At the time of his death on 9/11, Paul Ambrose, a clean-cut 32-year-old, was a rising star in public health. A graduate of West Virginia’s Marshall University college and medical school with a master’s from the Harvard School of Public Health, Ambrose was an advisor to U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher. He was flying to Los Angeles for a conference on childhood obesity when he died on American Airlines Flight 77, which hijackers crashed into the Pentagon. A surveillance tape from Dulles Airport would show him picking up his luggage after passing through security. About 15 feet behind Ambrose, Khalid Almihdhar and Majed Moqed, two of the terrorists who would hijack his flight, waited their turn.

That video was to be used as evidence in a lawsuit filed by Ambrose’s parents, Sharon and Kenneth Ambrose, against the airlines and related parties. Along with about 100 other families, the Ambroses opted out of the federal September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which paid about $2 million per victim—but barred recipients from suing the airlines.

When Paul died, Kenneth Ambrose was the chairman of Marshall University’s sociology department. Sharon was a hospital COO. (Both recently retired.) In 1998, they had lost their other child, Kenneth Scott Ambrose, also 32, to a lethal blood clot. The Ambroses believed that the Victim’s Compensation Fund was an attempt to shelter the airline and security industries from financial and public relations disasters. In December 2001 they contacted Mary Schiavo, the former Department of Transportation Inspector General who wrote Flying Blind, Flying Safe, about airline safety, and filed their suit in September 2002. Several months later, Schiavo joined the South Carolina law firm Motley, Rice—known for class action lawsuits—which took on on the Ambrose case and those of 57 other 9/11 families.

After delays, the Ambroses were set to go to trial last November 5. But on November 2, one day after attorneys from both sides and Manhattan Federal Court judge Alvin Hellerstein watched the video of Paul, the Ambroses and American Airlines agreed on a settlement. Its terms are confidential, but Donald Migliori, a Motley, Rice attorney, acknowledges that the Ambroses received significantly more than $2 million.

“The Ambroses had tremendous courage to say, ‘I’m not taking the Victim Compensation Fund. I’m going to expose myself, my family, Paul’s friends and fiancée to skepticism, questions, scrutiny,’” Migliori says. The Ambroses declined to be interviewed for this article, as did government and airline representatives. But Motley, Rice lawyers argue that the action established what they claimed all along: The Ambroses weren’t greedy but sought answers to questions that government-sanctioned investigations weren’t answering. Who was responsible for airport security lapses that allowed 19 men with box cutters to hijack four planes? Would anyone be held accountable?

Arguing that disclosure of relevant information jeopardized national security, the Transportation Security Agency labeled almost all the requested evidence classified. Eventually, Motley, Rice lawyers were granted access to a special reading room to review TSA documents. “The government went into overdrive to protect the airlines,” says Schiavo. “We had to fight to the bitter end for every piece of information.”

By late 2007 Motley, Rice had compiled over a million pages of interviews with airport officials, security screeners, and the authors of security guidelines. Among the most damning evidence was a security handbook used by the airline trade association stating that box cutters and pepper spray were prohibited aboard planes. At the time, the airlines were claiming that no regulations covered box cutters and pepper spray.

With the Ambroses’ support, Motley, Rice filed a petition to declassify the pretrial documents. They hope to create a public archive at a 9/11 memorial or the Library of Congress.

The potential archive is small solace for the Ambroses, but it is something. “You never get comfortable with burying your children,” Migliori adds. “But I do think they got some reaffirmation of their purpose and a sense that they did the right thing.”