Who is wtc falling man

He wore a white jacket. Under that, he had to wear a white T-shirt. There are pictures. There are pictures of the Falling Man as he fell.

Do they want to see them? Catherine says no, on her mother's behalf—"My mother should not see"—but then, when she steps outside and sits down on the steps of the front porch, she says, "Please—show me. Before my mother comes. She looks at them one after another, and then her face fixes itself into an expression of triumph and scorn.

Only I know Norberto. They said my father was taken to hell with the devil. I don't know what I would have done if it was him. I would have had a nervous breakdown, I guess. They would have found me in a mental ward somewhere…. Her mother is standing at the front door, about to go back inside her house. Her face has already lost its belligerent pride and has turned once again into a mask of composed, almost wistful sadness. A phone rings in Connecticut. A woman answers.

A man on the other end is looking to identify a photo that ran in The New York Times on September 12, It's a famous picture, the man says—the famous picture of a man falling. It may be, the man says. She lost both her sons on September They worked together at Cantor Fitzgerald. They worked on the equities desk. They worked back-to-back. No, the man on the phone says, the man in the photograph is probably a food-service worker.

He's wearing a white jacket. He's upside down. She knows what he was wearing because of her determination to know what happened to her sons on that day—because of her determination to look and to see. She did not start with that determination.

She stopped reading the newspaper after September 11, stopped watching TV. Then, on New Year's Eve, she picked up a copy of The New York Times and saw, in a year-end review, a picture of Cantor Fitzgerald employees crowding the edge of the cliff formed by a dying building.

In the posture—the attitude—of one of them, she thought she recognized the habits of her son. So she called the photographer and asked him to enlarge and clarify the picture. Demanded that he do it. And then she knew, or knew as much as it was possible to know. Both of her sons were in the picture.

One was standing in the window, almost brazenly. The other was sitting inside. She does not need to say what may have happened next. They're puzzled, they're uncertain, they're scared—but when did they know? When did the moment come when they lost hope? Maybe it came so quick…. The man on the phone does not ask if she thinks her sons jumped. He does not have it in him, and anyway, she has given him an answer. The Hernandezes looked at the decision to jump as a betrayal of love—as something Norberto was being accused of.

The woman in Connecticut looks at the decision to jump as a loss of hope—as an absence that we, the living, now have to live with. She chooses to live with it by looking, by seeing, by trying to know—by making an act of private witness. She could have chosen to keep her eyes closed. And so now the man on the phone asks the question that he called to ask in the first place: Did she make the right choice?

Catherine Hernandez thought she knew who the Falling Man was as soon as she saw the series of pictures, but she wouldn't say his name. He would never have left her alone by jumping. But Sean was too small to be the Falling Man. He was clean-shaven. He worked at Windows on the World in the audiovisual department, so he probably would have been wearing a shirt and tie instead of a white chef's coat.

None of the former Windows employees who were interviewed believe the Falling Man looks anything like Sean Singh. Then a few days later he studied them closely and changed his mind. Wrong hair. Wrong clothes.

Wrong body type. It was the same with Charlie Mauro. It was the same with Junior Jimenez. Junior worked in the kitchen and would have been wearing checked pants. Charlie worked in purchasing and had no cause to wear a white jacket. Besides, Charlie was a very large man. The Falling Man appears fairly stout in Richard Drew's published photo but almost elongated in the rest of the sequence. The rest of the kitchen workers were, like Norberto Hernandez, eliminated from consideration by their outfits.

The banquet servers may have been wearing white and black, but no one remembered any banquet server who looked anything like the Falling Man. Forte Food was the other food-service company that lost people on September 11, But all of its male employees worked in the kitchen, which means that they wore either checked or white pants.

And nobody would have been allowed to wear an orange shirt under the white serving coat. But someone who used to work for Forte remembers a guy who used to come around and get food for the Cantor executives. Black guy. Tall, with a mustache and a goatee. Wore a chef's coat, open, with a loud shirt underneath. Of course, the only way to find out the identity of the Falling Man is to call the families of anyone who might be the Falling Man and ask what they know about their son's or husband's or father's last day on earth.

Ask if he went to work wearing an orange shirt. But should those calls be made? Should those questions be asked? Would they only heap pain upon the already anguished? Would they be regarded as an insult to the memory of the dead, the way the Hernandez family regarded the imputation that Norberto Hernandez was the Falling Man? Or would they be regarded as steps to some act of redemptive witness? I could never have made the choice not to know. Jonathan Briley worked at Windows on the World.

Some of his coworkers, when they saw Richard Drew's photographs, thought he might be the Falling Man. He was a light-skinned black man. He was over six five. He was forty-three. He had a mustache and a goatee and close-cropped hair. He had a wife named Hillary. The hair stood up on my arms.

From then on, in the account of the picture itself, it was a little bit like writing by Ouija board. Curtis: What conclusion did you come to about why these pictures should not be suppressed? Junod: I think that there was a judgment being made about how to die. About the deaths that people suffered, and that some were honorable and some are not.

And the story, if it has any purpose at all besides telling the story of all the people that photo represents, it was to go against that idea. I went into that story totally thinking I was going to call people up, and they were going to yell at me for calling them. Because the fact is that people had no information about how their loved ones died. They had no idea. And they wanted to know.

Curtis: You said you wrote the beginning of the piece as if by Ouija board. How about the rest of the piece? Junod: It was like World War I trench warfare, man. I wrote the beginning. I handed in the beginning and then handed in a very rough draft of the end. The rest of the two-thirds of the story needs a lot of work. I didn't know that the building, the first building had collapsed because I was looking at it through a telephoto lens. And I'm only seeing a piece of whatever's going on. Drew's image, which came to be known as the "Falling Man," appeared in a number of newspapers the next day.

Many people found the lonesome vision too shocking. One high-profile viewer was mesmerized by its deeply-human pull. Five years ago, Sir Elton John told "Sunday Morning" correspondent Anthony Mason that that he had to purchase the photograph for his personal collection.

It's probably one of the most perfect photographs ever taken. Twenty years after the attack, it captures, perhaps more than any other picture, the horror of that day. Drew said, "It's still sort of that 'verboten' picture. And that's what it's really about. The identity of the falling man has never been determined, though journalists have found two possibilities.

Yet people were turning it upside down to take a second look from a different angle. I look at it from my own angle. I was below the north tower that morning, on the corner of West and Vesey streets.

The smoke was so thick, it was tough to see and tougher to breathe. Rubble was falling, and when I heard the first of a series of loud cracks, I thought it was the sound of concrete debris striking the ground. But I was wrong.

It was the sound of human beings hitting the pavement. I focused on one person falling through the air, and shot eight frames. Then there was a huge noise, like an explosion. I just kept shooting; I thought maybe the roof had collapsed.

I had no idea the whole building was falling, because I was too close. An emergency technician saved my life; he yanked me away. The tower leaned toward us as we ran, and I stopped and shot nine more frames.

Watching the tragedy unfold messed me up for a long time.