Epilogue • Family reunion
Lessons learned for Jill and the Monitor about her campaign for freedom. What's happened to Alan's family?
By
Peter Grier
| Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
On April 2, 2006, a white Lufthansa 747 with the designation "Hamburg" written on its side taxied up to a gate at Boston's Logan Airport. At 12:22 p.m., Jill Carroll stepped off the plane and onto US soil.
As she passed through customs, agents and other officials on duty crowded around for a chance to see her. Whisked into a waiting car, she was driven to the Monitor's headquarters in Boston's Back Bay, a police escort around her and news helicopters overhead.
Jill was traveling light. She'd left a big yellow bag of clothes and toiletries from her captivity in the Green Zone in Baghdad. She'd decompressed there for a day, talking to members of the US Embassy's Hostage Working Group, before traveling on an aircraft carrying American casualties to Ramstein Air Force Base in Landstuhl, Germany.
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ZIPPY!
Jill's family shouted her nickname out of the window as she pulled up in front of a Boston apartment on April 2.
MELANIE STETSON FREEMAN - STAFF
Photos: Reunion
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In Boston, her car went straight into the underground garage of the Christian Science church headquarters. In a preplanned bit of evasion, she was led through basement corridors under the complex to a loading dock on a nearby side street. She then jumped into a blue van - easily missing the media horde camped outside the Monitor building.
The van went only a few blocks, to a nearby church-owned townhouse. There, Jim, Mary Beth, and Katie crowded around an open window, yelling her nickname, "Zippy!"
Jill met them coming down the hallway in a whole-family embrace. She wept and said, "I'm sorry." She was home.
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