The tower 'jumpers' were murdered

The Irish Independent ^ | September 8, 2002 | Declan McCormack

[aristeides]

Jumping under these circumstances is not suicide. When you know you're going to die whatevery you do, you have the right to choose the least painful way to die.

[LeeMcCoy]

Never forget!

[Behind Liberal Lines]

When I think of the jumpers I wonder why we simply haven't nuked the entire midEast yet.

[lafroste]

This article is perverse. Of course some people jumped. Of course the jumpers were victims of homicide. What the coroner has done is rule those deaths of homicides instead of suicides, which was absolutely the correct thing to do. The author of this article needs to be slapped around, then fired for writing such a gratuitous bit of pomposity.

[Aaron_A]

Man, this is gonna be a tough week :(

[philo]

From Tuesday's USA Today

The New York medical examiner's office says it does not classify the people who fell to their deaths on Sept. 11 as "jumpers."

"A 'jumper' is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide," says Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office. "These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out."

[EggsAckley]

I'm with you! This morning I awoke to a horrible nightmare; driving through a huge city that had obviously been nuked. But it was one of OUR OWN. Really got me out on the wrong side of the bed today.

[Iwentsouth]

What a pointless article. Or a braindead writer.

Is this writer trying to say 200 people went to the WTC to jump of the building? The planes crashing into wasn't the cause of it?

[Ditter]

I try not to think of the jumpers, it hurts too much, but when I do I wonder the same thing. We are a country of great restraint.

[Trickyguy]

These "jumpers" were murdered. An old retired fireman told me that 100% of people will jump to their deaths rather
than be burned alive.

Murder, not suicide.

[kaylar]

I still have nightmares over the jumpers. Had one just last night. It was about people having to jump out of a "54 storey" building ; I remember that number exactly. They were trying to avoid being burned alive, and it was as a result of terrorism, but it was a bomb that caused the destruction. It wasn't in NYC either; it was either KC or Chicago or somewhere in the midwest.An awful nightmare I was glad to wake up from.

[Maelstrom]

Moral Decay.

[mountaineer]

Absolutely, we must never forget.

[Ditter]

Have you ever had prophetic dreams before?

[aculeus]

Is this writer trying to say 200 people went to the WTC to jump of the building?

Read it again.

[SES1066]

Part of what is important about this is the legal determination of the cause of death. Some insurance policies pay reduced amounts in case of suicide. Murder charges cannot be brought if the person is a suicide.

As far as the article is concerned, I have no problems with it, it was merely showing how the Coroner's Office makes an intelligent interpetation of how circumstances change perception of actions. It is neither ghoulish or improper in my opinion.

[Alice in Wonderland]

From Accounts from the South Tower:

Kelly Reyher worked on the 100th floor of the South Tower. He survived despite being on 78th floor, in an elevator, at moment the second plane hit. He is one of 18 people known to have escaped from at or above the impact zone in the South Tower:

"So we ran to the window and that's when, we didn't know what happened but it was catastrophic. And you just froze for a second watching the flames come out. And then people started to fall out of the hole in the east side of the building. And what it looked like was it looked like that they were blinded by the smoke and couldn't breathe because their like hands were over their faces. They would just walk to the edge where the jagged floor was and just fall out. So I think that they were completely confused about where they were and what had just happened.''

Accounts From the North Tower

[kaylar]

I don't know if it's prophetic (I certainly hope not!) but yeah, I've had precognitive dreams. Unfortunately, they're only about useless stuff that does neither me nor the world any good, instead of about important things like the winning pick six numbers for a specific day. Now, me becoming a millionaire would be useful, but instead I get trivial dreams like this:

I dreamed I was in a strange bookstore, and I was looking on the shelves when I suddenly came across a book I'd been looking for for years .(This was before I was online and knew about sites like abebooks.com. Nowadays, if I remember a book I'd like to read or reread, I can find multiple copies of even the rarest, most obscure book. But I digress...)The book was The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, which was published in the 1930s. So I woke up, and thought nothing of it. I certainly had no plans to go to a bookstore that day, strange or familiar. But that morning, my DH asked if I wanted to go along while he went to a little town where he had some business to deal with ; I saw a used bookstore there, after he was done we stopped there and...Yep, it was there. Werewolf of Paris, in a paperback reprint from the 1970s.

That's the kind of useless precog dreams I get. Cassandra, eat your heart out.

[SamAdams76]

Of course these people were murdered and the medical examiner was correct to not rule the jumpers suicides. Their fates were sealed the instant the airplanes struck the buildings below them. They were murdered by Arab Muslim terrorists. Why deny insurance payments for the survivers of these victims over a meaningless technicality such as this.

I can certainly understand how many of these victims chose to jump rather than succumb to the fiery inferno raging below them. Being burned alive is one of the most painful things I can imagine.