How many jumped from wtc

I was so close I could see her face. She seemed calm and relaxed, as if she had no other option but to jump. I knew I was lucky not to see her hit the pavement. When we got to the west side of the North Tower, we saw many other people jumping from the windows.

Those images have stayed with me, and I often wonder what must have gone through their minds before they decided to jump. I had been there for about 20 minutes when I heard the terrible sound, like a massive tree branch breaking, as the North Tower crumbled.

I photographed it as it collapsed and it was only then, when it no longer obscured my view, that I realised the South Tower had also fallen completely. As I ran from the mayhem, I took one frame of a man kneeling on the floor crying, his shirt all torn. I switched lenses and saw a child running and screaming. I realized my digital cards were all full, so I ran a few blocks to the Getty Images office on Varick Street.

There, I was uploading the contents of my memory card to a computer when we were told we needed to evacuate the building because the police suspected a bomb had been placed at the Holland Tunnel, adjacent to the office. I left and took a taxi back to my hotel, from where I filed the photos I had taken.

My newspaper ran a late edition that day and used my photos for it. For the rest of the day, I stayed in my room. I cried a lot. I remember calling my ex-wife but being barely able to speak. Between sobs, I screamed, trying to tell her how many people I had seen jump from the towers. To this day, I still have no recollection of what I did between 6pm on September 11 and the following morning.

On the 20th anniversary of the attacks, thousands will gather to pay tribute to the nearly lives lost. The usually bustling express subway was completely empty on the morning of September 11, Except for one man. It was unusual for a carriage speeding from Times Square downtown into New York City's financial trading district during morning peak hour to have just one solo rider, and Richard Drew had no idea he was about to capture one of the most compelling and controversial photographs in history.

Drew, an AP photographer, had been shooting a maternity fashion show for New York Fashion Week in Bryant Park, in the city's midtown area, when he received a tip from a CNN cameraman that a plane had just crashed into the north tower of the Twin Towers.

Sixteen minutes later, another would strike the south tower. What he saw when he emerged, one block from the World Trade Centre, was utter mayhem. Both buildings were on fire. Smoke filled the air. He had no idea a second plane had hit until he was standing between a police officer and an Emergency Medical Technician EMT. At first onlookers thought it was debris; American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the building only a few minutes before.

It was 8. Logozzo was with co-workers on the 72nd floor of the south tower when the plane hit. Many survivors of that day still say the bodies falling from the sky were one of their most haunting memories.

The north tower held for minutes after the plane hit. People jumped constantly, consistently, through that entire time. Most jumped from the north tower; a handful from the south. It took just 10 seconds to fall. They weren't unconscious as they fell, but death was instant. Some jumped alone. Some jumped in groups. Some jumped in pairs. The man inside the frame—the Falling Man—was not identified.

They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died.

They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced.

Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul.

One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman's body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.

From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called "jumpers" or "the jumpers," as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground.

No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, "We're in uncharted waters now.

Save their souls! They're jumping! Oh, please God! Papers all over the country, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to The Denver Post , were forced to defend themselves against charges that they exploited a man's death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography.

Most letters of complaint stated the obvious: that someone seeing the picture had to know who it was. Still, even as Drew's photograph became at once iconic and impermissible, its subject remained unnamed. Cheney at first despaired of his task; the entire city, after all, was wallpapered with Kinkoed flyers advertising the faces of the missing and the lost and the dead.

Then he applied himself, sending the digital photograph to a shop that clarified and enhanced it. Now information emerged: It appeared to him that the man was most likely not black but dark-skinned, probably Latino.

He wore a goatee. And the white shirt billowing from his black pants was not a shirt but rather appeared to be a tunic of some sort, the kind of jacket a restaurant worker wears.

Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower, lost seventy-nine of its employees on September 11, as well as ninety-one of its patrons.

It was likely that the Falling Man numbered among them. But which one was he? Over dinner, Cheney spent an evening discussing this question with friends, then said goodnight and walked through Times Square. It was after midnight, eight days after the attacks. The missing posters were still everywhere, but Cheney was able to focus on one that seemed to present itself to him—a poster portraying a man who worked at Windows as a pastry chef, who was dressed in a white tunic, who wore a goatee, who was Latino.

His name was Norberto Hernandez. He lived in Queens. Cheney took the enhanced print of the Richard Drew photograph to the family, in particular to Norberto Hernandez's brother Tino and sister Milagros. They said yes, that was Norberto. Milagros had watched footage of the people jumping on that terrible morning, before the television stations stopped showing it. She had seen one of the jumpers distinguished by the grace of his fall—by his resemblance to an Olympic diver—and surmised that he had to be her brother.

Now she saw, and she knew. All that remained was for Peter Cheney to confirm the identification with Norberto's wife and his three daughters. They did not want to talk to him, especially after Norberto's remains were found and identified by the stamp of his DNA—a torso, an arm. So he went to the funeral. He brought his print of Drew's photograph with him and showed it to Jacqueline Hernandez, the oldest of Norberto's three daughters. She looked briefly at the picture, then at Cheney, and ordered him to leave.

What Cheney remembers her saying, in her anger, in her offended grief: "That piece of shit is not my father. The resistance to the image —to the images—started early, started immediately, started on the ground. A mother whispering to her distraught child a consoling lie: "Maybe they're just birds, honey.

In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world, the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo—the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes.

All over the world, people saw the human stream debouch from the top of the North Tower, but here in the United States, we saw these images only until the networks decided not to allow such a harrowing view, out of respect for the families of those so publicly dying. At CNN, the footage was shown live, before people working in the newsroom knew what was happening; then, after what Walter Isaacson, who was then chairman of the network's news bureau, calls "agonized discussions" with the "standards guy," it was shown only if people in it were blurred and unidentifiable; then it was not shown at all.

And so it went. In Rudy , the docudrama starring James Woods in the role of Mayor Giuliani, archival footage of the jumpers was first included, then cut out.

In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers' experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten. It was no sideshow. They differed dramatically. The Times , admittedly conservative, decided to count only what its reporters actually saw in the footage they collected, and it arrived at a figure of fifty.

USA Today , whose editors used eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence in addition to what they found on video, came to the conclusion that at least two hundred people died by jumping—a count that the newspaper said authorities did not dispute. Both are intolerable estimates of human loss, but if the number provided by USA Today is accurate, then between 7 and 8 percent of those who died in New York City on September 11, , died by jumping out of the buildings; it means that if we consider only the North Tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came from, the ratio is more like one in six.

And yet if one calls the New York Medical Examiner's Office to learn its own estimate of how many people might have jumped, one does not get an answer but an admonition: "We don't like to say they jumped. They didn't jump. Nobody jumped. They were forced out, or blown out. I'm disgusted.

I tried, but cannot find any reason someone would want to know something like that…. If that's why you're here—you're busted. Now go away. Eric Fischl did not go away. Neither did he turn away or avert his eyes. A year before September 11, he had taken photographs of a model tumbling around on the floor of a studio. He had thought of using the photographs as the basis of a sculpture.

Now, though, he had lost a friend who had been trapped on the th floor of the North Tower. Now, as he worked on his sculpture, he sought to express the extremity of his feelings by making a monument to what he calls the "extremity of choice" faced by the people who jumped. He worked nine months on the larger-than-life bronze he called Tumbling Woman , and as he transformed a woman tumbling on the floor into a woman tumbling through eternity, he succeeded in transfiguring the very local horror of the jumpers into something universal—in redeeming an image many regarded as irredeemable.

The day after Tumbling Woman was exhibited in New York's Rockefeller Center, Andrea Peyser of the New York Post denounced it in a column titled "Shameful Art Attack," in which she argued that Fischl had no right to ambush grieving New Yorkers with the very distillation of their own sadness … in which she essentially argued the right to look away.

Because it was based on a model rolling on the floor, the statue was treated as an evocation of impact—as a portrayal of literal, rather than figurative, violence. They thought that I was trying to say something about the people they lost. You don't even know my father. How dare you try telling me how I feel about my father? He said, 'You don't understand. I'm getting bomb threats. Photographs lie. Even great photographs. Especially great photographs. The Falling Man in Richard Drew's picture fell in the manner suggested by the photograph for only a fraction of a second, and then kept falling.

The photograph functioned as a study of doomed verticality, a fantasia of straight lines, with a human being slivered at the center, like a spike. In truth, however, the Falling Man fell with neither the precision of an arrow nor the grace of an Olympic diver.

He fell like everyone else, like all the other jumpers—trying to hold on to the life he was leaving, which is to say that he fell desperately, inelegantly. In Drew's famous photograph, his humanity is in accord with the lines of the buildings. In the rest of the sequence—the eleven outtakes—his humanity stands apart. He is not augmented by aesthetics; he is merely human, and his humanity, startled and in some cases horizontal, obliterates everything else in the frame.

In the complete sequence of photographs, truth is subordinate to the facts that emerge slowly, pitilessly, frame by frame. In the sequence, the Falling Man shows his face to the camera in the two frames before the published one, and after that there is an unveiling, nearly an unpeeling, as the force generated by the fall rips the white jacket off his back. The facts that emerge from the entire sequence suggest that the Toronto reporter, Peter Cheney, got some things right in his effort to solve the mystery presented by Drew's published photo.

The Falling Man has a dark cast to his skin and wears a goatee. He is probably a food-service worker. He seems lanky, with the length and narrowness of his face—like that of a medieval Christ—possibly accentuated by the push of the wind and the pull of gravity. But seventy-nine people died on the morning of September 11 after going to work at Windows on the World. Another twenty-one died while in the employ of Forte Food, a catering service that fed the traders at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Many of the dead were Latino, or light-skinned black men, or Indian, or Arab. Many had dark hair cut short. Many had mustaches and goatees. Indeed, to anyone trying to figure out the identity of the Falling Man, the few salient characteristics that can be discerned in the original series of photographs raise as many possibilities as they exclude.

There is, however, one fact that is decisive. Whoever the Falling Man may be, he was wearing a bright-orange shirt under his white top. It is the one inarguable fact that the brute force of the fall reveals. No one can know if the tunic or shirt, open at the back, is being pulled away from him, or if the fall is simply tearing the white fabric to pieces.

But anyone can see he is wearing an orange shirt. If they saw these pictures, members of his family would be able to see that he is wearing an orange shirt. They might even be able to remember if he owned an orange shirt, if he was the kind of guy who would own an orange shirt, if he wore an orange shirt to work that morning.

Surely they would; surely someone would remember what he was wearing when he went to work on the last morning of his life But now the Falling Man is falling through more than the blank blue sky.

He is falling through the vast spaces of memory and picking up speed. He never came home. His wife, Christy Ferer, won't talk about any of the particulars of his death. She is a close friend of Eric Fischl's, as was her husband, so when the artist asked, she agreed to take a look at Tumbling Woman.