You can find three places at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank where the memory of Dr. Yeneneh Betru is enshrined: a framed collage along a ground-floor wall contains photos of the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, where Betru’s name is inscribed on a bench; a somber-faced bas-relief portrait hangs outside the center’s Intensive Care Unit; and a crape myrtle tree in front of the hospital was planted in his honor a year after the worst terrorist attacks in U.S history killed 2,977.
And Betru is there in Dr. Steven Taback’s memories, too.
“Call me Yen,” Betru, forever 35, had said when they met, already adept at smoothing the way for others.
“That’s who he was,” said Taback, medical director of critical care at Providence Saint Joseph. “If he could make it easier for me to say his name, he would. He wanted to make everyone’s lives better.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, Betru was one of 59 people on American Airlines Flight 77, traveling from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles when it was hijacked by five terrorists and flown into the Pentagon, killing all on board and 125 people inside the building.
Twenty-five years later, Taback talked about why it matters that he remembers his friend and his life of good deeds, whose greatest strength was “who he was.”
The two young physicians met in 1995 or so, when Taback was looking for an internist for a medical group he and other doctors were starting.
“It was through that position that Yen came to us, that’s where we met him, and hired him right away,” Taback said.
The two bonded over their “wonderful, but difficult” training at L.A.’s County Hospital, recognizing in each other the same intensity of service county-trained medical people embrace.
“He was dedicated to the healing arts, was conscientious, very highly competent, and with an amazing bedside manner,” his friend said. Betru was also very driven.
“People who are driven with intensity tend to have an edge,” Taback said. “He smoothed out all those edges. There were no edges to him.”
Betru was a teenager in 1982, the eldest child and first of his family of six to come to America from Ethiopia. He attended high school in Colorado, and college at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, earning his medical degree from the University of Michigan and completing his residency at Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center.
By 2001, Betru was serving as a medical director for IPC The Hospitalist Company, which was part of Taback’s physician group practice. Colleagues, patients and friends remember the slim and lanky doctor for his sense of humor and gentle kindness.
“We know life is fragile, but we don’t live and think that day in and day out. And I remember the regret. Oh God, had I had that opportunity to say, ‘Hey, you’ve touched my life. I love you.’” — Dr. Steven Taback, on his friend, Dr. Yeneneh Betru.
Jody Stanley worked in insurance and billing for IPC. She said Betru loved to squeeze himself into an elevator full of people, all raring to get home on Friday nights.
“You would push all of the buttons so the elevator would stop on every floor and how everyone would groan because we wanted out of there and we were on the top floor,” she wrote online in 2014. “You would just laugh. I loved your sense of humor and how you always had a kind smile to give someone.”
Betru’s brimming optimism and lightheartedness was remarkable considering he grew up in impoverished Ethiopia. He was visiting that African country in the late 1990s when his grandmother died and Betru saw for himself the lack of medical care available there.
“It’s what drove him to try and help people here, and to bring what he could in terms of his wealth of knowledge and training back to Ethiopia for his family and his community,” Taback said.
On September 2001, Betru had just returned from Ethiopia, enjoying a layover in D.C. and visiting his brother Aron. He shared plans to build a kidney dialysis clinic in Addis Ababa, and announced his engagement.
Taback said he isn’t surprised Betru decided to take an earlier flight to Los Angeles, knowing the practice was overwhelmed with patients.
The worst thing he could say about his friend, really, is that he got on the wrong plane.
Taback was driving from his home in Calabasas to Burbank when his phone rang.
“I remember one of my office personnel, Josie, called me and said, ‘I have bad news for you. You know, Yen was on Flight 77.’ It was just utter shock, disbelief, horror, sadness and intense remorse.”
Taback spoke at a memorial organized by Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in the weeks fter 9/11.
“I forgot to tell him that I loved him,” Taback remembers saying. “It’s not something I would have said. I said, ‘Have a nice trip, enjoy Ethiopia,’ and we’ll see you when you come back.”
But of course, healthcare providers need to compartmentalize their emotions in their work. Even the worst terrorist attack in American history couldn’t change what doctors and nurses do every day.
“We know life is fragile, but we don’t live and think that day in and day out. And I remember the regret. Oh God, had I had that opportunity to say, ‘Hey, you’ve touched my life. I love you,’” Taback said.
In the crushing first days after 9/11, those who loved Betru put their mourning to use. Nurses sold knitted baby caps and flag lapel pins to raise money for the Dr. Yeneneh Betru Hemodialysis Center, which was dedicated in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Sept. 11, 2008. It boasts six dialysis machines and offers free treatments, courtesy of American service clubs and nonprofits that raised money for it.
The ripple effects of Betru’s legacy is found in those good things, Taback said, adding he has thought of his friend opposite Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who was killed in 2011.
“You couldn’t find two human beings who are so diametrically opposed,” Taback said. “Somebody who’s hell bent on destruction and another whose whole life is dedicated toward warmth, love and healing.”
And while 9/11 changed U.S. national security policies and led to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its impact in Los Angeles is measured by stories from Betru’s friends and family.
At Loyola Marymount, where classmate Debra Thruston remembers Betru forever studying in the science lab or walking St. Robert’s Hall with a smile, their Class of ’88 alumnus was memorialized in “The Tower,” the university’s yearbook for the 2001-2002 academic year. Through the clinic in Ethiopia, “he will be saving lives long after his life was tragically cut short,” it read.
And unlike New York, where the city still bears scars from the attacks, Betru’s L.A. instead carries reminders of a man who thought nothing about taking patient calls for his friend, even though it meant working more hours on already extended day.
“Who does that?” Taback asked.
At Saint Joe’s, whenever he passes his friend’s portrait outside the ICU, Taback gently puts his hand on it, in greeting and benediction. An American flag given to him by government officials in 2001 still sits on his desk.
Standing underneath the memorial tree, showing off its pink blooms in the summer heat, Taback is careful not to disturb the small American flag a staff member plants at its base. That person, who wanted to stay anonymous, tends that flag year-round, replacing it when needed. She has done that for 25 years.
“This institution is just a miraculous place, and it’s been such a privilege to work here,” Taback said. “When I think of all the life that I’ve had and enjoyed in this world that he was robbed of, there’s no justice. Who knows what the last 25 years would have been for him, to care for patients, to have relationships with co-workers and family, the children he would have had. Who knows what he would have done, as dedicated as he was? What he did do in his short time, how much more he would have done?”
Betru would have turned 60 this year.
Remembering is healing.
“I think about Yen all the time,” Taback said. “He was heroic in his passing, but so much more heroic in how he lived his life.”