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Todd Morgan Beamer (November 24, 1968 - September 11, 2001), of Cranbury, New Jersey, was an account manager for the Oracle Corporation.
He died at age 32 in the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack on board United Airlines flight 93. He is survived by his wife, Lisa Beamer, two sons, David and Drew, and a daughter, Morgan Kay, who was born on January 9, 2002 -- nearly four months after her father's death.
Todd and other passengers had been in communication with people via cell phones and learned that the World Trade Center had been destroyed using hijacked airplanes. He had been talking with a GTE Airfone operator (Beamer used GTE as his cell phone service provider) located in the GTE service center in Oak Brook, Illinois named Lisa D. Jefferson for about 13 minutes.
Todd's last words were, according to the 9/11 Commission, "roll it"—apparently referring to a food tray being used as a battering ram. This was misheard as "let's roll", which became a catchphrase symbolizing American determination; notably, Neil Young wrote a tribute song with that phrase as its title, and President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address called it the new American creed. Florida State University's football coach, Bobby Bowden, drew both criticism and support for using the phrase as the team's motto for the 2002 season. The phrase has been registered as a trademark by the Todd M. Beamer Foundation, a charity founded by his wife, which has tried to prevent its commercial use by third-party merchandisers.
Todd Beamer High School (http://www.fwsd.wednet.edu/tbhs/) in Federal Way, Washington, which opened in early September 2003, is named after him. A post office in Trenton, New Jersey, was also named after him. Beamer attended Los Gatos High School.
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