Posted on 03/15/2006 8:18:01 AM PST by West Coast Conservative
IT is one of the most chilling images to emerge from the horror that has become, simply, 9/11. Against the steel-and-glass background of the World Trade Center, a man falls headlong 1,300ft to the street below.
While pictures of the Twin Towers billowing smoke and flames will remain the most enduring image of the terrorist attacks, this one man's dying moments somehow humanise the toll of New York's darkest day.
And yet, as famous as the image is, the man's identity has remained a mystery. Until now.
Five years after the horror of September 11, 2001, the falling man has finally been identified as Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old who worked in a restaurant at the top of the north tower.
Over the years, his family has always assumed he perished in the building. Now, learning he had jumped is almost too much to bear.
His father, Alexander, a Baptist minister, has still not come to terms with the manner of his son's dying. "I can't talk about it," he says. "My life's work is telling people that they have to go on after tragedy, but I can't do it for myself."
Jonathan's elder sister, Gwendolyn, says: "When I first looked at the picture... and I saw it was a man - tall, slim - I said, 'If I didn't know any better, that could be Jonathan'.
"I never thought of the Falling Man as Jonathan. I thought of him as a man that just took his life in his hands for just one second.
"Did that person have so much faith that he knew that God would catch him - or was he so afraid to experience the end?"
On the day he died, Jonathan had kissed his wife Hillary goodbye before making the 20-mile journey from his home in Mount Vernon to Manhattan where he worked in the Windows On The World restaurant as a sound engineer.
That morning, the restaurant was holding a breakfast for 16 members of the Waters Financial Technology Congress, and 71 other guests.
At 8.45am, less than an hour after Jonathan arrived for work, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower.
The impact sliced through floors 93 to 99, killing hundreds, immediately creating a 1,000C inferno as the plane's fuel ignited.
The fireball was so intense that people in the building's lobby were burned as the flames shot down the lift shafts.
But it was the 1,000 people trapped on floors 100 to 107 who were unluckiest. With the lift shafts severed and staircases blocked by rubble, fire and choking smoke, there was no escape.
With the air becoming unbreath-able, desperate staff and diners began smashing windows. And it was in those final moments that Jonathan, an asthmatic, must have made his dreadful decision...
If we don't know what went through Jonathan's mind then, we do know the last desperate thoughts of others who decided they would take fate into their own hands.
Eighteen minutes after the first plane struck, the second plane hit the south tower, trapping another 600 people.
Mother-of-two Alayne Gentul, 44, a senior vice-president of the Fiduciary Trust, was among them, and in her last few moments she called her husband, Jack.
"She told me smoke was coming in the room, coming through the vents," Jack Gentul says.
"Her breath was laboured. I asked her why she didn't go down and she said it was really hot out there. She said to me 'I'm scared'. She wasn't a person who got scared, and I said, 'Honey, it'll be all right, it'll be all right, you'll get down.'
"She said she loved me and said to tell the boys she loved them. I was so shocked I said, 'Of course I will, but it's going to be all right.' When I hung up the phone I was horrified." It was the last time the couple ever spoke.
"She was found on the street in front of the building across from hers," says Jack. "Whether she jumped or fell, I don't know. I hoped that she had succumbed to the smoke, but it doesn't seem likely.
"In some ways it might just be the last element of control... something you can do. To be out of the smoke and the heat, to be out in the air, it must have felt like flying."
Official estimates of how many people leapt from the buildings vary from 50 to 200.
US writer Tom Junod says: "Between seven and eight per cent of those who died in New York City on September 11, 2001, died by jumping out of the buildings.
"If we consider only the north tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came from, the ratio is one in six." Photographer Richard Drew, 54, had trained his I lens on the north tower and begun filming the jumpers. "You could hear them," he says. "It was a big thud, like the sound of sacks of cement hitting the ground."
When he returned to the Associated Press bureau, a sequence of 12 shots stood out.
THEY caught a man, seemingly calm, plunging to his inevitable death.
The picture was published around the world, causing widespread revulsion, as if merely looking at them was to intrude upon a moment of private agony. After September 12, the picture was rarely shown again, but Tom Junod couldn't get the image out of his head and spent years trying to discover the identity of the Falling Man.
It was executive chef Michael Lomonaco who finally solved the mystery.
"Jonathan fitted the body type, the skin colour, and it left the door open for a possibility that it was really Jonathan," Lomonaco says.
Jonathan's father is still too upset to speak about his son but his sister, Gwendolyn, is ready to talk.
"Jonathan was a person who just loved life and it was contagious so that when we were around him, you couldn't help smiling and laughing." Nobody will ever know for sure if Jonathan was the Falling Man, although the evidence makes it highly likely.
In one of the pictures, his white shirt is blown away by the wind to reveal an orange T-shirt - identical to the one he wore to work.
But as Gwendolyn says: "It's not about trying to find out who he is, but what his death says to all of us." And what it says is ... never again.
Oh, God, I can't bear to look at the picture. May the family take comfort that he is with Christ.
Thanks for that link.
Actually, most of them didn't jump, at least not consciously. You remember the lesson you got in junior high school about the central nervous system and "reflex arcs", and how when you touch a hot stove your spinal cord will send the signal to jerk your hand back before your brain even realizes what's going on? The same thing happened to most of those trapped on the upper floors of the WTC. At some point for each of them, the heat simply got to be too much, and their bodies literally flung themselves away from the heat source.
Thanks for your post.
I never thought I would forget, I made up my mind I WOULD NOT foget, but I am amazed at how much I DID forget. If you haven't seen this little 7 meg movie (See Post 25), you should. I intend to watch it often to keep my remembrance of WHY we are doing what we do sharply in focus. IF you watch that little movie, then you watch the "media news" of the day you will see it is like comparing a desparate prayer to absolute trivia. Thank you for making me remember more clearly.
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my ‘miscellaneous’ ping list.
Just further proof that liberalism is a mental disorder.
A very touching article and posts.
It never ceases to bring a lump to my throat.
Interesting. CPUSA discussed the 9/11 issue in their latest meetings according to minutes.
I have no way to describe how I felt when I realized what those sounds actually were.
The last sentence is the only one even close to the truth in this entire passage. And the "rarely shown again" part has nothing to do with "intrude(ing) upon a moment of private agony".
We all know why it really was rarely shown again.
I really, really can't stand the left-wing media sometime.
Got Kleenex?
Hitting the pavement at that velocity has to hurt if even for a split second.
My heavens- how do you stop yourself from seeing that in your dreams every night?
that video is unbelievable
wow that'll make someone choke up
They wish they could.
That's really horrible. Five years later even. Many of those people who jumped did it out of desparation. Probably, they did it because of all the smoke and heat inside the burning towers. Many did not intend on jumping. When you feel something hot, you move away and they had nowhere to go. So, they jumped. It is a lot less painful to die by jumping off and hitting the ground at terminal velocity.
The left can't get over it with Pinochet overthrowing Allende, let alone the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communism in Eastern Europe.
Doesn't this make you just want to b--ch slap Ward Churchill (and the thousands of moron leftists who agree with him)?
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