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.
Sorry, but we could have won this war a long time ago IF the DEMOCRATS WOULD HAVE BEEN ON OUR SIDE!! They WANT us to LOSE!
Ah, so you're suggesting that a shoe bomber could have brought down that airline? Interesting.
May they rest in peace.
Yup. On 9-11, I was watching a Pittsburgh PA news station (I think it was WPXI) and they had a reporter up in Somerset (about 90 minutes from Pittsburgh), where the fourth plane crashed. The reporter related that a local woman was hanging out her wash when she heard a big bang and she looked up and saw an airliner begin to tilt to the side, then disappear over the horizon.
That was early in the afternoon when I heard that, maybe 1 PM. In the ensuing hours, the story disappeared from the news reports. The official story came out that there was NO bomb aboard that flight and no big bang. Go figure!
I've never read that before, thanks for posting.
Bump for Jonathan.
Thats right.
What I remember most about that Dominican Airlines crash is that my cousin was scheduled to fly to the Dominican Republic the following week on vacation. She wasn't worried a bit. She figured that since one tragedy already happened, she was safe.
Jonathan Briley, you have a whole new set of brothers and sisters who care for your family. There is a piece of the buildings at the entrance to the East Coast base that teaches new Marines to perform their jobs, brought by the NYFD, in brotherhood. Semper Fi The tower doesn't even have to be burning. Lots of twists and turns and exceptions have had to be added since they made suicide a sin hundreds of years after Christ. That was the same meeting where they decided that priests who had taken a vow of vegetarianism had to eat meat broth or be excommunicated, right?
Reminds me of the evacuated Chernobyl dwellings.
I'm so sorry you saw what you saw. So sorry it happened at all. I'm heartsick.
This story is getting a big yawn here at work...and we're in D.C.! We saw the smoke of the Pentagon from our windows!
They're forgetting...Dear Lord, they're FORGETTING!!!!
That's why I always smuggle a bomb on board...I mean, what are the chances that TWO bombs would be on the same plane? ;-)
For the Homeland Security/TSA folks with no sense of humor, it's a joke!
Wow- I hope someday people will be able to talk about it-- it needs never to be forgottten.
Heartbreaking story. May Jonathan Briley rest in peace, and may all the victims of such a horrible crime rest in eternal peace as well.
It is a reflex to avoid danger, like fire or smoke.
Jumping does not hurt but there is quite a bit of time on your hands to think about how the landing will.
I'm betting the man would want to be avenged.
Esquire got it wrong, they identified the wrong person
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