in the struggle for those keys. She is believed to have been among the very first people k*lled that morning, before either tower was even struck. At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. For years, her family had almost nothing to bury. A memorial first. Then, in October 2001, a funeral built around an urn holding rubble from Ground Zero. "We, all of us, never thought we'd have any rem@ins for her," her brother Paul said. It took the New York City medical examiner nine more years to identify enough of her remains to finally give the family something real. "It was always like something was missing," Paul said. "Some people in my family never got to mourn her death." A woman who announced her own career with pure joy, standing on a chair in front of her friends. A woman who stood, one final time, between danger and everyone behind her. Rest easy, Karen - @tiktokissue1