BETHLEHEM, Pa. (AP) - Susie Sewell of Bethlehem is thankful when she thinks about the August 2015 terrorist attack on a train depicted in the new Clint Eastwood movie “15:17 to Paris.”
She’s thankful for the three American men who subdued a gunman, stopped the attack and let her, in the 2½ years since, finish college, move out of her parents’ house, get a job and experience life.
Sewell was on that train - with her parents, two sisters and, by happenstance, a Bethlehem couple they had never met before.
She and her family two weeks ago got a chance to see a private screening of the flm depicting their ordeal.
“Despite all of the terrible, terrible things happening in the world right now, I can’t ignore all the good that has happened because of them,” Sewell wrote in a recent post on a blog she maintains. “I am blessed to be alive and I truly experience each day differently because I am breathing.”
A twist of fate
It was a twist of fate that put the Sewells - father Mark, a mechanical engineer, mother Kathy and sisters Susie, Sophie and Sarah - on the train that day.
The Sewells were vacationing after having a family reunion in Ireland, where her mother was born and still has relatives. They visited Belgium and The Netherlands in a cramped rental car they decided to ditch when they got to Amsterdam.
“We were ready to kill each other,” Sarah Sewell said with a laugh. “So we were, like, ‘We’re not doing this.’ “
Mark Sewell returned the car, and that day decided to “take a relaxing train ride to Paris.”
The Bethlehem couple the Sewells eventually encountered, John and Corissa Browne - an electrical engineer and a clinical coordinator registered nurse - also were on the train by fate.
On a whirlwind vacation, they planned to see Amsterdam, then take a train to spend a few days in Paris before heading home.
“Believe it or not, we were ahead of schedule,” John Browne said. “We wanted to catch the earlier train, but we already had tickets on it, and they said, ‘Nope, you have to stick to the train that your tickets are for.’ So we said, ‘All right.’ We were just going to Paris for two days.”
Mark Sewell and John Browne - recognizing each other as Americans - met while packing their luggage beside each other on the train. When they boarded, they were two seats apart. Neither knew they were from the same city.
The terrorist attack took place five cars from the one in which the Sewells and Brownes rode. Members of both families passed through it to reach the car in which drinks were served.
“As soon as we got on our way in Amsterdam, we went right to the bar car to go get some beer,” Mark Sewell said.
An unremarkable trip - until …
The 15:17 to Paris train was a high-speed line, with only one scheduled stop, in Brussels.
Shortly after that stop, John Browne said, with the train “in the middle of nowhere, just all of a sudden you felt (the train) slow down. You’re not thinking anything’s wrong; just maybe technical difficulties or something.”
“It slowed down for a long time,” Mark Sewell said. “It was just creeping and creeping.”
Susie Sewell said she was nervous. She and sister Sophia were sitting next to each other, “and we’re very anxious travelers anyway, so were very heightened the entire time, anticipating something irrationally, not thinking that it really would happen.”
That Brussels stop, authorities said later, is where Moroccan-born Ayoub El Khazzani came aboard with an AK-47 assault rifle, a 9mm Luger pistol, a box cutter, a hammer, gasoline and a backpack filled with ammunition. He shot a passenger and passed into the car that was five away from the Sewells and the Brownes.
There, Spencer Stone, an Army medic traveling with friends, charged at Khazzani and leveled him. Authorities said Khazzani tried to fire at Stone, but his gun jammed.
As they wrestled, Khazzani used the box cutter to slice Stone deeply about the neck. Stone’s companions, National Guardsman Anthony Sadler and college student Alek Skarlatos, helped take away Khazzani’s weapons and subdue him.
The Sewells and the Brownes were not aware of any of that. But soon the train stopped at a remote platform, and emergency chimes started ringing. There they sat for 45 minutes.
“Some of the crew had run through our car,” Susie Sewell said, and John Browne said there was an air of emergency.
“People were making haste up and down the aisles,” he said. “And then you could see more commotion in the next car, so the next car knew something we didn’t.”
Announcements that had been in French followed by English sudden were in French only, Mark Sewell said.
“And you see all the French people go, ‘ugh, ugh,’ ” John Browne said.
Finally, Susie Sewell spoke to some young French people who had spoken to the crew.
“I said, ‘Hey, do you speak English? What’s going on?’ ” she said. “And he said something about a guy with a gun and we’re going to stop and get off the train. . That was the first inkling that we knew something was really wrong.”
After 45 minutes, Susie Sewell said, “an employee got on our car and was, like, ‘Everybody has to get off. There’s a terrorist on board. But everything’s perfect now.’ . We were, like, ‘Suddenly everything’s perfect?’ Those two ideas don’t belong in the same sentence.”
Caught in the aftermath
The Sewells and Brownes got off the train, got their luggage and waited on the platform.
“We’re all kind of, like, ‘We’re American, right? I’ll hang out with you,’ ” Browne said.
The families had to walk past the car where the incident took place.
“And it was all there,” Browne said. “There was a man on a gurney with an IV, solar blankets . blood everywhere. There were shoes in the trash can,” the gun and police evidence markers with numbers all over the crime scene.
There also was an older man, sitting on a bench, bleeding, Susie Sewell wrote in her blog. But Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos were gone.
The families weren’t fully aware of what happened.
“Just the little tidbits,” Sarah Sewell said. “The platform was a little chaotic.”
They talked with an American woman who was in the car where the attack happened, but “she was very visibly distraught and just said it was terrible,” Sarah Sewell said.
After about 15 minutes, passengers were herded onto a second train.
It was then that Susie Sewell saw John Browne was wearing a Lehigh Valley Hooligans T-Shirt. That’s the rugby team for which he plays.
“Susie looks at me, and she’s, like, ‘Is that Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania?’ ” Browne said. “And of course, when somebody says that in the middle of this, you’re, like, ‘Why do you want to know?’ “
They were amazed to realize they were from the same city.
The second train was too full, so the 500 or so people who were on the terrorist train were led, carrying their luggage, a quarter mile to an elementary school gymnasium.
Before leaving the platform, the Sewells and Brownes had someone snap a photo of them with the train.
“I know it seems crazy to want to take a picture at that time,” Susie Sewell said. “But that’s when we made it.”
They felt safe.
The end of the ordeal
After about three hours in the gymnasium, people were taken into interrogation in groups of about 20, Mark Sewell said.
“They brought French FBI, and they questioned every one of us . had one-on-ones, asking us what we knew, what we saw,” he said.
“And they were all taking notes,” John Browne said. “They all sat down and checked our passports, documented all of it.”
By then, they were getting Wi-Fi connection on their phones and were finding out details of what happened.
“We found out pretty much from social media,” Kathy Sewell said.
Before everyone was released, French officials told the gym full of people what happened on the train, but still were vague.
In all, they spent six hours at the gymnasium.
They were taken aboard another train - reluctantly, Susie Sewell said - and got to Paris at 3 a.m., 12 hours later than planned. In Paris, the train company had free taxis lined up to take everyone where they needed to go.
“When we finally checked into our hotel, super late, we looked at the TV, and there we were on the TV, walking past someone being interviewed,” Susie Sewell said.
Memories of Paris
After the incident, the Sewells were in Paris two days. Mark Sewell said the first thing they did was to call and visit the U.S. embassy to try and get a thank-you to Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos. The embassy was closed.
“We didn’t know how to get in touch with them,” he said.
Mark and Kathy Sewell tried to continue their vacation by going to the Louvre. But being in public places made them nervous, Kathy said.
The family had to take a train, a bus and two planes to get home.
“My girls were very nervous to get on any train to get out of Paris,” Mark Sewell said. “And we had to.”
The Brownes had only a day left in Paris, and with just 5½ hours of sleep, they walked 15 miles around the city before leaving the next morning.
Once they returned to the United States, the couple had a longer vacation planned shortly after to North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
“So we came home from this, we rushed, rushed,” John Browne said. “We got to the Outer Banks, it wasn’t till we were kind of sitting there, drink in our hands, relaxing, and my wife just kind of gets a little emotional about it.
“It was our time that it finally hit us about what could have happened, but didn’t,” he said.
Eleven months after the terrorist attack, Corissa Browne gave birth to a daughter, Mariana.
Mark Sewell said it was advertisements for the new movie that made him again think about trying to reach Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos, whom French President Francois Hollande awarded the Legion of Honor, and who got heroes’ welcomes when they returned to the United States.
For the movie, Eastwood cast the three as themselves.
The movie’s screenplay was written by former Easton resident Dorothy Blyskal, who said in an email he had no idea there were Lehigh Valley residents on the train.
Sewell emailed a Warner Bros. official in California, who put them in contact with a studio representative in Philadelphia, who invited the families to a private screening of the film Jan. 29 at ArtsQuest Center in Bethlehem. All of them said seeing the film was an emotional experience.
Of particular interest to them was how Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos also fatefully were on the train after debating whether to stay in Amsterdam.
“We never truly understood what happened in that train car,” Mark Sewell said. “I mean, we knew from our perspective where we were. But seeing what went down . It made me tear up at the end, realizing this quickly could have gone the wrong way.”
After starting her detailed blog post about the incident several times, Susie Sewell said the two-year anniversary spurred her to complete it - “just so I could get my thank-you out.” She said her father passed it on to the Warner Bros. representatives for Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos.
It ends this way: “Because of those men, that couple that we met on the train had a chance to create a beautiful baby girl. . Because of their bravery we are alive.”
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Information from: The Morning Call, http://www.mcall.com
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