A woman who nearly died in the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center âwill finally get the $5.4 million âa jury awarded her aęĶĶfter a 21-year legal battðļle against the Port Authority.
“It’s as if I can now breathe,” Linda Nash, âa former New Yorker now living in Colorado, âtold The Postâ Wednesdayâ.
Nash was first awarded the seven-figure payout by a Manhattan âjâury in Marðch 2009.
But then her case got cauęĶght up with âthat of âanother bombing victim and she was stripped of the award in 2013â, after the Port Authority appealedâ.
On Tuesday a four-judge panel for Manhattan’s Appellate Division, a midâ-level appeals court, âunanimously âruled that the payout should have remained intact.
“The Port Authority ought not to be permitted a second bite of the apple at the expense of the elderly plaintiff, who suffered traumatic brain injuries ââover 20 years ago,” wrote Justice Sally Manzanet-Daniels in the decision.
Nash, who has bð°rain damage and struggles with a laundry list of ailments frðĶom post traumatic stress disorder to asthma, could not return to work at Deloitte Touche after the bombing.
“I was in a very high-level, high-skilled job and when Iâm under stress my brain just couldnât work. I loved my job and I missed it greatly,” she said.
Nash moved to Colorado where she raises horses.
“Iâve been to the Upper West Side but I couldnât possibly go down to Lower Manhattan,” Nash told The Post.
“I was minutes away from dead,” said Nash, who was parking her car when the truck bomb exploded.
Rescue workers pulled Nash from the rubble.
The Feb. 26, 1993, attack killed six and left more than 1,000 injured. Nash’s attorneys argued that the PA ignored its own security reports citing vulnerabilities to the facility.
A Port Authority spokesman declined to comment, but an appeal to the state’s highest court is unlikely because the ruling was unanimous.
“I think it’s finally over,” Nash said.