The extraordinary story of the Israeli American soldier, mathematician and tech pioneer who was probably the first person murdered on September 11, 2001.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Daniel “Danny” Lewin boarded American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles and took his seat in business class.
He was in seat 9B.
Directly in front of him sat Mohamed Atta, the tactical leader of the 9/11 plot, and hijacker Abdulaziz al Omari. Directly behind him sat another hijacker, Satam al Suqami.
Minutes after takeoff, the hijacking began.
Lewin was fatally attacked.
Based on the 9/11 Commission’s reconstruction, the hijackers’ seating positions, reports from flight attendants and Lewin’s military background, the evidence strongly suggests that Lewin confronted the hijackers moving toward the cockpit and was attacked from behind by Suqami.
He was probably the first person murdered in the September 11 attacks.
But to understand what happened in seat 9B, you first have to understand who Danny Lewin was.
Who Was Danny Lewin?
Age: 31
Born: Denver, Colorado
Raised: United States and Jerusalem
Military service: Four years as an IDF officer, widely identified as a Sayeret Matkal veteran
Education: Technion and MIT
Career: Cofounder and chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies
Family: Married, father of two
By 31, Lewin had already lived several lives.
He had been an Israeli military officer, an accomplished mathematician, an MIT researcher and the cofounder of a technology company that helped transform how information moves across the internet.
From Denver to Jerusalem
Lewin was born in Denver on May 14, 1970. When he was 14, his family immigrated to Israel and eventually settled in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood.
The move was difficult for him at first. Friends and family later described a teenager who responded by throwing himself intensely into whatever he pursued, from school to physical training.
After high school, Lewin spent four years as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces.
The 9/11 Commission confirms his service as an Israeli military officer but does not identify his unit. Former comrades, Israeli reporting and memorial institutions have identified him as having served in Sayeret Matkal, one of Israel’s most elite special operations units.
Lior Netzer, who trained alongside Lewin and later worked with him at Akamai, remembered someone who pushed himself beyond what was expected even in an already exceptionally demanding environment.
Lewin was also physically imposing. Netzer later recalled being terrified of practicing krav maga with him because once Lewin grabbed someone, escaping was extremely difficult.
But Lewin’s defining talent was not physical.
It was mathematical.
The Mathematics That Helped Change the Internet
After his military service, Lewin studied mathematics and computer science at the Technion while working at IBM’s research laboratory in Haifa.
He graduated summa cum laude in 1995 and was named the Technion’s Outstanding Student in Computer Engineering.
In 1996, he moved back to the United States to study at MIT under Professor F. Thomson Leighton.
The rapidly expanding World Wide Web had a serious problem. When enormous numbers of users tried to access the same website, the servers hosting it could become overwhelmed.
Lewin and his colleagues developed mathematical techniques for distributing content across networks and directing users toward nearby copies rather than forcing everyone to retrieve information from a single location.
Their work produced an influential 1997 academic paper on consistent hashing, followed by Lewin’s award winning MIT master’s thesis.
The research would soon become the foundation of a company.
Building Akamai
Lewin and Leighton cofounded Akamai Technologies in 1998.
Its central idea was powerful: distribute internet content across a huge network of servers and deliver it from infrastructure closer to the person requesting it.
Lewin became Akamai’s president and later its chief technology officer.
The company grew explosively during the dot com boom.
Stories from those years paint Lewin as almost relentlessly persistent.
According to his biographer Molly Knight Raskin, when Microsoft executives told Lewin they did not need Akamai, he refused to give up. After being escorted from the building, he returned and kept pushing for another opportunity. Microsoft eventually became a major early Akamai investor.
Another story describes a manufacturer telling Akamai that producing 1,000 servers in four weeks was impossible. Lewin bought tool kits, flew engineers to the facility and arrived saying he was not there for a meeting.
He was there to build servers.
Professor Leighton later remembered him as extraordinarily talented and hardworking.
“He accomplished an amazing amount in a short lifetime.”
By 2001, however, the dot com bubble had collapsed and Akamai was struggling.
On September 10, Lewin and Leighton spent hours confronting the possibility of laying off hundreds of employees.
The following morning, Lewin boarded Flight 11.
Back to Seat 9B
American Airlines Flight 11 departed Boston Logan International Airport at 7:59 a.m.
Investigators concluded that the hijacking began shortly after 8:14.
Flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney managed to communicate with American Airlines personnel on the ground while events unfolded aboard the aircraft.
Ong reported that somebody had been stabbed in business class.
Sweeney reported that a passenger had suffered a severe wound to the throat and appeared to be dead.
Information relayed on the ground identified the passenger as the man in seat 9B.
Danny Lewin.
The 9/11 Commission later reconstructed what happened during the initial takeover.
As Atta moved toward the cockpit, possibly accompanied by al Omari, Lewin was stabbed by one of the hijackers, probably Suqami, who was sitting directly behind him.
Then the Commission added a crucial detail.
Lewin “may have made an attempt to stop the hijackers in front of him, not realizing that another was sitting behind him.”
That carefully worded sentence has become central to understanding Lewin’s final moments.
Did Danny Lewin Confront the Hijackers?
The available evidence strongly suggests that he did.
Lewin was seated directly behind Atta and al Omari as the hijacking began. Suqami, another member of the hijacking team, was directly behind Lewin.
The 9/11 Commission reconstructed the attack by concluding that Lewin was stabbed, probably by Suqami, as Atta moved toward the cockpit. It specifically raised the possibility that Lewin attempted to stop the hijackers in front of him without realizing another was sitting behind him.
There was no surviving eyewitness who could describe those seconds, so the precise sequence cannot be proven.
But when the seating arrangement, circumstances of his attack and Lewin’s background are considered together, the evidence strongly supports the conclusion that Lewin confronted the hijackers and was attacked from behind.
His military background makes that reconstruction particularly striking.
Lewin was not an ordinary passenger suddenly confronted with violence. He had spent four years as an Israeli military officer and was widely identified by former comrades as a veteran of Sayeret Matkal. He had undergone demanding military training and was known to be physically powerful.
Those who knew him considered intervention entirely consistent with his personality.
Technion professor Alfred Bruckstein later recalled believing that Lewin must have tried to do something even before learning that American investigators had considered the same possibility.
“I knew he wouldn’t be the one who sits and does nothing,” Bruckstein said.
We will probably never know precisely what happened during those few seconds in business class.
But the evidence paints a compelling picture: as the hijackers began taking control of Flight 11, Lewin confronted the threat in front of him and was fatally attacked by the hijacker sitting behind him.
Probably the First Person Murdered on 9/11
Lewin was probably the first person murdered in the September 11 attacks.
Flight attendants Karen Martin and Barbara Arestegui were also stabbed during the initial takeover of Flight 11, apparently at roughly the same time.
But Lewin was reported as appearing to be dead while the wounded flight attendants were still alive.
By approximately 8:33 a.m., American Airlines personnel on the ground were discussing a possible fatality and identifying the passenger as “Levin or Lewin.”
Flight 11 would not strike the North Tower until 8:46 a.m.
The exact sequence of those first attacks cannot be established to the second, and no official investigation has formally designated Lewin as the first person murdered on 9/11.
Nevertheless, the available evidence makes him the probable first murder victim of September 11, 2001.
The Internet He Helped Build
There is a haunting postscript to Lewin’s story.
On September 11, millions of people rushed online searching for information about what was happening in New York and Washington.
Traffic to major news websites exploded.
And the technology Lewin had helped develop was suddenly doing exactly what it had been designed to do: distributing enormous amounts of internet traffic and helping heavily visited websites remain accessible.
Akamai survived the dot com crash and grew into a major global internet infrastructure and cybersecurity company.
Lewin’s influence survives in other ways as well.
Akamai’s highest employee honor is the Danny Lewin Award. The ACM presents a Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award. The grand prize of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition bears his name.
Cambridge has Danny Lewin Square and Danny Lewin Park.
The U.S. Army War College hosts an annual Daniel M. Lewin Memorial Lecture.
His name is inscribed on the National September 11 Memorial in New York.
And in Jerusalem, he is remembered at the 9/11 Living Memorial Plaza alongside the other victims of the attacks.
The Man in Seat 9B
Twenty five years later, there are details of Danny Lewin’s final moments that can never be recovered.
But the evidence paints a powerful picture.
When the hijacking of Flight 11 began, Lewin was sitting immediately behind two of the terrorists moving toward the cockpit, with another terrorist behind him.
The available evidence strongly suggests that the former Israeli military officer confronted the hijackers and was fatally attacked from behind.
He was probably the first person murdered on September 11.
He was 31 years old.
By then, Danny Lewin had already served as an Israeli military officer, become an accomplished mathematician, helped develop technology that changed the architecture of the internet, cofounded Akamai Technologies and become a husband and father of two young boys.
His life was extraordinary even before he stepped aboard Flight 11.
His final act appears to have reflected the same determination that defined that life.
Twenty five years later, remember his name.
Daniel “Danny” Lewin.
May his memory be a blessing.
