STROUDSBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A woman who was widowed in the World Trade Center attack committed suicide this week, and a friend said she had "just lost her will to live."
Pat Flounders, 51, had been at home watching television Sept. 11 when she saw a jet hit the north tower. She called her husband, Joe Flounders, 46, and told him to leave his office on the 84th floor of the trade center's south tower.
He told her he would -- after he helped a co-worker who was hysterical and in shock. The south tower was struck by hijackers minutes later.
"She was so distraught. She just lost her will to live; she lost hope," said Kelly Lewis, who helped Pat Flounders gather personal documents after her husband's death.
She died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at her home Monday, Monroe County Coroner Dave Thomas said. Her body was found by a friend.
"She died as a result of the collapse of the twin towers just as surely as if she had been standing next to Joe on September 11," Dean Curry, a family friend, told The New York Times.
"Right after the disaster, she said many times that she just wanted Joe to come home," Curry said. "But lately she would be saying, 'I want to be with my husband."'
The Flounderses met over the phone in 1977, when he lived in Brooklyn and was the broker for the bank where she worked in New Orleans. They married a few years later, and she moved to Brooklyn.
A few years ago, after Pat Flounders had struggled with cancer, the couple decided to move to the Poconos in Pennsylvania, seeking peace and fresh air. Joe Flounders rose each day at 3:30 a.m. to make it to work at Euro Brokers Inc. at the trade center by 8:30.
"The house was his sanctuary," Pat Flounders had told the Times for a biographical sketch of her husband in November. "We'd been working on the house for three years, and three days before he died, we finished it."
On Sept. 11, she said, he was supposed to be playing in a golf tournament, but went to the office to make a few trades.
Pat Flounders held a memorial for her husband last week at New York's Trinity Church, just blocks from the trade center site.
She had been recovering from surgery in which she had a pacemaker implanted, Lewis said, and apparently refused the offers of free counseling that were made to families of trade center victims. She leaves a grown son from another marriage and two grandchildren.
On Tuesday, the trade center attack claimed yet another victim. Dave Bernard, 57, of Chelmsford, Mass., had been hit by falling debris and died at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where he had been transferred from New York.
An industry specialist with the Internal Revenue Service, Bernard was in New York for a 9 a.m. business meeting in Building 7 of the trade center, a smaller building near the towers. He was caught in debris moments after the north tower was struck by American Airlines Flight 11. He suffered serious spinal injuries and numerous broken bones.
He leaves a wife and three children.
