Beautiful Young Physician Vanished The Day Before 9/11 Under Strange Circumstances
New York, New York. 31-year-old Sneha Anne Philip really seemed to have it all. She wasn’t just living the American dream, she was living the New York City dream.
She graduated from top colleges. She was on track to be a successful doctor. Her zip code was one of the most affluent areas Manhattan had to offer.
She had two kittens, a loving husband, and plenty of friends.
But everything wasn’t exactly as it seemed at first glance.
Wikipedia; pictured above is Sneha in a black and white photo
In September of 2001, Sneha was working on finishing up her residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital, located on Staten Island.
She was living in a beautiful 1 bedroom apartment in Battery Park City with her husband, Dr. Ron Lieberman. They had tied the knot in 2000.
The two had met while attending the Chicago School of Medicine, and it was important for Sneha to graduate at the same time as Ron, so she spent a whole year vacationing in Italy to make that happen. By all means, Sneha and Ron seemed to be happily married.
On September 10th, Sneha wasn’t expected to be at work, but that morning hardly started for her as a relaxing day off.
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Prior to 10 a.m. Sneha showed up in court with Ron. She pled not guilty that morning after being arraigned for falsely reporting an incident.
You see, Sneha was fired from her first residency program for continuously coming to work late and struggling with alcohol issues. Following her firing, she said one of her now former co-workers inappropriately touched her.
The district attorney became involved in that and authorities maintained that Sneha lied about the whole incident. This resulted in her being charged with falsely reporting an incident.
Even though she was now facing legal troubles, Sneha absolutely refused to retract the complaint she had filed against this person she used to work with.
Regarding that morning in court, the police would later say that Sneha and Ron were having some kind of a rather loud disagreement about her excessive drinking, engaging in drugs, and extramarital affairs with women, but Ron has denied that ever happened.
After leaving court, Ron headed off for work while Sneha went back to their apartment. Her cousin was supposed to stop by for dinner in a few days so she wanted to make sure everything was picked up.
She talked to her mom on the phone for around 2 hours. She told her she wanted to go to Windows on the World at some point but never clarified when she wanted to go; this was the restaurant located inside the World Trade Center.
At around 5:15 that evening Sneha left the apartment she shared with Ron to drop some items off at a local dry cleaner, and her building’s security cameras catch her leaving.
At 7:18 that night her movements are caught on camera again, and this is the final confirmed sighting of Sneha.
This time, she’s walking through a Century 21 department store, and she has her hands full. She spent around $550 on bed linens, 3 different pairs of shoes, and lingerie. She used Ron’s American Express card to make her purchases.
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What’s interesting is that someone who worked at that Century 21 remembered seeing Sneha while she was shopping in the department store, and she was with a woman that was reportedly a friend of hers. This friend was about 5 feet 2, weighed approximately 115 or 120 pounds, and was perhaps East Indian.
Around 11 or 11:30, Ron comes home from work and Sneha is not in their apartment. Now, that didn’t initially concern Ron at all because she would frequently stay with one of her family members or friends when Ron was working late hours.
Ron thought she had to be with one of her loved ones, and he went to bed thinking nothing of her disappearance.
He was simply annoyed she hadn’t bothered to get in contact with him, because that wasn’t exactly like her.
The next morning was September 11th. Ron got up and went to work. At 8:43 in the morning, a slender brunette is seen near the elevators in their apartment building. She then turns and leaves the building, but the video is not of great quality and the sun was hitting at an angle. Was that Sneha?
This was just a few moments before the first plane hit the World Trade Center. When Ron realized the tragedy that had struck Manhattan, he started to panic about where Sneha really was.
He desperately tried to call her, but he couldn’t get through. She didn’t pick up. He tried to get back to their apartment, and it took him 6 grueling hours to get down to lower Manhattan.
When he finally arrived, the front doors to the building were not working due to power being lost in the area. He couldn’t get in. He had no idea if Sneha might be safely inside.
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When Ron was able to get into the building after the front doors had been opened, he noticed their apartment was completely coated in dust.
They had left a window open for a little fresh air, and dust from the buildings coming down had seeped inside. The paw prints on the dust that their cats had made were the only signs of life.
Sneha wasn’t there, and neither were the items she had purchased at Century 21. It’s likely she never made it back to the apartment given this information, but where had she gone?
In the aftermath of the attacks, Sneha’s brother went to the media and told them a dramatically false story about how Sneha called him and said she was helping victims on the streets of the city.
It wasn’t true at all. It was a story he spun in the hopes that her disappearance would gain some kind of attention. Well, it did.
It got quite a lot of attention, but it generated zero leads and her brother did own up to the lie after some time had passed.
Meanwhile, Ron thought it seemed possible Sneha had slept over at a family member’s place and perished in the 9/11 attacks. He also thought it was likely she did stop to help victims and perhaps something had happened to her then.
Wikipedia; pictured above is a flyer for Sneha
As authorities began to look into Sneha’s disappearance, they brought to light that Sneha spent a good deal of her time in lesbian bars. They said she frequently chose to stay out into the evenings and not come home so she could spend time with women she met while out at local bars.
Authorities said that she lived some kind of double life and used 9/11 as an opportunity to disappear from New York City and start a whole new life elsewhere. She had been recently fired, she had been charged with a misdemeanor…it certainly seemed her picture-perfect life was falling apart.
They went on to say they thought she had potentially been murdered if she had not left the area of her own free will.
Pairing that with the fact that the last time she was seen was on September 10th, not September 11th, Sneha was removed from a list of 9/11 victims in 2004.
Ron and the rest of Sneha’s loved ones denied what authorities had to say about her and they appealed to have her name re-instated to the list of victims.
They were crushed that her name had been taken off of the list in the first place.
“I don’t have even a grain of hope that she’s alive or that anything else happened to her,” Sneha’s mom told New York Magazine.
“It’s more peaceful for me to think she died in the World Trade Center than … I cannot bear to think that somebody killed her.”
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On January 31st, 2008, Sneha’s name was added back to that list. However, her remains have never been recovered. The shopping bags she had with her the night she vanished are also still missing.
The woman she was last seen with at Century 21 has never been identified. It’s never been made clear who she might have been staying over with on the night of September 10th.
So many questions remain surrounding what happened to Sneha.
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