Daniel Lewin
From September 11 Memories
Daniel "Danny" M. Lewin was a mathematician and entrepreneur. He died at the age of 31 on American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, after allegedly being shot or stabbed. According to news reports of a phone call from flight attendant Betty Ann Ong, to Amy Sweeny at Logan International Airport, as Sweeny reported in turn to her manager, Michael Woodward, Lewin was sitting in seat 9B, and had his throat cut by the passenger in seat 10B at approximately 8:20. That passenger in 10B was later identified as Satam al-Suqami. The claim that Mr. Lewin was shot has been traced to an FAA memo outlining the sequence of events surrounding the hijacking, but has been repudiated on this point of fact by the FAA subsequently.
Danny Lewin co-founded Akamai Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and a board member. At the time of his death, he was a Ph.D. candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a resident of Brookline, Massachusetts. He was said to have become a paper-billionaire when Akamai stock first became available.
Lewin was born in Denver, Colorado and raised in Jerusalem, Israel, where he served in Sayeret Matkal, a counter-terrorism unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, and graduated from Technion. He held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship. After working at the IBM Haifa research laboratory, he moved to the United States. He was survived by his wife and two sons.
His parents visited him from Israel in the week before his flight.
