Major League Baseball

Stanley Jefferson, former Met and NYC cop, still haunted by his 9/11 experience

Updated Sep. 10, 2021 4:54 p.m. ET

By Alex Coffey
Special to FOX Sports

Stanley Jefferson is trapped. It has been this way for 20 years.

He gives you an example. Sept. 29, 2013: Mike Piazza Day at Citi Field. The Mets were playing the Brewers. New York knocked in two runs in the bottom of the eighth to win it 3-2, capping their season at 74 wins.

Before the game, Piazza was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was there. Piazza gave a nice speech and held up a wooden plaque.

Jefferson remembers barely any of it. He doesn’t know who was playing. He missed the two RBIs in the bottom of the eighth. The game meant nothing to him.

The Mets took Jefferson in the first round of the 1983 MLB Draft. He made his big-league debut with them in 1986, playing 14 games with their eventual World Series-winning club. He has been offered free tickets countless times, and he has returned once, only because his girlfriend at the time was a big Mets fan.

Citi Field was packed that day. Jefferson didn’t even want to get out of his car. The walk from the parking lot to the ballpark was agony. And by the time he got to his seats and saw all those people — 41,891 of them, yelling, clapping, waving cardboard P-I-A-Z-Z-A signs — he was ready to leave.

He endured seven innings, calling it "the longest game ever." This is quite a statement from a former major leaguer who played in parts of six MLB seasons, including doubleheaders and extra innings.

But Jefferson sees that as a different life. That man could roam big-league outfields in front of thousands of people and barely give it a second thought. Back then, crowds were just background noise. Now, they are debilitating.

"I want to do what other people do," he said. "It would be nice to go to a game or maybe a concert, something that most people do with ease. I used to do it with ease. Now it's not easy. When someone invites me somewhere, I have to do verbal Judo to get out of something that is easy, something that is very simple, and people will try to figure out why.

"I can see it in their face, and I can hear it in their questioning. 'What's the problem?'"

Stanley Jefferson was drafted by the Mets in 1983 and played for six major-league teams from 1986 to 1991. (Photo courtesy of Stanley Jefferson)

Stanley Jefferson has seen things he believes no human should see. That is the problem. He didn’t see them for a day or two or three; he saw them for weeks.

After his baseball playing and coaching career ended, Jefferson joined New York Police Department precinct Midtown South in 1997 because he wanted to bring people closure. He wanted to help.

And sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center in the weeks following Sept. 11, 2001, he wondered, whom was he helping?

Jefferson sifted after his shifts. He sifted on his off days. He tried not to think about it while he was doing it, but then he’d stumble across a family photo that was once on someone’s desk. That would go in a pile over there. Or some boots that once belonged to a firefighter. Those would go in a pile over here. Or a watch, a scarf, a ball cap, a cellphone, all reminders that this one big tragedy was actually, upon closer examination, thousands of smaller tragedies, thousands of lives that came to a painful and abrupt halt.

The first week was nonstop. Jefferson didn’t go home. He slept and ate in a glass atrium across the street. It was where they kept the bodies, in a separate room. There were no breaks until that first week passed — because at that point, it wasn’t a rescue mission anymore. Everyone who was going to be saved had been saved. And those who hadn’t been saved, he could hear. Like the firemen, with their emergency beepers sounding off under that pile. Beeping every day.

"They were alive at one point," he said. "They pulled their emergency beacons so they could be located, [so people could] find them. And … you know."

The truth is, very few people know what it is like to see death, smell death and hear death on that scale. The only comparisons Jefferson can think of are soldiers and nurses working in COVID-19 intensive care units. But he doesn’t think anyone is built to experience such trauma, day in and day out, for months.

"You’re supposed to have some time where you take a timeout," he said. "You regroup, and you reboot the system, and then, yes, you can go back to work. But to have it on a regular basis? I'm sorry, that is torture. It’s not fair."

Jefferson hasn’t gotten a timeout since that second plane hit the south tower. He remembers standing on 14th Street and watching it fall as everyone looked at him and his partner, Ed, two cops, two authority figures. They were looking for reassurance, looking for answers, and all Jefferson could say was, "Go home."

Jefferson joined the New York Police Department in 1997, and four years later, he worked among the officers sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. (Photo courtesy of Stanley Jefferson)

The chemical changes in his brain and in his body weren’t abundantly clear at first, even to himself. He didn’t go out as much, but he was working constantly and didn’t have time to. It was in 2002, after he was transferred to NYPD internal affairs, that he started to notice something was off.

Jefferson was walking down a street in lower Manhattan, lined with brownstones, and felt like the buildings were closing in on him, squeezing him. He had to stop and stand in a doorway until the feeling passed.

That feeling of suffocation around buildings and the anxiety he felt around crowds kept happening. At first, he tried to ignore it. He thought he could fight through it. He was big and strong, a former ballplayer, a police officer, the man who was supposed to have all the answers. But then it got worse.

So Jefferson shut people out. He would deal with it himself, rather than show any weakness. Steve Brandstetter, his close friend of more than 25 years, said Jefferson is like a politician in that way. He’s good at hiding what’s really going on. As a ballplayer, he had to sign autographs and talk to media with a smile. He learned to fake it.

He began to self-medicate, drinking at his apartment in Co-Op City in the Bronx. He started to get panic attacks on the job, so he retired in 2004. The police department tried to place him on ordinary disability retirement, but Jefferson argued that because he was suffering from Sept. 11-related PTSD, he qualified for accident disability retirement.

He had to go to court to argue his case, in front of his peers, a group of people who should have understood better than anyone what he was going through. He eventually got the pension he felt he deserved, but it came at an emotional cost.

The drinking continued and worsened after the deaths of his father and his wife, both in 2010. By 2012, things really started to spiral out of control. He was overweight, he didn’t leave his apartment, and he was afraid to go outside.

There are days when Jefferson is still afraid to go outside. He loves people, and that is why he’s trapped. He misses his two kids and two grandkids — ages 8 and 10 — and wishes he could see them more than he does. But they live in Virginia, so that would require more flights, more crowds, and one roundtrip ticket per year is about as much as he can handle.

Jefferson, now 58 years old, has not worked a full-time job since he retired from the police department in 2004.

"I am not reliable," he said. "I’m unreliable to my family. How can I be reliable as an employee?"

Jefferson is congratulated upon his graduation from the police academy by then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, right, and police commissioner Howard Safir. (Photo courtesy of Stanley Jefferson)

He moved to Florida in 2014, to be closer to Brandstetter but also to get away from the painful memories. After his wife and father passed, there was nothing left for him in New York. He does not enjoy returning to the city that shaped him, the city in which he once played football on the greenway, stickball against a wall in the Bronx, as a child.

Proximity to Manhattan, with its skyscrapers, all seemingly falling down on him, was one of the reasons he wanted to move thousands of miles away. Florida has smaller buildings, pink and green and aqua and white, and when the sun reflects off of them, they leave him with a bright feeling.

At first the move was hard. New York was still his home, even if it filled him with anguish. Over time, though, he has come to embrace the Florida lifestyle. He met new people — something Brandstetter says Jefferson is very good at — but made sure to keep them at a distance.

"I don't think he wants them to know that he has panic attacks," Brandstetter said. "I don't think he wants them to see any weakness. Stan puts up a very strong veneer. He's very muscular. He's got a big, broad smile. He's got big, broad shoulders, but he’s got a sweet nature, almost like the gentle giant. He's very well-educated. He's very intuitive because he knows his own emotions. So he's very intuitive of other people's emotions.

"He talks to everybody, but there’s just something about the combination of all these people there that gets him. He’s very rational. He knows they are not going to harm him. But he gets that fight-or-flight mechanism and ... it's hard to know what he's going through because I'm not feeling it. But I've witnessed it, and he's living with it."

The first tell, for Brandstetter, is when a bead of sweat starts to trickle down Jefferson’s temple. He’ll start rubbing his hands and moving back and forth. He’ll get a distressed look on his face. Sometimes, Jefferson might say, "I need to leave." Other times, it’s up to Brandstetter to interpret the signs he’s sending. The trigger is usually a big crowd, but it could be anything.

Jefferson starts to feel light-headed. Now he is on high-alert. He is seeing and hearing everything around him. He compares it to the fear that strikes when you’re walking on a dark street, late at night. All of a sudden you hear a sound, and your adrenaline kicks in.

"That moment of fear, I can't get rid of it," he said. "It's like I'm fighting the fight-or-flight mechanism from within. It’s why I wanted to go to the car when I went to that Mets game. It’s why I want to go to a room when I’m having a panic attack. I want to get away from everyone.

"I know that no one wants to hurt me. I know that. I know it. I just can’t stop it."

Leery of crowds, Jefferson hasn't been to a Mets game in New York since 2013, but he did visit the team's spring training camp in Port St. Lucie, Florida, in 2018. (Photo by Joel Auerbach/Getty Images)

Jefferson has always been big on personal growth. It’s part of why he loved baseball. He could come to the ballpark every day and hone some specific skill — his baserunning, his hitting, his fielding. The growth wasn’t always linear, but it didn’t need to be. With a 162-game season, he had some time.

He still has that same mindset. He has good days and bad days, but for the most part, he believes he is in a better place mentally than he was a few years ago. He says the move has been good for him. He has scaled back his drinking and would like to cut it out entirely, but he still relies on it for most social occasions. He went to a wedding recently, in New York, and didn’t have a drink. He was proud of that.

But growth isn’t linear. Jefferson was the best man at the wedding. He was available when he needed to be, for photos and for the ceremony. But by the time he was supposed to give a toast, he was gone.

"He's trying to find a cure, I think, and unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a cure," Brandstetter said. "It is who he is. It’s ingrained in him. He's frustrated by it. Logically and intellectually, he knows, 'Drinking's not good for me. I'm not afraid of people. Why do I need to grab the drink?' And he's tried not to. And he just wants to leave. I think the alcohol keeps him from having the panic attacks. It keeps his mind away from whatever goes on in there that brings upon a panic attack."

That might be true, but Jefferson will not stop trying. It’s the same reason he makes a point of walking in a crowd two or three times a week. Sometimes it’s a festival, maybe a farmer’s market. Anything with people outside.

He won’t stop to talk to anyone. He won’t stop to buy anything. He feels uncomfortable, but that’s the point. He’ll walk through his fears, and eventually, an hour or two later, walk out of them and realize that he’s stronger than he gives himself credit for.

And then the next time the world starts to feel like it’s closing in on him, he can remember that he saw it up close, and it didn’t seem so bad.

Alex Coffey is a freelance writer based out of New York City. She spent two years at The Athletic, covering the Oakland A’s, the Seattle Storm and MLB at large.