Original subtitles

It was the most photographed and videotaped day in history.

Two of the world's tallest buildings destroyed by hijacked planes.

The next day, newspapers published photos of the horror.

But there were some images so awful they provoked rage across the world.

These were the pictures of people falling.

One photo of a falling man was the most controversial of them all.

It was branded distasteful, exploitative, voyeuristic.

It was never seen again.

The images that came to symbolise the day

were those of the heroic rescuers working in the rubble.

But some argued that the picture of the falling man

needed to be confronted.

It not only acknowledged the story

of the people who had been forced to jump,

it alone gave a true sense of the horror of that day.

The quest to identify one man

became a quest to give name and voice to that horror,

a journey to help America learn and recover from its darkest day.

The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey

welcomes you to the observation deck of the World Trade Center.

You are travelling in an Otis Elevator at a speed of 20mph.

When they were completed in 1971,

they were the two highest buildings in the world,

standing 110 storeys high.

The World Trade Center was a beehive of human activity.

Up to a quarter of a million people walked through its doors every day —

bond traders, executives, waiters, dish washers,

tourists, cleaners, IT specialists,

insurance salesmen, maintenance men...

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the greatest bar

here, located at Windows on the World, in the World Trade Center.

My name is Ernie Scott.

Please watch your step as you exit.

It was the towers' height that never ceased to amaze —

standing an extraordinary 1,500ft above the ground.

"Tuesday, September 11. I'm James Farraday.

And here's what's happening. Thousands of New Yorkers..."

September 11, 2001 was just another ordinary day.

"Lower humidity than recently — the high 80 dropping to 60 tonight.

Up to 78 with sunshine tomorrow, 76 Thursday."

This is Steve Tory.

It appears Michael Jordan

will indeed be coming out of retirement...

[SCREAMING]

8:46am.

Flight 11.

9/11.

Certain phrases have become shorthand

for the worst attack on American soil in history.

Still around, guys. Still around.

When it was all over,

the world preferred to remember the heroic images of the rescuers...

...and how the American spirit had prevailed.

The impact cut a swathe through floors 93 to 99,

instantly killing hundreds.

Almost immediately,

broadcasters began to transmit images across the world.

Let's get this update from 101OWINS correspondent...

I'm looking at the World Trade Center...

Initially, most people could only react to the breaking news.

One of the world's tallest buildings wounded by an errant aeroplane.

I've now moved inside a building. But all the buildings...

But for anyone with a relative inside or nearby,

the immediate thought was for their safety.

I turned to my computer and I typed, “Hey, are you there?”

Meaning “are you at work?”

He worked for Bloomberg LP, so...

And I was gonna give him a heads-up not to go downtown

because of what had happened.

So I get a response back that says,

“Yes, I'm here. I'm on the 106th floor.”

“There's a lot of smoke. I'm scared.”

I just... I couldn't process that information.

I was like, “106th floor of what building?”

And that's what I turned around and typed back to him.

And he wrote back, “Windows on the World, World Trade Center.”

Peter Alderman was one of 170 people

at Windows on the World restaurant that morning.

There were diners, chefs, waiters, and kitchen staff.

Michael Lomonaco — the executive chef —

would have been there too,

but he was running late because he had stopped at an optician's.

How could that happen?

How could a plane on this beautiful crystal-clear blue-sky day,

you know, run into the building?

How could that happen?

I started to take stock of, you know, who's up there?

What's happening at Windows?

I tried to take a mental roll-call,

to try to recall who was there at that moment.

I knew there was nothing that I could do, but I couldn't leave.

And all I could think about

were my friends, my colleagues, my co-workers.

And trying... just desperately

to pray that they could get out,

that they could get to the fire exits, get down those fire stairs.

[MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATION]

But for nearly 1,000 people on the upper floors,

there was no exit.

They were trapped.

The plane had sliced through the elevator shafts.

The emergency staircases were impassable.

The plane hit the north tower in a very central way,

resulting in the fuel from the wings pouring into the building itself.

The fuel and the fire that was created in the instant that it hit

spread so far that people standing in the lobby were burned

from the fireball that came out of the elevator shaft.

And you could see the smoke coming out

from all the way up above Windows on the World

within minutes of the impact.

Those that could get out did.

But for the others above the crash site,

the heat and thick smoke was already making it difficult to breathe —

in some places impossible.

But the watching world

could only guess at the terrible conditions inside.

Only those in direct communication

realised that the danger had spread far beyond the crash site

and that casualties might number not into the tens,

but into the hundreds, even thousands.

I was freaking out.

I was crying and my boss came into my office and he's like, you know,

“It's OK. It's just a fire.

They're gonna put it out and you know he's OK."

So I wrote back again to him saying, “Can you get out?"

And he wrote back, “No. We are stuck."

[SIREN WAILS, HORN BLARES]

The people trapped on the upper floors

inundated the emergency services with calls pleading for help.

At the point of impact,

temperatures were reaching over 1,000 degrees centigrade.

As the flames consumed everything in sight,

the smoke was becoming increasingly toxic.

In desperation, windows were broken to let in fresh air.

This only made things worse.

For some people, there was only one option left.

Oh my God.

Among the bystanders was photographer Richard Drew.

I was standing between a police officer and a woman EMS worker.

And all of a sudden, the woman says, “Oh, look”,

and she pointed up and we both looked up...

...all three of us looked up

and the people started coming down from the World Trade Center.

Bodies were falling,

so I instinctively picked up my camera and started taking pictures.

That's what I do. It's like a carpenter, you know?

He has a hammer, he builds a house. I have a camera, I take pictures.

Numerous people are jumping.

Numerous people are jumping.

You could hear the sound.

They would fall to a certain point and then I couldn't see them anymore

'cause my view was obstructed from where I was.

But you could always hear them hitting the ground

like a sack of cement, a big thud.

Oh my God!

Broadcasters were pulling back.

They weren't showing the people falling.

They were reporting them.

What did you see happen?

People are jumping out the windows over there.

They're jumping out the windows —

I guess because they're trying to save themselves.

I don't know.

But pulling back didn't spare people from the horror,

because then the unbelievable happened,

something that made it clear that the first plane wasn't an accident.

[CRASH!]

[Woman screams]

When United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the south tower,

millions saw it live.

[Woman screams] Oh my God!

A second plane crashed into number 2.

And my brother's a photoj...

You can't even see down Broadway

from the vantage point of City Hall.

I've now moved inside a building, but all the buildings along Broadway

here at City Hall are being evacuated.

Now the thousand people trapped in the north tower

were joined by 600 in the south.

One man, arriving at his office across the river in New Jersey,

however, was unaware of the attacks

and the awful predicament his wife now found herself in.

The phone rang and it was my friend Bill.

And he said, “Do you know what's going on at the World Trade Center?"

And I said, “No." He knew Alayne worked there.

We had been friends for many years.

And he said, “Well, a plane hit the north tower”,

and I knew Alayne worked in the south tower,

so I said, “Well, you know, that's horrible,

but let me see what I can find out.”

My secretary came in and told me that Alayne was on the phone.

The first thing I said was, “Well, thank God you're OK."

And she said, “Well, not really."

She told me that smoke was coming into the room,

was coming through the vents

and that there had been an explosion beneath them.

She didn't know a plane hit.

Alayne Gentul had seen the north tower hit

and had immediately began helping her colleagues to evacuate.

[SCREAMING AND HUBBUB]

She was on the 97th floor when the second plane struck

and was now among those trapped.

As she was speaking to me, I could hear her voice,

her breath was laboured.

And, um... I remember saying,

“Don't breathe so hard, you know? Try to relax.”

When I asked why they didn't try to go down,

she said it was really hot out there.

And she meant the area

near where the elevators and the stairwells were.

I didn't understand that.

But it was evident to me just from her breathing

that it was becoming impossible to be there anymore.

She said to me, “I'm scared.”

She wasn't a person who got scared.

And I said, “Honey, it'll be alright, it'll be alright.

You'll get down, you'll get down.”

Alayne said that she and her colleagues

felt they only had one choice,

to put wet clothes over their head and to try to get out.

She said to me that she loved me

and she said to tell the boys that I love them.

And I was... I was shocked that she was saying this to me.

I said, “Of course I will, of course I will,

but it's going to be alright.”

And she said, “I love you", and I said, “I love you,"

and she said, “I love you", and I said, “I love you",

and then I said, “Call me when you get down.”

And when I hung up the phone, I was...

[Sighs]

...I was horrified.

Jack Gentul doesn't know what happened next,

but he knows where it all ended.

I know that Alayne was found on the street...

...in front of the building across from hers.

So whether she jumped or fell,

I don't know.

I believe she was alive when it happened because of that phone call.

I hoped that she had succumbed to the smoke,

but... it doesn't seem likely.

It's something I can't know.

In some ways, it might just be

the last element of control that you have.

Everything around you is happening and you can't stop it,

but this is something that you can do.

And to be out of the smoke and the heat and to be out in the air...

...it must've felt like flying.

It's gonna fall.

What's going on? It's gonna explode!

At 9:58, the south tower fell,

extinguishing in an instant the hopes of hundreds inside.

[SCREAMING]

The photographer Richard Drew caught the moment.

Oh, shit! The World Trade just...

0h, my God!

The whole building collapsed!

I think the camera is sort of a filter for me

between me and what I'm photographing.

And I'm only seeing what's coming through my lens

and that helps me sort of separate it, I guess, psychologically.

What Drew didn't realise

was that he'd already captured an image so shocking,

so representative of the horror of the day,

that it would ignite controversy and anger across the world.

Nothing's taking off. All the airports are closed down.

The roads are closed down.

The twin disaster at the World Trade Center

happening shortly before 9:00am, then right around 9:00am

and then, just a little while ago, a third explosion

which actually brought down the south tower.

1010WINS reporter Juliet Papa is down around...

More than an hour had passed since the north tower had been hit.

On the ground, people were traumatised by what they were seeing.

Not just the burning buildings, but bodies falling.

Oh my God!

Some people had been blown out by the initial explosions,

some may have slipped,

but it was clear that some were being forced into an impossible decision.

[RADIO BABBLE]

The fire continued to spread,

burning up the furniture and office papers

and the combustible materials throughout the buildings.

And the tower itself became like a chimney,

sending the smoke up towards the top of the tower.

And as time passed, the situation became desperate.

There was a long period of time

where people were just hanging out by the windows waving things.

You saw one man just waving a long white... is it a tablecloth?

It's not clear.

They were people that I knew.

There were people waving jackets or tablecloths or napkins.

There were people waving, crying out for help...

...and they were people that I knew so well

and that only made it worse.

Firefighters were climbing the stairs trying to reach the upper floors.

They could get nowhere near.

Some people had tried to escape to the roof,

but found the access door locked, but it wouldn't have helped anyway.

The thick smoke made it impossible for helicopters to land.

Peter Alderman was one of 7O people

stuck in an office on the 106th floor.

He sent seven text messages between 9:07 and 9:25 to friends and family.

His growing desperation was clear.

Someone had asked him if they could evacuate the building

and he said, “We can't even move.”

When I spoke to him, he said, “No, we're stuck”,

and I took stuck to be, you know, maybe in a room or something,

but “can't move", to me, that sounds much worse.

He said the room was filling with smoke,

so I mean, the situation was definitely deteriorating

as the minutes were going by.

You were able to see more and more people

assembling at the windows.

As time is passing, not only are they assembled at the windows,

but they are stacked upon each other at the windows.

Acting, I'm sure, with an irrational search to somehow breathe.

Pushing up against the windows and bodies lying upon each other.

Some people, in fact, were actually hanging out of the windows

and holding on across the steel that divided the windows.

They were just so desperate to get air.

Imagine leaning out of the 109th floor of the World Trade Center.

No rational person would ever do that.

Holy shit! Oh my God!

They're jumping!

Numerous people are jumping.

Numerous people are jumping.

There were things that were so big that were falling.

And, um...

...it was terrifying and horrifying

to think I didn't recognise the objects I was seeing as people.

Maybe that thought was just too...

...too horrendous, too horrifying to me.

Others did see what was happening.

Lonely 10-second journeys. A very public way of dying.

The only visible fatalities in a day that claimed thousands.

Surely we're in the middle

of the worst ever act of terrorism directed at the United States

on domestic soil.

And it may not be over.

Sources ascertain at the Fox News channel...

Thomas McGinnis was trapped just below the crash zone.

His wife, Iliana, had been desperately trying to reach him

for over an hour.

The receptionist said, “Thomas is on the phone”,

and right away I took it.

He says, “This doesn't look good. This doesn't look good.”

And I said, “You're right. Oh my God. This is like World War III.”

And I'm not thinking something's wrong

because he's on the phone, he's calling me, so he must be OK.

He's at the bar or on the street

or he's using somebody else's cellphone or he's on a payphone.

And he says it again. He just says it three times in a row.

And something in the way he says it, he was calm about it,

but something said to me, “Something's not right”.

And I started to get nervous and I got upset too.

I was upset, like mad at him. Like, “Are you OK?"

And he said it again. “This doesn't look good. This doesn't look good.”

And I said, “Just answer me yes or no — are you OK?”

And that's when he said, “We're in a conference room on the 92nd floor.”

The fire was working its way down to the 92nd floor.

As Thomas McGinnis talked to his wife, it was nearly upon him.

That's when he said to me, he goes, “Iliana, you don't understand.

There are people jumping from the...” [Sobs]

I'm sorry.

He said, “There are people jumping from the floors above us.”

And that's when I just was like, “Oh my God, this is bad.

This is very bad”, 'cause I'm thinking...

I mean, one thing is when you're on the 3rd floor or the 4th floor

and there's a fire and you jump

because you think, “OK, I've gotta escape this fire.”

And you think, “Well, I might survive.

I might get broken legs or a broken back or...”

But these people are jumping to their deaths.

That's how desperate they are, that they're jumping to their deaths.

And I'm just thinking about these poor guys in this room,

not for five minutes, but for an hour dealing with that

and knowing that something terrible is going on up there

and that it's coming down to us too, because we can't get out of here.

And so I know that for him...

...it was a goodbye call.

But I just wasn't ready to accept that.

But I know that it was for him 'cause he said,

“I love you. Take care of Caitlin”, who's our little girl.

I just kept saying, “You're coming home tonight.”

And he says, “If we get out of here, it's gonna be a miracle.”

And the last thing he said was, “I've gotta get down on the floor.”

And that's when I lost the connection.

And I tried again, but I just... I couldn't get through.

There was no dial tone. There was nothing.

Thomas McGinnis's call

was the last voice ever heard from the north tower.

Three minutes later, the tower collapsed.

By then, as many as 200 people had fallen from the sky.

OH, MY GOD! IT'S COMING DOWN!

Let's go!

IT'S COMING DOWN!

Shit. [SIREN WAILS IN THE DISTANCE]

[MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATIONS]

A couple of hours later, the photographer, Richard Drew,

was back at the Associated Press newsroom at Rockefeller Center.

He was now methodically working his way through the images he'd shot.

You photograph what's there in front of you.

You just instinctively take pictures of what's there.

So I started looking at the pictures of the falling people.

I called one of our senior editors, who was there at the time, over

to start looking at the images with me

and I said, “I really like this one. It really hits you.

It's just something... that certain something that you recognise.”

I see this not as this person's death,

but as part of his life.

There's no blood, there's no guts. It's just a person falling.

Within minutes, Drew's falling man

joined thousands of images arriving in newsrooms across the world.

Among them was the 'Morning Call',

a typical midsized American newspaper based in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

My first reaction to it was horror.

We knew it was happening, there were reports of it on television,

but TV stations weren't showing bodies falling from the tower.

My mind right away went to, “Are we gonna print this?”

And I felt we wanted to print it,

but could the person be identified, you know'?

First thing I tried to do is look very closely to see,

and I couldn't.

The editors wanted to choose images

that best captured the story.

To gauge opinion, they pinned many on the wall.

[LOW-LEVEL CONVERSATION]

Among them was the falling man.

It felt like I was punched in the stomach, you know'?

It was such a strong image.

It was hard to look at.

You feel like it's a private moment.

It feels almost obscene looking at this.

You feel like you're taking away the person's humanity a little bit.

I said I had the same reaction to the Eddie Adams photo

where the South Vietnamese police chief

stepped up to the Vietcong prisoner,

put the pistol to his head and shot him in the temple.

It's just the last moment of a person's life.

Naomi's reaction was, “Exactly, it is just like that Eddie Adams photo,

and that's a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo,

and that's exactly why we should run it.”

At the afternoon news meeting,

as the staff tried to absorb the day's events,

the editor canvassed opinion.

By the time we got to the news meeting,

I recall... there were probably a few voices were concerned.

We'd still discuss the concern.

Naomi was very passionate about the photo.

She believed there are photos in history that are flashpoints,

that really kind of get at the truth.

I mean, they're hard to look at,

but there are certain photos that just tell the story.

And in this case it got to the humanity

in a way that other photos,

even that might be more graphic, would not.

This particular photo —

that separated it from all the other photos

was the quietness and the body position.

I saw grace, I saw a stillness,

even though I know that he was falling.

I saw a quietness in that,

as opposed to a loud, horrible, burning death.

The 'Morning Call' decided to publish the Drew image,

putting it on the back page of the first section.

It carried the photo larger than any newspaper in the country.

You know, you have to know, going into this,

that you're going to get reader response,

and it's going to be heavy, and it's going to be angry.

And a lot of it can be misdirected anger, but we get it.

[PRINTER WHIRRS]

On the morning of September 12,

170,000 copies of the paper carrying the image of the falling man

were distributed throughout the Morning Call's region.

Allentown is so typically American

that it's regularly used by pollsters to canvass American opinion.

Its response was unequivocal.

“To the editor, It was with utter disgust that,

as I read the September 12 edition,

I turned a page, only to see a large photo of some poor soul

plummeting 1,000 feet headfirst to certain death.”

“Do not let your children read the 'Morning Call'.

The half-page colour picture of a man falling out of the window

was used in such poorjudgment.”

I'm not an angry guy.

I'm pretty much a very passive person.

Nothing fazes me. I'm very light-hearted.

But that day, that picture, it just made me angry.

We had more response on this photo

than I believe we've ever seen on any photo published —

and a passionate response — and that's saying a lot.

I'd never really seen something like that.

Many people just didn't want to look at it and they were angry.

You knew that, a few seconds earlier,

that person had to make a decision.

They were executed, but they had the choice

in the manner of how they were going to die.

They were either going to fall to their death

or they were going to be burned alive in the building.

There was no third choice.

And when you saw that photograph,

you immediately knew that this person had thought those thoughts,

had made his decision and acted on it.

We had to capture the enormity of this event.

There had never been anything like it prior.

And the images were absolutely critical.

I really think it did cause anybody who looked at that photo

to think about that — “What would I do?”

I thought about that myself.

You know, “What choice would I make?”

And the absolute horror of making that choice.

And I think maybe that's the personal space

that we went to with some people,

where they thought about what would their personal choice be?

We've not run it since that day, since September 12.

We just couldn't, you know, scratch at that scab again, open that wound.

But the photo had already been published

and the reaction in Allentown was mirrored around the world.

But some who saw it couldn't get it out of their mind.

I remember seeing that picture. It stopped me.

There was something that was everyday

about the person who was in it —

you know, he looked like any guy who you see in the city.

And yet there was something, you know, forever remote about him.

I mean, how could you ever possibly get to that experience?

He seems almost perfectly composed. This is impossible.

This picture, it should be, and it will go, everywhere.

I never saw that picture again.

The photo had disappeared from public view

in a remarkable, spontaneous act of self-censorship.

Newspapers and magazines decided not to run it again.

No-one wanted to confront the existence of the jumpers.

[MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATIONS]

In the days following September 11,

there was a desperate search for survivors.

10,000 were feared dead or missing under the rubble.

Firefighters worked tirelessly around the clock,

hunting for any sign of life.

Americans had recoiled from the falling man.

But now, pictures of the rescuers

were something the nation could celebrate and rally around.

The images that lasted are, in the most case, heroic pictures.

There was a spin that came out of our feeling

of being so deeply wounded on that day

which was that, you know, “We're Americans,

and you may have knocked our buildings down,

you may have killed nearly 3,000 people,

but the American spirit shall prevail.”

Whereas Richard Drew's picture, the 'falling man' picture,

became, for whatever reason,

the picture that nobody wanted to look at.

But Tom Junod,

a prize-winning writer on American culture,

could not stop looking.

He felt the falling man was the defining image of September 11

and decided to investigate why the jumpers had been airbrushed

from the day.

I talked to the coroner's office in New York.

I asked them for a count of how many people jumped that day.

And what the woman from the coroner's office said was,

“Nobody jumped that day.

They were blown out. They were forced out.

We don't say that they jumped. Nobody jumped.”

That just made me feel that there was just something going on

that was not familiar American territory

about dealing with tragedy.

There were just things about that day

that you weren't supposed to say, you weren't supposed to see,

you weren't supposed to talk about.

And for me, that resistance wound up centring on and attaching itself

to Richard Drew's picture.

Junod was not alone in his curiosity.

A few days after the image was published,

a Canadian journalist was asked to identify the falling man.

An editor called me with what I thought was a ludicrous request.

He wanted me to find out who the man was and tell his life story.

And my first thought was, “Good luck”, you know.

“I don't think it's possible to get

the identity of one person in an image like that.”

But I decided to try.

The worst ever act of terrorism

directed at the United States on domestic soil,

and it may not be over.

In the days after September 11,

America was in shock and in mourning.

The country closed in on itself.

I've ordered that the full resources

of the Federal Government

go to help the victims and their families...

...and to conduct a full-scale investigation

to hunt down and to find those who committed this act.

Peter Cheney began his hunt for the falling man

by having the image enhanced.

I saw that he was black or Spanish, he had a goatee

and the jacket was more like a waiter's jacket

and he had black pants and a particular type of shoe.

And he was wearing what looked like a restaurant worker's outfit.

Based on the odds,

I thought that this guy had most likely come from

the Windows on the World restaurant.

We have checked, like, four or five hospital lists.

We couldn't find anything...

There were thousands of people desperate for information

about their missing loved ones.

They were trapped, you know...

She was on the 79th floor,

so everything around them had collapsed already.

If I don't find him, I have to start all over again.

It's taken me my entire life to find him

and I don't know what I will do without him.

But no-one wanted to lay claim to the falling man.

For two or three days, I worked nonstop

to try and track down who this person might be,

but I seemed to be getting nowhere.

I had called Windows on the World,

I had gone all over the city, looking at the 'missing' posters,

trying to find somebody who matched this particular image.

I'd had it.

I'd done everything I could think of doing and it wasn't working.

Then, late one night wandering around Times Square,

Cheney came across a poster of a missing man in a white jacket.

I had this instant sort of recognition.

I thought it looked like the man in Richard Drew's picture.

He looked an awful lot like him.

And I almost doubted myself.

I said, “How is it possible I would do all this work

and then chance upon a poster in Times Square?”

The number led to Milagros Hernandez.

She and her family had pinned hundreds of posters across New York,

desperate for any news about her brother, Norberto.

He worked at Windows on the World.

I asked her if she and her family

had seen the picture in the newspaper.

She said, “Yes.”

And I said, “Did you think it was your brother?”, and she said, “Yes.”

I said, “Well, I'd like to tell his story."

Milagros was eager that Cheney come with her

to her brother's funeral

and meet Norberto's family.

But they were incensed when they discovered

that a journalist was there.

I was standing there, crying, praying.

I believe I turned back,

I see a man with a photo.

My aunt... I believe she called me over...

And I cursed him. I told him to get out.

“That's not my father. Get out.”

Excuse me for saying this, but if I had his address,

I would go his house and... it wouldn't be so nice.

But some members of the extended family

did identify Norberto as the falling man.

Cheney went ahead and published his article.

The story quickly spread around the world.

When one of Norberto's daughters heard about it,

she got on the internet to investigate.

When I typed up my dad's name on the search engine,

there were 9,384 articles.

I'm, like, “Wow. Let me open a couple.”

“The jumper”, “The jumper”.

It was in Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian,

there was an Italian, French.

And I can't read any of those languages,

but I was able to pretty much... read out,

“Norberto Hernandez”, “jumper”, “World Trade Center”,

and you see the picture.

Norberto's wife and three daughters

refused to accept that the image was Norberto.

It flew in the face of their family motto — 'together forever',

and their faith.

My father, he was a gentle giant.

He was 6'2", very quiet, humble, barely heard him speak.

My father liked salsa,

especially Salsa Kids and El Gran Combo.

And Tito Rojas.

He always was listening to that music.

He would never put us aside for anybody.

I mean, he was the main guy, you know. He was my father.

The thought that her father could've jumped

had a profound psychological effect

on Norberto's youngest daughter, Tatiana,

13 years old at the time.

I couldn't sleep. I thought it was the truth.

I believed that. I was, like, “Oh, it probably was him”, you know.

And I started seeing him in the house.

One time I saw him, like, creep over, and then he was smiling.

And I was so scared, 'cause I thought everyone else saw it.

I was, like, “Oh my God. Did you see that?”

They're, like, “What? What?”

I'm, like, “Didn't you see Papi?”

Because of her daughter's trauma,

Norberto's wife decided to leave the family home of 25 years.

The family moved, hoping for some peace.

[Speaks Spanish]

We were together for nearly 30 years.

And I can put myself in his situation.

“There's a fire, I'm on the 107th floor.

I'm not gonna jump through the window,

“because I'm thinking...”

And I know what he was thinking —

he was thinking of me, his daughters, his grandchildren

and his mother.

“I'm not gonna jump.

I'm going to try to escape any way possible,

down the staircase, any way,

but the last thing I would do is jump out of the window.”

[MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATIONS]

But it was more than grief

that fuelled the Hernandezes' angry denial.

It was something more fundamental.

I'll say it as this —

once a person commits suicide,

their soul automatically goes to hell, with no questioning.

We weren't the most religious family,

but we had our beliefs and we went to church,

so by you calling him 'the jumper',

you're kind of saying that his soul is damned.

You're telling me he's in hell.

I think that's mostly what got to my mom.

That's what got to me too.

To the Hernandezes, the thought of their Norberto jumping

was impossible.

To them, it was a betrayal of love and faith.

To others, the idea of identifying the falling man

smacked of voyeurism.

The chef, Michael Lomonaco,

had worked with Norberto for nearly 14 years.

What do we stand to gain by identifying this person?

What's the purpose of this?

Why this exercise in trying to look at this photo

and understand who's in it?

What will we ever know about this photograph

that it doesn't already say on its own?

But Tom Junod was sure that the only way to remove the stigma

surrounding the falling man and the rest of the jumpers

was to discover more about them.

I felt that the idea of people jumping,

I felt that the jumpers, I felt that the falling man

had been sort of pushed to the side.

There was an element of exclusion, that he died improperly,

that we want to remember this day for its heroism.

And whether we think of the jumpers as heroic or not,

they should not be excluded from the consecrated ground of American soil

because they died in a way that makes us uncomfortable.

[MUFFLED RADIO COMMUNICATIONS]

Junod was convinced

that America needed to confront the falling man —

a harrowing symbol of 9/11 —

instead of pretending he didn't exist.

He then found someone who provided justification for his mission,

someone who'd found comfort and peace

by accepting that his loved one may have jumped.

It had to be so intense up there and there was no other way out...

...that it was either burn alive or go quickly.

I envisioned that it had to be 'The Towering Inferno'.

And from the photos I saw, it obviously was.

Who knows how much smoke was in there?

You know, do you suffocate to death or do you jump?

I think it was brave to do that.

When the media started posting photographs,

then I started searching to see if Karen was one of those jumpers.

After a while, it just became an obsession with me.

I was so intense on just finding something.

I found some photos in my search that I think was Karen jumping.

I know it's her because the clothes and the shape.

I would know her from a shadow.

She had a blue sweater top on, sleeveless,

and cream-coloured pants.

If you look at the pictures that I have,

I mean, that's what I see.

It wasn't painful, for some reason. It really wasn't.

I finally, you know, have something I can hold on to.

This is where she was and this is how she died — she jumped.

She didn't burn up, she didn't become dust.

Nothing is more painful than losing her,

but not knowing how I lost her was even more painful.

So now that I believe that that's what took place,

it's not painful for me to talk about it.

And if she jumped, she jumped.

If Tom Junod wanted to create an acceptance of the image,

he would first need to create an understanding of it.

He then discovered from the photographer Richard Drew

that the picture was just one of a sequence of 12.

When I looked at that series — the outtakes —

the story became a different story for me.

I thought it was probably a light-skin black man.

Someone who had his hair cut so short

that you could see his scalp.

Somebody who was tall, kind of lanky.

So that was also the beginning of me thinking that,

“Well, this might not be Norberto Hernandez after all.

This might be someone else.”

For Tom Junod,

the search for the falling man had just begun.

As the months passed,

the search for bodies was replaced by a clean-up operation.

The goal now

was to remove any reminder of the country's day of horror

and begin the healing process.

One memory had been wiped from the record long ago —

the photograph of a man falling from the sky,

and with it, the story of the jumpers.

Writer Tom Junod wanted to make sure that healing didn't mean forgetting.

If America accepted the image of the falling man,

that would never happen.

When I looked at that series — the outtakes —

the story became a different story for me.

He's clearly falling.

It's not this almost Zen-like acceptance of his fate.

He is panicking, he is rolling through the air.

As he does that,

the turbulence pulls his shirt off

and the white shirt that he is wearing comes off enough

to reveal that he is wearing underneath that white shirt

an orange T-shirt.

Well, that was new information.

Junod reluctantly decided to contact the Hernandez family.

He knew they were grief-stricken

and angry at the media for naming Norberto.

But if he could convince them to look at the new photos,

he would be able to rule out, or confirm,

Norberto as the falling man.

Surprisingly, the family agreed to see him.

You go to the house and it's essentially a shrine to Norberto

and the life that they had with Norberto.

And there's pictures of him, you know, everywhere.

In the beginning, Catherine did all the talking for her mother.

But as time went on, Eulogia became more and more eager

to tell, you know, the story.

And her eagerness was expressed most positively

when I asked her if she knew what Norberto had worn that morning.

“Was he wearing an orange T-shirt?”

No. [Laughs] No. [Speaks Spanish]

No. No. Never.

That day he was wearing black trainers,

white socks,

stonewash blue jeans

and a blue-coloured shirt with patterns.

While speaking to the family,

Junod was shocked to realise

that none of them had ever looked at the original photo.

The thought had been too painful.

Here was an opportunity to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt

that Norberto was not the falling man.

He tentatively asked Catherine whether she wanted to look.

She leapt at the chance.

As soon as I saw the picture, I think, “This isn't my dad.”

The facial... and the colour... It wasn't him.

And you could immediately tell it wasn't him.

Suddenly, Eulogia was over our shoulder.

She had come out and she said, “Let me see those.”

I was curious. I had to see it. I had to see it.

It was obvious it wasn't him.

From that day, everything changed at home.

Everything changed.

I changed. I was no longer in such a bad way.

Before that, I was in a bad way.

In a very bad way.

Catherine said, “I don't know what I would've done if that was my father.

I think I would've had a nervous breakdown.”

Everything that they thought that their family represented

was contradicted by this picture.

The last thing that Eulogia left me with as I got in my car and left,

she looked at me and she said, “Please clear my husband's name.”

But Junod wanted to do more than clear Norberto's name.

He wanted to clear the name of all the jumpers.

He believed that by finding out more about the life and death of one man,

he could do this.

He looked again at the reporter Cheney's article.

When Peter Cheney did his story 'The Falling Man',

he thought he could see the face of the man

and that he could see details that were enough.

Cheney looked at that picture, saw the black pants

and said that he was a kitchen worker.

But, in fact, most kitchen workers, in New York at least,

don't wear black pants,

they wear these black-and-white check pants.

But, in fact, Norberto was a chef

and would not have been wearing black pants.

So, I don't know who it is.

But I do know it's not Norberto Hernandez.

But Junod did agree with one thing in Cheney's article —

the falling man had come from Windows on the World.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the greatest bar, here located at Windows on the World

in the World Trade Center.

My name is Ernie Scott.

Since opening in 1976, Windows had become a New York institution.

Customers loved the location,

and so did the staff.

Many of them had worked there for years,

which had created an unusual camaraderie among them.

It was just a good feeling. It was a good place.

You know, certain nights there'd be an incredible sunset.

You know, we'd all stand there and go, “Wow! Isn't that cool?”

You know, just tiny things like that. Dumb things.

You know, people that you met, things that you did,

birthdays that you celebrated with each other.

People that, you know,

just became really part of your extended family every day.

That family had been devastated by September 11

when 79 of its members had perished.

But could one of them have been the falling man?

Junod now hired a researcher to help him.

They compiled a list of 22 possible names

based on age, race and body type.

They then asked surviving staff

whether they would consider looking at the photos.

You're asking these people

to look at something that could possibly be a colleague of theirs,

could possibly be a good friend of theirs.

This is not something that you...

You're not looking through a high school yearbook with them.

This is something that you've really got to approach respectfully.

For anyone who had lost a friend or colleague,

this was a painful request.

Most took some time to consider the idea.

I felt like it was my duty and my responsibility

to help identify this person if I could.

There might be somebody out there

who would want to know that their father was in this picture,

or their brother... or their son.

I was very nervous before I looked at the pictures.

I was... hopeful and terrified at the same time

that I would know who it was.

I didn't... I...

I guess in some ways I did want to know

if it was one of our people,

but I really didn't want it to be one of my people.

Not everyone felt they could help.

Michael Lomonaco had stood and watched helplessly

as smoke, then flames, then people, poured out of his restaurant.

My reaction to the photographs was I didn't want to see them,

I didn't want to be in the room with them,

I didn't want to handle them, I didn't want to participate in this.

Other Windows staff agreed to meet with the researcher,

who brought with him the falling man series of photos.

It was actually very easy

to eliminate a lot of people right off the bat

and literally just went one by one,

thinking about, “Was it this person?

Was it this person?”

And reaching a conclusion at the end

that it wasn't anyone that I could positively identify.

As time passed,

more and more names on the list were ruled out.

Not the right body type,

not the right shoes,

not the right hair.

Finally, there were just a few names left

and one last staff member to look.

We went through those pictures with a fine tooth comb.

It just... it didn't resonate in my mind

that it was anybody from our staff.

And in a way I felt really bad about that

because you want to give somebody an answer.

But in a way I was so glad it wasn't.

So glad it wasn't.

The investigation had reached a dead end.

America was moving on from September 11.

The falling man was in danger of remaining in obscurity.

Then a breakthrough.

The chef, Michael Lomonaco, agreed to look at the photos.

A few days later, over lunch,

he met with the researcher who had with him the pictures

and the names that refused to go away.

“No, it can't be Charlie Moore.

It can't be Wielder.

What about Junior? It can't be Junior.

Um, what about Jonathan?”

And he stopped.

Michael took a real close look.

And it took a while for him to be ready to speak to me about that.

'Jonathan' was Jonathan Briley.

He was a sound engineer

who looked after conferences and functions at the restaurant.

Jonathan fit the body type,

the size, colouration of the person in that photograph,

and it left the door open for me

that there was a possibility that it was really Jonathan.

Which having known Jonathan and really admired him and liked him,

and I thought he was just a terrific person.

A good... a good guy.

A hardworking, dedicated, good guy with a great sense of humour

and a person who embodied an individual

that I could call friend and respect.

It offered me no comfort to think, “Oh, that's Jonathan.”

If it is Jonathan,

I can only feel so bad

for him having to have suffered the way he did.

And, um...

You know, I...

...I miss him.

He was somebody that I would've liked to have known forever.

Was Jonathan Briley the falling man?

Every September 11,

two giant shafts of light commemorate where the Twin Towers once stood.

A dramatic image,

but it gives no clue to the thousands who died that day.

One man believed that a simple photo did.

He now believed he knew who the man might be —

someone called Jonathan Briley.

Now he needed confirmation from the family.

Of all the interviews, it was the most heartbreaking

because Jonathan Briley's father was a preacher.

He said, “I'd like to talk to you, but I can't.

For my life's work,

I tell people that they have to go on after tragedy.”

And then he said in that same impossible voice,

“But I can't do this. I can't do it for myself.”

The Reverend Briley suggested

that Junod talk to Jonathan's older sister Gwendolyn.

She'd been especially close to Jonathan.

Jonathan.

Jonathan Eric Briley was this person that just loved life

and that it was contagious.

So when you were around him,

you couldn't help but smiling and laughing.

Every time Jonathan comes to mind,

he's walking and he's talking and he's smiling,

and he had this bounce in his step.

He was one of these special people

that could spread himself around the whole family.

And we all got, um... our piece of Jonathan.

In the days after the attack, the Brileys waited for his return.

A phone call, anything.

As the days passed, their hopes of finding him alive faded.

Reverend Briley gathered the family in prayer.

He talked to God

like someone who absolutely knew that he existed.

He says, “I believe you can create a miracle.

I want my miracle.”

He said, “I have loved you, I do love you,

I believe you, I have sewed you.

I want to know where my son is.”

The next day, we had a phone call from the coroner,

said to come down.

They found Jonathan.

We knew where he was.

That was a gift. That was a gift from God.

The coroner's office identified Jonathan through DNA

and dental analysis.

Jonathan's younger brother, Timothy,

had the painful experience of confirming the identification.

Timothy recognised his shoes and his hands.

He said, “I would know my brother's hands and his feet.”

He took one of his shoes and he kept it.

They were black tennis shoes.

Lace-up and then had the velcro thing around the ankle.

I didn't remember anything about an orange T-shirt,

but when I talked with Timothy, he did.

He talked about how Jonathan had this orange T-shirt

and they would tease him because he wore it all the time.

Could Jonathan be the falling man?

When I first looked at it,

it was almost like touching a hot stove.

You just... Your mind just...

I looked at the figure

and I saw it was a man —

tall, slim.

Wow.

I looked at it and I said,

“If I didn't know any better, that could be Jonathan.”

But for Gwendolyn,

the identity of the falling man didn't matter.

She understood that it symbolised something far more significant

than a single individual.

I never thought of the falling man as Jonathan.

I thought of him as a man that just...

...took his life in his hand for just that 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 up there?

That's something I'll never know

because that happened to him.

I hope we're not trying to figure out who he is,

and more figure out who we are...

...through watching that.

Tom Junod could never be absolutely certain

that Jonathan Briley was the falling man.

But he'd learned something far more important from Gwendolyn.

The man's identity didn't matter.

The power of the image came

not because the falling man could be identified,

but because he couldn't.

[CHOIR SINGS AMERICAN NATIONAL ANTHEM]

What that day needed more than anything else

was essentially what a lot of other wars had,

which was a tomb for the unknown.

What makes the tomb of the unknown soldier so poignant

is the fact that he is unknown.

It's not the fact that he is identified,

it's the fact that one has been made to stand for many.

When Richard took that picture,

I believe that he took a picture

that really stood as the tomb of the unknown soldier for that day.

[People read names of the deceased]

Tom Junod's quest had revealed just how important the falling man was.

The image didn't insult those who died.

Rather, it was a fitting and just memorial to them,

because it forced the world to acknowledge

and remember the terrible events of that day.

One of the reasons why I became so determined

to plumb the meaning of the falling man

was that we can't hope to understand these incredible times

unless we look at these images

and accept the witness of these images.

I mean, I think that looking at the falling man and to discuss it

is the only option that we have,

given that there IS a falling man.

[Woman reads names of the deceased]