Tania Head was, according to her own account, one of 18 people who survived on the 78th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the area located above the point where the second plane struck on 11 September 2001.
She said that a dying man handed her his wedding ring so she could return it to his widow, that a volunteer with his clothes on fire helped her down the stairs, and that she lost her fiancé, David, in the North Tower. On the strength of that story, shewent on to chair the World Trade Center Survivors' Associationand to meet Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York.
None of that was true. Tania Head was in fact Alicia Esteve, a young woman from Barcelona who, on the day of the attacks, was doing a master's degree in the city and had never set foot in the Twin Towers.
Nor did the engagement to David Scott Suárez, the Deloitte employee killed in the attack to whom she claimed to have been engaged, ever exist. Neither his family, nor the company he supposedly worked for, ever confirm that link.
The lie held until 2007, when New York Times journalists David W. Dunlap and Serge F. Kovaleski, following an intuition that something in her story did not add up, exposed it. Shortly afterwards, word began to circulate in survivors' forums that Alicia Esteve had committed suicide, a claim that has never been confirmed.
