Natalie Hatch said she knew something was wrong the moment she awoke Sept. 11, 2001.

Around 4:15 that morning, she had returned to her apartment in Hoboken, N.J., after finishing a 12-hour shift at NBC where she worked on the international news desk.

A few hours later, her husband at the time woke her up.

“And he handed me my pager and he says, ‘I think you’re going to want to get up for this one,’” said Natalie, who now lives in Craig.

She stood staring at the television, trying to make sense of the images on the screen. The first plane had just collided with the World Trade Center, located across the Hudson River from her apartment, she said. At first, she thought a wayward plane had accidentally crashed into the building.

“And then it dawned on me, all of a sudden, that just the night before last, I had been sitting out on my fire escape with a glass of wine, with the Twin Towers right in front of me, watching the fireflies,” Hatch said.

She remembered the roof.

Hatch eventually left her job with NBC.

Today, she is a resident at Correctional Alternative Placement Services in Craig, where she was sentenced to in December, 2010. The events of 9/11 have had a lasting impact on her life, she said.

She didn’t know that would be the case back then, on that tragic September morning, as she ran up a flight and a half of stairs to the roof of her apartment, camera and binoculars in hand.

From her roof, Hatch said, she saw the second plane approach the World Trade Center. She said she could hear the engines revved at full throttle as the aircraft flew toward the tower.

“And I just remember seeing it,” she added. “It was like … watching somebody do a magic trick. It was so surreal.

“This plane went in one side of the building and disappeared and … you almost saw the nose of it pop out the other side.”

She watched the top 10 floors of the tower bow out, then bow in and sink downward, she said. The air was filled with a cacophony: the rumbling and the ensuing explosion as the plane hit the tower; televisions blaring; the sounds of her neighbors’ exclamations of shock and horror as they watched from their windows.

“I could see people,” she said. “They looked like birds flying out of the building.”

She ran downstairs to the television in her living room, desperate to see if her colleagues in the news industry had any information about what had just happened. By then, she said, she began to realize her first assumption had been wrong. This was no accident.

Helicopters and F-16s were flying overhead, she said. She half expected to see submarines emerge from the Hudson in a full-scale invasion of U.S. soil, she said.

She and her husband considered packing their car and heading upstate. But, they decided to stay where they were.

At one point during that morning, after the plane hit the second tower, she collapsed on the roof, she said. She sat there, stunned, and “listened to the earth rumble and watched the clouds and the buildings and the people that had just died be carried away by the wind.”

Hatch left NBC in 2003, desperate to leave New York after 9/11, she said.

In the following years, she said, she worked stints as a main assignment editor at a Fox News affiliate in Denver, a communications manager for Winter Park/Mary Jane Ski Resort, and in marketing and public relations for a business in Granby.

Life hasn’t been easy since 9/11.

In December 2010, she was convicted of two counts of menacing, a Class 5 felony, in Grand County, according to Grand County court officials. That month, she was sentenced to two years in CAPS with credit for 146 days served.

Per her sentence, she is not required to serve time in prison or to complete probation.

Hatch said she has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, adding that the condition may be attributed to what she witnessed on 9/11.

In her view, her experiences that day and since then have helped her develop a more resilient spirit, but it’s also given her “a more empathetic way of looking at the world and life and people from all walks of life, because you never know when you don’t have control,” she said.

In life, “the important things are family and where our heart is,” she said.

Bridget Manley can be reached at 875-1793 or bmanley@craigdailypress.com.

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