Jessica L. Sachs

Jessica Leigh Sachs (about 1978 to 2001) was a young accountant from Billerica who was killed in the September 11 attacks, the only Billerica resident known to have died that day.

She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in December 2000, where she belonged to the accounting honor society Beta Alpha Psi, Beta Gamma Sigma and the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, and helped to start Mercy House, a Southern Baptist ministry on the campus. After college she lived with her parents in Billerica and attended New Colony Baptist Church. She went to work as an accountant for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Boston and was studying for the CPA examination.

On September 11, 2001, at the age of 23, she boarded American Airlines Flight 11 at Logan Airport for a business trip to Los Angeles, her first trip to the West. The plane was hijacked and flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Only a few fragments of her remains were recovered.

In its report for that year the Board of Selectmen wrote, "We felt the loss with the death of Jessica Sachs, a passenger aboard one of the planes flown into the World Trade Center building." New Colony Baptist Church made a prayer garden with two benches on its grounds in her memory, and her name is among those on the Massachusetts September 11 memorial in the Boston Public Garden and at the National September 11 Memorial in New York. The Annual Fall Town Meeting of 2019 opened with a brief service of remembrance for her and for the first responders who died as a result of the attacks.