Becoming a U.S. Citizen Saved Cupertino Man on 9/11

Had it not been for Cupertino's Krish Suresh's desire to attend his U.S. citizenship swearing-in ceremony, an odd twist of fate could have placed him on the same flight as Los Gatan Mark Bingham, whose Flight 93 went down in Shanksville, PA, on Sept. 11, 2001.

Call it fate, or whatever you want, Suresh says, but for whatever reason, he was not on that critical flight; instead, he made it to his swearing in ceremony. And now that the news of Osama Bin Laden's death is spreading, Suresh has reason to pause and reflect on the moment.

"Finally," he says, "justice has been done."

Suresh spent a good part of Sept. 10, 2001, with Bingham, the Los Gatos High School graduate who died on Flight 93. Bingham and Suresh were scheduled to be on the same flight due out of Newark, NJ, on Sept. 10, but continuous delays prevented them from taking off on time.

Suresh says Bingham declined the flight Suresh was on, because it didn't have an available first-class seat, and instead waited for the next flight out—the fateful one that Suresh also could have been on, had he not been in a hurry to get home.

"I was between jobs," he says. "The only reason I was insistent in waiting out those eight hours was because I was becoming a citizen of the U.S. on 9-11. I could have very easily been on that flight."

Suresh didn't know Bingham, other than for those hours they spent together at the airport, but they are forever connected in that national event, the one that is now reawakened with the announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Suresh got goosebumps, he says, when he learned on 9-11 that Bingham was dead as a result of the attacks on the U.S. by al-Qaida.

It wasn't until Bingham's mother, a United Airlines employee, was quoted talking about her son that Suresh realized that Bingham was the man he spent so much time with on Sept. 10, 2001.