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.
BTTT
It was mass murder. Nothing less.
RIP Johnathan.
That was an unforgettable article in Esquire--I've always wondered if they found the identities of the jumpers from the photos that were all too briefly shown on tv and newspapers.
BTTT!
Beautifully stated.
I watched the whole thing from my balcony in Jersey City. I was going out the door to get on the PATH train to the World Trade Center when the first one hit.
Watching, through binoculars, people jumping out of the towers was the worst thing I've ever experienced.
There was a commuter parking lot about a couple of blocks from me. For some reason, I was really saddened by the cars that weren't claimed after a week or so, since their owners never came back.
Didn't they catch Richard Reid just after that?
Unbelievable isn't it? Similar to the leftwing wackos who claim that Bush blew the Pentagon up and there was no plane flown into it. So..where are the passengers from that flight? Where is Barbara Olsen?
I predict that in a generation there will be a whole cottage industry of 9/11 deniers, just like there is one for Holocaust deniers. And as witnesses die off, more and more of these bottom feeders will come out from under their rocks.
Yes.
That is the new big lie. That and it was all a hoax. Part of me, the nice side, thinks it is a coping reflex.
The barbarian in me wants to scream at those who think it was fake, and then drag them to see the piles of "remains" awaiting identification.
If someone had dared hand me a flyer like that when I visited the site a couple years ago, they would have had a paper sandwich for breakfast!
Good to be reminded, but it irks me that the only signs seen in that bit are "Bush knew"-themed, and the damned Jewel song.
Burned in my mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDh_pvv1tUM&search=9-11
Wiping tears from my cheeks here. My 3 year old heard the video and came to look. Upon seeing it, she asked, "what happened?" She hadn't even been born 9/11 but she knew it was something terrible. and I pray that she and other children never have to endure a 9/11. If only the msm would play some of these touching tormenting videos.....if only pigs could fly.
bump
:(```
That's what Clinton did for 8 years... dismissed or ignored one act of terrorism after another. Bin Laden was pushed to do something undeniable, so as not to be ignored once again.
The Clinton legacy. :-(
Pinz
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