9/11 Remembered

In praise of 9/11 first responders

In praise of 9/11 first responders

On 9/11, when terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, murdering thousands, an untold numbers of cops, firefighters, and other first responders did what they so often do -- they headed straight into the smoke and flames, and set about trying to help victims, find survivors, and make everything all right. Never forget.

 

Reminders of 9/11 fill Ron DiFrancesco’s house

Ron DiFrancesco is believed to be the last person to make it out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Ten years later, the memories and aftermath of 9/11 permeate his everyday life.

 

Reminders of 9/11 fill Ron DiFrancesco’s house cont.

 

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For the folks who can't stand Bush (like me), please remember, although he is speaking in this video, the video is NOT about him, so no negative comments please. Thanks.

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Final survivor of south tower collapse struggles with scars of 9/11

Final survivor of south tower collapse struggles with scars of 9/11



Ron DiFrancesco's voice softens and trails off. He barely finishes his sentences as he recalls his experience on Sept. 11, 2001. He speaks as if it happened yesterday.

"It was a living hell," he says. "I was mere seconds from death. ... I didn't know I was going to get out."

DiFrancesco is believed to be the last person out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center before it collapsed. According to some reports, he was one of only four people to escape from above the 81st floor.

A decade later, survivor's guilt still weighs heavily on him.

"I will carry with me to my grave whether I should have taken somebody with me," he says, "I still harbor a lot of guilt.

"Time does heal a bit, but it doesn't make you forget what happened. And I think, for our generation, it's our marking point in history. It changed the world that day," he says.

DiFrancesco prefers not to go into detail about his horrifying experience on 9/11. He says it forces him to relive the nightmare. In the past 10 years, he has given only a few interviews, including one for John Geiger's book The Third Man Factor and another for an article in the Ottawa Citizen. Based on those accounts, this is what happened to DiFrancesco:

The first plane had just struck the North Tower, and from his office on the 84th floor of the South Tower, DiFrancesco, a 37-year-old Canadian money-market broker for Euro Brokers, could see smoke billowing from the building. Moments after he left his office to evacuate, the second plane smashed into the South Tower, hitting the building between the 77th and 85th floors.

DiFrancesco was thrown against a wall by the force of the impact, and then he rushed to the nearest stairwell and headed down. On the way, he ran into a group of people trying to escape; they told him to go up the stairs instead, because the flames were too bad below.

As they debated which way to go, they heard someone calling for help. DiFrancesco and his colleague Brian Clark, an executive vice president at Euro Brokers, went to rescue the man, but DiFrancesco became overwhelmed by smoke and had to turn back.

He began to go up the stairs to find clear air, but the doors on each landing were locked, a safety mechanism to keep smoke from filling the whole building in the event of a fire. Panic set in as it became harder to breathe, so he turned around and started back down.

He reached a landing in the impact zone and joined others lying on the floor, gasping for air. But a voice told him to get up and keep going. He ran down the stairs, covering his face with his forearms as he fought through the flames.

Finally he reached the ground floor, where a security guard directed him to a different exit. As he reached it, he heard a giant roar as the building began to collapse. He turned and saw a fireball heading right at him. Days later, he woke up in the hospital with lacerations on his head, burns all over his body, and a broken bone in his back.

Ten years later, DiFrancesco, who is now 47 and living in Toronto, Canada, says the memories and the aftermath of 9/11 permeate his everyday life.


"The scars on my head and my arms remind me every day how fortunate I am," he says. "There are mementos throughout the house. In our living room, we have quite a few pictures of New York and a picture of the World Trade Center. We have a couple of albums of cards that people had sent, and there are some memorial books we look at [too]. They actually gave my wife the watch that was on my wrist on 9/11. It was broken, but it stopped at the exact time the building came down."

But the effects of his experience that day go much deeper than his scars and mementos. DiFrancesco's near-death experience changed his entire outlook on life.

"For me, being so close to death, I don't fear dying or moving on," he says. "When I was almost down and out, I did see the light, and I was prepared to go, but I'm here. … If I was to die tomorrow I would hate leaving my wife and kids, but I don't fear dying now."

DiFrancesco's whole mentality changed, too. He's constantly on alert, even when there's no imminent threat.

"I'm very aware of my surroundings and what's going on, what I'm doing, and what other people are doing," he says. "Whenever I go into a building or a room, I need to know where the exit is, because that day I wasn't in control, and I almost didn't make it out. It's a bit obsessive I think, but it's changed the way I think and the way I act."

Even seemingly normal occurrences cause terrifying flashbacks.

"When I see tall buildings and planes, it jogs my memory," he says. "Loud noises [and chaos] really bother me. I'm a little claustrophobic, so when [I'm] in a big crowd, it gets to me a lot. I also find screaming and yelling really gets to me."

But out of the pain and chaos came compassion, hope, and a deeper meaning to the idea of paying it forward. DiFrancesco and his family have always been religious and involved in community service, but the overwhelming outreach from their friends and neighbors after 9/11 moved them to make it a bigger part of their lives.


"When I was in the hospital, people were taking care of meals for the family, and that went on for months," he says. His community went out of its way to help get the DiFrancesco family back on their feet.

"My car was left at the train station, and my wife didn't know where it was. A neighbor came and found my car and brought it back to us," he explains. "And I only had the one key that was melted in the World Trade Center, so he went and got new keys made for my car."

The lengths to which his community went to support them inspired DiFrancesco and his wife more than ever to pay it forward and to teach their kids to do the same. Now, DiFrancesco is on the board of two charities: Villa Colombo, a home for Italian seniors, and Camp Trillium, a charity that promotes and offers recreational experiences for children with cancer and their families.


For the DiFrancescos, volunteering for Camp Trillium is a family event.

"I participate in this cancer bike ride ... we ride basically 60 miles a day for four days," he says. "My children and my wife are actively involved [too]. My two older children ride with me, and my two younger [kids] and my wife volunteer for the four days."

DiFrancesco has always enjoyed cycling, especially for a good cause, but ever since 9/11, his riding has taken on a different meaning, and he rides for an hour or two almost daily.

"I love the peacefulness of the road, riding my bike, and riding in a pack ... [it's] a bit of healing for me," he says. "I find it cathartic."

The healing process is an ongoing one for his family. Over the years, DiFrancesco and his wife have been collecting friends' and families' stories of how 9/11 affected them -- and may even consider putting them into a book.

"We both find it fascinating what you were doing that day ... people went home, picked up their kids from school, and hugged them and kept them close," he says. "Just hearing [their] stories ... it's interesting to find out what everyone was doing on that day."

There are still questions that may never be answered, and survivor's guilt is ever-present.

"I don't understand all of it," he says. "Why did I survive and 61 of my colleagues didn't?"

For DiFrancesco, though, one message is clear.

"When your number is up, He will call you. Coming so close to death, I believe you can't change destiny," he says. "Be happy with every day we have here."

 

How the Death of One Woman Brought Life For One Man

9/11 a Transition from Death to Life
By Xavier Derico


On Aug. 7, 2000, I was a dead man. Not literally, of course. But emotionally and spiritually, I was dead. There was considerable tumult in my life: My mother had died not more than just a year before, a long-term relationship ended, I had very little money and I was slated to start a new job the next day -- a job that I didn't even want.

On Aug. 8, 2000, I saw a glimmer of life for the first time in a long time. That glimmer of life came by way of CeeCee Lyles. You may know of her as one of several valiant flight personnel on United 93 who, in effect, told the terrorists they made the biggest mistake of their lives by hijacking that plane. But I know of her as a dear friend, a friend whose advice and unconditional friendship set into motion a shift in my thinking and a change in my approach to life.


Love Yourself

As cliched as it may sound, CeeCee preached this message continually. If you don't love yourself, you can forget about others' loving you -- and I'm not just referring to romantic love. CeeCee loved her husband, her children, and her extended family. But more than anything, it was clear that she loved herself the most. I didn't understand it then; I do now.

Face Your Fears

I was profoundly fearful in most aspects of my life when I met her. I was afraid of living, afraid of dying, afraid of succeeding, and afraid of failing. I didn't realize this about me, but she apparently did. During our lunch breaks, she shared the fears in her life, but she also shared the steps that she took to overcome them. I didn't understand it then; I do now.

Make Yourself Happy

Obviously I wasn't happy with where I was in life, but I didn't think that I deserved to be. After all, who is truly happy with life? It turns out that a lot of people are. CeeCee wasn't particularly thrilled with the position she occupied at the time, so she did what she was known to do: She did what made her happy.

She became a flight attendant and left the company without a second thought. It was as if she knew she deserved better in her life. I didn't understand it then; I do now.

After she died, it dawned on me that, as painful as it was for her to be gone, she died 1) loving herself unquestionably, 2) facing unimaginable fears (would she ever see her family again?), and 3) making herself happy; she was doing something that she loved -- helping people enjoy themselves.

I imagine that bin Laden wanted this event to paralyze me in fear. Instead, from the fiery wreckage of the crash site of United 93, a phoenix has risen from death and defeat and spreads its wings in freedom, never to be bound again.

Thank you, CeeCee Lyles.

 

Scientists still struggle to identify 9/11 remains

Scientists still struggle to identify 9/11 remains

In a laboratory in the center of Manhattan scientists continue to struggle to put names to the remains of victims from the September 11, 2001 attacks, some 40 percent of which are still unidentified.

"It's not a legal obligation because everybody has a death certificate. It's an ethical-moral decision," said Mechthild Prinz in the department of forensic biology at the city's Chief Medical Examiner office.

The names of the people who died in the explosions, fires and collapse in the Twin Towers on 9/11 are known, but the violence was so extreme that even a decade later it takes painstaking forensic work to match those identities to the human fragments found at the site.

The latest match made was just this week: Ernest James, who was 40 years old. He was the 1,629th victim identified out of 2,753 people killed at the World Trade Center, or 59 percent of the total.

Initially, traditional methods such as dental records, photographs and finger prints were used to identify the bodies and remains pulled from the rubble. But as the easier batches of remains were dealt with the gruesome task turned into something more akin to serious detective work -- and even that is not enough in many cases.

"We did collect 21,817 remains, so you can imagine obviously that a lot of people were fragmented in many different body parts. And since we haven't identified over a thousand people, some of them really disappeared," said Prinz, 53, who comes from Germany but has been working as a forensic scientist in New York since 1995.

Amid strict security and sanitation conditions, a team of five scientists continues to deal with 6,314 fragments of bones found in the World Trade Center area.

An AFP journalist was shown the work underway through a window in a door before being told to put on gloves and taken into a large room, where robots clean the remains before they are tested for DNA against a databank created by relatives of the deceased.

"I remember a case a few years ago which was a small piece of bone on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building. It was the size of a coin and we were able to identify someone who worked in the towers at that time," recalled Taylor Dickerson, a criminalist in the forensic biology department.

However in most cases the DNA found in the fragments turns out to be just another piece of a person already identified. As a result, the work is painfully slow: fewer than three dozen people have been identified since 2006.

Sometimes, DNA is found in bone fragments that cannot be matched to anyone in the databank -- either because relatives did not give samples or because the remains belong to an illegal immigrant who happened to be in the area at the time and was never registered.

Prinz said the work, for all its frustrations, is satisfying.

"It definitely was worthwhile to do it, because some of the families are really grateful," he said.

"I guess the biggest thing for me has been just understanding the impact our work has on both the families and the community, the forensic community," Dickerson said. "I never expected to do that in my career."

 

9/11 Memorial

 

Shop owner battles back after 9/11

Shop owner battles back after 9/11 destroys business, brings $400,000 debt

http://news.yahoo.com/shop-owner-battles-back-after-9-11-destroys-business-brings-400-000-debt.html



Minas Polychronakis has been repairing the soles and shining the shoes of New Yorkers since 1970 at Minas Shoe Repair. Today he has one big dream, and it is to be back in business at the former location of the twin towers, in the yet-to-be-completed 1 World Trade Center.

Minas Shoe Repair was one of the first tenants of the World Trade Center in 1977. For almost 24 years, Minas' shop was located in the mall at the World Trade Center on the lower concourse, near 2 World Trade. On Sept. 11, 2011, he and his family lost nearly everything when the shop was destroyed.

Lost with Minas Shoe Repair was 14 million square feet of commercial office space in Lower Manhattan. Roughly 750 companies vanished, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York. As a result, 65,000 jobs were relocated. Employment fell 5% from 2001 to 2005. More than 20,000 residents were temporarily without a home, as many small shops and retailers were gone for good.


"There was nobody around. No companies. People were afraid. They [didn't] want to come to work," Minas says, describing the first few years after the attacks. "It was bad."

At the time, he had two other smaller shops in downtown Manhattan, but neither brought in anywhere near the business the WTC store did. For years after losing his shop Minas struggled to make ends meet.

He needed $5,000 a week to break even, but he received only $1,000 a week in government subsidies.

He used his house as collateral, maxed out his credit cards, and bought supplies on credit (offering an IOU instead of credit cards). Minas eventually racked up more than $400,000 in debt.


Minas could have moved uptown after Sept. 11, but he felt an obligation to remain downtown near the trade center site.

"This area was good to me, and I feel I have to stay here," Minas says. "I had a choice after Sept. 11th to move uptown [or] midtown. But I said, 'No, I stay here.'"

In December 2003, Minas opened a new shop at 67 Wall Street, about a half-mile from the trade center site. "And again the same story. There [were] no people. I said, 'No, I am not going to give up.'"

A decade later, business in downtown Manhattan is starting to pick up. Some might even say it's booming.

"Since 2005, the district has added 307 new companies in an economy that has dramatically diversified," says a recent report titled "The State of Lower Manhattan" by the Alliance for Downtown New York. "The count has increased each subsequent year -- even during the recent economic downturn. Today, the district has 8,428 companies, 130 more than were here on September 11, 2001."



Things are also starting to look up for Minas, his shop, and his family.

"We survived, and I am just glad we are back on track after so many years," says Minas's youngest son, also named Minas, who works at the shop during the summer while school is out. "I am also hoping for my dad to someday move back and into the 1 World Trade Center. That's where we belong. That is my father's legacy."


Fortunately for the elder Minas, he is one for making his dreams a reality despite the odds. Born on the island of Crete in 1941, he started making shoes at the age of 12, not because he wanted it to be his future trade, but because he had no other choice. Times were tough for his family, and he did not have the money to get an education. In 1969, he learned that the United States was looking for craftsmen such as shoemakers. That same year he got his visa and moved from Greece, where he had been working, to America.

He arrived in this country with no money. He did not know anyone, and he did not speak English. But he did bring with him another dream: to open his very own shoe repair shop in New York. After working as a dishwasher for a year and saving $1,000, he was able to open his first shop at 18th Street and Ninth Avenue. This shop would change his life. He met his future wife, Maria, at the shop. Minas repeatedly told Maria that her shoes were not ready, so that she would keep coming back to see him. In 1975 they were married.


A few years and a few shops later, Minas needed something more. "I slept one night and I [got] up one morning and I said, 'I can't keep going like this. I have to do something better,'" he says. From that point he was determined to open a new store in the World Trade Center. He filled out a rental application with the Port Authority and after a long selection and vetting process, he was granted the right to set up shop on the bottom floor.

On Dec. 12, 1977, Minas Shoe Repair opened and business was immediately booming. He started with two shoemakers and three shoeshiners. On Day 2 he needed double help. On Day 3, he needed even more help.

After more than three decades together, Minas and Maria are still married and have four children.
Over the years he has become an institution in the financial district of downtown Manhattan. "I've sat and chatted with him and watched him kind of work the crowd," says his friend and customer Howard Mash. Mash frequently shares a coffee and cigarette with Minas on the stoop outside the shop. "People know him in the neighborhood. … Everybody loves him."

And his customers come from all over the city and the outer boroughs. "I used to live at the Crest [apartment building] right next door. Now I actually live and work up in midtown," says customer Noah Bogan. "I don't really trust any other shoe repair shops, so I still come back here."

Today Minas has two locations in downtown New York: Minas Shoe Repair at 67 Wall Street and Omega Shoe Repair at 40 Exchange Place. And one day he and his family hope to have another -- located inside the 1 World Trade Center.

 

Irene Couldn't Hurt the 9/11 Memorial

The 9/11 memorial is expected to be open in less than two weeks, and thankfully the hurricane won't be holding up the memorial from reaching its goal on time for the tenth anniversary ceremonies, The New York Observer is reporting. The memorial is mostly made of newly planted Swamp White Oak trees, and features thousands of granite cobblestone. Also per the Observer, crews were worried the storm might throw the cobblestones and break branches off the trees, leaving clean up crews a little too close to their deadline. Instead, they're now ahead of schedule. There was no damage to the area, except for a few broken tree limbs. “All the preparations we did in preparing for the storm actually helped prepare us for the opening, like removing excess equipment and temporary fencing that had been surrounding the pools," said Joseph Daniels, president and C.E.O. of the memorial foundation. There is some flooding in the basement of the museum, but they set out pumps during the preparation, so it shouldn't be a problem. "With two weeks left, it could have been a lot worse," Daniels said. "With the preparation the construction teams did, we’re real happy with that. We’re in great shape, actually."

 

Jury finds naval officer guilty in 9/11 fraud case
APBy NEDRA PICKLER


WASHINGTON (AP) — A retired naval officer honored for his valor during the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon was found guilty Monday of defrauding the victims' compensation fund by exaggerating his injuries.

After a three-week trial, a federal court jury found retired Cmdr. Charles Coughlin of Severna Park, Md., guilty of making a false claim and stealing public money after he got $331,034 from the fund set up by Congress after the 2001 attacks. The charges carry maximum penalties of up to 15 years in prison, but prosecutors say they expect to argue for three to four years based on his lack of a criminal record and the nature of the offense when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth sentences Coughlin on Nov. 21.

Coughlin's claim said he was in constant pain after being injured twice on Sept. 11, 2001 — first when objects fell on him when a hijacked plane struck the building and later when he went back inside to rescue others and hit his head. But prosecutors said Coughlin, now 52, continued playing lacrosse and ran a marathon after the attacks and lied when he claimed he needed surgery.

The case was not a slam dunk for prosecutors: It took three trials to convict him. Coughlin was first tried in 2009 along with his wife, also accused of making a false claim to the fund in support of her husband's application. The jury found Charles Coughlin not guilty on three mail fraud counts, but couldn't agree on a verdict on four counts against him or the charge against his wife. Afterward jurors said they thought Coughlin was the kind of man who would exercise through pain and seemed credible when testifying that he didn't lie.

Prosecutors dropped the case against Sabrina Coughlin but put Charles Coughlin on trial again a few months later on the remaining four counts. In the midst of that trial, a Supreme Court decision changed the standard for retrying defendants after a hung jury, eliminating two remaining mail fraud counts against Coughlin.

This time he was tried on the remaining two counts, which were the most serious against him.

Coughlin bowed his head and pursed his lips as the guilty verdict was read from the jury of seven men and five women.

"Charles Coughlin tried to make a profit on the 9/11 tragedy by making false claims on the fund set up to compensate the many heroic victims of the attack," Ronald Machen, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said afterward.

Coughlin is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Business School who spent most of his 21-year naval career in the submarine service. He had a top-secret security clearance and commanded nuclear submarines. He was working at the Pentagon when a plane hijacked by terrorists crashed into the building about 75 feet from his office. He said he went back inside the burning building to help rescue others, and he was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal and Purple Heart for his actions and injuries that day.

Coughlin's claim to the victims' compensation fund said he was left with constant pain in his neck, headaches, weakness in his left arm and numbness in his left hand and elbow. He said it changed his life physically — he used to work out daily, play basketball and lacrosse, run marathons and work on projects around the house.

But prosecutor Susan Menzer said Coughlin ran another marathon in November 2001 and showed the jury a picture of him running on the lacrosse field gripping a stick, taken after the attacks. She also showed jurors copies of check carbons she said he gave to the fund, falsely claiming they were for services he could no longer perform around the house. For example, she said he claimed a check for his lacrosse league dues was actually for someone to lay mulch in his yard. Coughlin said they were not fraudulent but mistakes due to sloppy accounting by his wife.

Prosecutors argued Coughlin should have to forfeit to the government the family's two vehicles — a 2002 Mercedes Benz C230 and a 2002 Honda Odyssey — as proceeds of his theft because Coughlin paid them off after receiving his check from the fund. But the jury sided with Coughlin that he didn't have to forfeit them. The government also has a civil case pending against the Coughlins in which they could potentially be fined up to the three times the amount of their award from the fund.

 

Interactive: 10 years after 9/11

It's been 10 years since the terror attacks that hit New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania took nearly 3,000 lives. In the interactive below, you can explore how the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, left a lasting impact on the world.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upshot/interactive--10-years-after-9-11.html

 

Photographer behind 9/11 "Falling Man" retraces steps, recalls "unknown soldier"

Photographer behind 9/11 "Falling Man" retraces steps, recalls "unknown soldier"
By Joe Pompeo
Richard Drew put down his camera bag and looked up at the colossal skyscraper that seemed to be racing toward the clouds at an accelerated clip.

"I'm really surprised how fast this building's gone up," he said of the rising edifice at 1 World Trade Center, peering at the monolith from beneath the brim of a tan baseball cap. "I just hope it isn't another target."

It was around 2 p.m. on a bright Wednesday afternoon in mid-July, and Drew, a veteran Associated Press photographer with wire-rimmed glasses and a neatly cropped silver beard that betrays his 64 years, was standing near the northwest intersection of Vesey and West streets in Lower Manhattan, across from the noisy jungle gym of cranes and steel where a global business hub is currently being reconstructed. Nine years and eight months earlier in this very spot -- now an austere pedestrian plaza in the shadow of the Goldman Sachs building -- Drew took a picture that became one of the most iconic images of one of the most catastrophic events in American history.


"I don't like coming down here," he admitted.

But he had nevertheless returned to retrace his steps for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, when he had watched dozens die through the lens of a Nikon DCS620. On that similarly brilliant morning a decade ago, two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers by the time Drew emerged from the Chambers Street subway stop around a quarter after nine. The 110-story buildings looked like a pair of giant smokestacks spewing plumes of black soot into the crystal blue sky. He began shooting, focusing on the topmost floors. It wasn't long before he realized that some of the people trapped inside -- as many as 200 of them, it was later estimated -- had decided that plunging thousands of feet to their deaths was preferable to burning alive.

"There's one. There's another one," he said, recalling the horrific scene with a detached ease. "I just started photographing people as they were falling."

One of those people would come to be known as the Falling Man. Though his identity remains unconfirmed, some believe he was Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old sound engineer who worked in a restaurant on the top floor of the North Tower. The man fell at 9:41, and Drew caught about a dozen frames of his fatal descent. In one of them, the subject soars earthward in a graceful vertical dive -- arms at his sides; left leg bent at the knee.


"Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it," wrote Tom Junod in a renowned 2003 Esquire piece that coined the title of the photo, which won a 2001 World Press Photo award and is the subject of a 2006 documentary film. "If he were not falling, he might very well be flying."

Newspapers the world over made space for the Falling Man in their Sept. 12, 2001, editions. But the widespread publicity sparked a debate as to whether the image was too gratuitous for public consumption. "To me, it's a real quiet photograph," Drew argued. Unlike fellow AP photographer Nick Ut's Pulitzer-winning 1972 shot of a naked 9-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam or Drew's famous photos of Bobby Kennedy's bloody dying breaths, "There's no violence in it," he said.


It was now close to 3 p.m., and Drew had decamped to a Shake Shack a few blocks from Ground Zero for a late lunch. Waiting for his food to arrive, Drew said he doesn't attend the memorial ceremonies held each year at the hallowed site nearby, nor does he plan to show up for the 10th anniversary of the tragedy. He was just doing his job that day.

"I don't need to be here to commemorate what happened to me," he said. "I record history every day. Everything I do, whether it's photographing DSK [Dominique Strauss-Kahn] in court, or the World Trade Center, or spring training baseball, it's all part of history, no matter how small or how large."

Drew likewise doesn't reminisce much about his experience on Sept. 11. (No lingering nightmares or PTSD, either.) He is reminded of the photo, however, twice a day, every day, through online news alerts that track mentions of the words "falling man" in the press. He picked up his BlackBerry to check the latest, in which "a 22-year-old man died Monday after falling off a rocky cliff and being swept out to sea in Hawaii," he reported. The alerts, which he created on his Yahoo! and Google accounts about eight years ago, rarely have anything to do with the actual Falling Man, but he likes to keep up anyway.

"I'm curious to see if people are writing about it or talking about it," he said. "To see how they might interpret the picture."


Sometimes the Falling Man reveals himself where it's least expected. Drew's longtime neighbor, the author Helen Schulman, lives five floors above the apartment Drew shares with his wife, his two daughters, and the family's 5-year-old golden retriever, Ajax, in a prewar building on the Upper West Side. Schulman wrote an entire novel without knowing that Drew, as she explains in the acknowledgements, had taken the "picture that haunted and inspired me throughout the years of writing" it. Drew and Schulman serendipitously connected the dots after she completed the first draft of the book, "A Day at the Beach" -- about a distraught family that flees Manhattan for the Hamptons on Sept. 11 -- which was published in 2007.

"It's always going to be a part of me," perhaps more than any other photo he's ever taken, Drew said.

But has it changed him?

He put down the last bite of his Chicago dog, took a sip of beer, and dabbed his mouth with a napkin before pausing to contemplate.

"I think of it as a learning experience," he said of the photo and Sept. 11 in general. "I get so caught up in the adrenaline of doing this job. So, looking back on it, I think a lot about being able to go home to my family every night. Whether I decide to think about it daily or not, it's always in the back of my mind. It's this world event that I have become a part of in my own little tangential way. I'm not a hero fireman; I didn't die there; I didn't have a loved one who passed away there. But it's something I'll never forget."

As for the anonymous soul whose legacy Drew has unwittingly preserved, "Even if people don't want to see my photograph, that man did fall out of the building," he said. "To me, he'll always remain the unknown soldier."

 

First responder's dramatic video after attack

First responder's dramatic video after attack
By Thomas Kelley

http://news.yahoo.com/first-responder-s-dramatic-video-after-attack.html

Career firefighters Kevin McCullagh and Jerry Walsh had retired weeks before terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Their years at Ladder 126 in South Jamaica, Queens, were over. But when they heard the news, they didn’t hesitate to drive across the Hudson River and volunteer to support their fellow firefighters

McCullagh took along his retirement gift: a camcorder. Aware that history was in the making, he started filming snippets of what they saw from a firefighter’s perspective: a giant pall of smoke rising over the Manhattan skyline, ash a foot deep, firefighters sifting through a sea of rubble, little fires burning here and there, trees blown on their sides, gouges in buildings, and the collapsed Twin Towers.

“It was unbelievable,” McCullagh recalls. “It was surreal. I realized what we were in for when I saw a fireman coming toward us. He was just beside himself. I asked him, ‘What’s it like over there?’ And he briefly described what it was like and I knew it was going to be something quite unique. There was carnage. There were a lot of crazy things.”


One sight especially surprised the two friends. Amid the twisted metal and burning rubble were smashed fire engines, crunched flat and caked with dust. “I had been around fire trucks my whole professional career and you’d never seen anything like it,” McCullagh says, still amazed today. “You see them as indestructible. When the big red fire truck shows up, everything is going to be OK. And seeing them tossed around like little toys, and smashed and burned, it was pretty amazing to see them like that.”

McCullagh, now 52, and Walsh, now 54, worked for seven days -- every day, all day. Fires still had to be extinguished. Search and rescue teams needed assistance. Steel workers, electricians, and heavy-machinery operators needed help moving debris, setting up equipment, and making sense of the chaos.

When he was resting, McCullagh would pull out his camera and shoot a couple minutes of footage. He documented canine units searching the rubble, an ambulance turned into Swiss cheese, a never-ending line of dump trucks rolling into position. He recorded cleanup crews crawling like ants through mountains of jagged, gnarled debris.

Watching McCullagh’s video clips today, the scale of the destruction boggles the mind anew. That the wreckage was removed within months remains a herculean feat. “These guys are risking their lives,” McCullagh says at one point to the camera. “These guys are incredible. My heart goes out to every fireman in this city.”

For a few months, McCullagh and Walsh continued to pitch in, frequently driving back to the cleanup site. But as they found out later, there was a heavy toll for many who worked in the toxic environment of Ground Zero. Many first responders are now suffering or dying from respiratory problems and deadly illnesses such as thyroid, esophageal, and lung cancers that top doctors and epidemiologists say are related to the cleanup.

McCullagh hadn’t looked at his video footage for almost 10 years, until these problems spurred him to take another look. When he reviewed them, he was surprised by how well his shots conveyed the immense toil of the 9/11 cleanup. He felt it was a powerful historical document, and he hadn’t shown it to anybody. But during the fight last year in Congress over health benefits for 9/11 workers, he decided it was time to share his footage.

Reflecting on his retired firefighter comrade Jerry Walsh, he says, “Jerry…was a marathon runner, a great athlete, a young, strong guy, and now he has a rare form of blood cancer. It’s way too prevalent among guys who were down there. There’s quite a lot of it that people are unaware of. I think people were all behind the firemen for a certain amount of time but people do tend to forget and maybe this 10th anniversary people will remember what the firemen, the cops, the steel workers, what they went through. And it was all done without question. Everyone went down there to do the best they could.”

Recently, McCullagh was in Lower Manhattan to visit a friend who works on Wall Street when he made a wrong turn. Suddenly he was again face to face with Ground Zero. He was able to peep through some of the fence but could see very little.

“I just kept walking,” he says. “But it was kind of strange. I realized I hadn’t been back there in nine-plus years. It looked a lot different.”

Since 9/11, McCullagh notes that you can’t go into most buildings in Manhattan without showing ID or passing a security scanner. He feels the country is more uptight and paranoid, that too many people have lost their sense of humor. He also feels the rebuilding of the World Trade Center has taken too long and that too often it has been used as a political football. One bright spot for McCullagh was the death of Osama bin Laden.

“Not that it’s going to bring closure to anybody,” he says. “It’s not going to bring back people’s loved ones. But personally, I felt good that whole day. And I was proud of my country. I was proud of the president. I was proud of the military, the way they went and did it.”

McCullagh was a fireman for more than 20 years, including serving as fire marshal and fire investigator. He had friends he saw only a few days before they died at the World Trade Center. He still gets together with other firefighters to share stories and remember 9/11. But on the 10-year anniversary, he says there are no special plans.

“They’ll just be remembering it in their own way,” he says. “It’s not going to be a celebration, that’s for sure. A moment of silence, just remembering all the people, all the great people that were lost.”

 

Confronting Terror: Faces of 9/11

Among the most eloquent and unsettling of the countless photographs from September 11, 2011, are those focusing not on the fall of the towers, or the jagged, smoking hole in the Pentagon, but on faces. Human faces etched with shock, fear, and disbelief at the cataclysm unfolding above them, or staring glassy-eyed into some unseen distance, stunned by the enormity of the barbarous terror unleashed that cloudless, late-summer morning. Here, LIFE.com presents a gallery focusing on witnesses to terror as they confront the unspeakable.

 

Confronting Terror: Faces of 9/11 cont.

 

Yankee Stadium gravel inspires memorial for 9/11 victim

Yankee Stadium gravel inspires memorial for 9/11 victim

http://news.yahoo.com/yankee-stadium-gravel-inspires-memorial-for-911-victim.html

On a summer day in Shoreham, New York, the Kevin Williams Memorial Field is a peaceful place. An American flag ripples as its steel chain clanks against the 40-foot pole. At the base of the pole, worn baseballs seem to grow from the earth, resting among the flowers. On one baseball, there's a handwritten message:

"We Will Never Forget."

Kevin Williams was 24 years old when he was killed on Sept. 11, 2001. He worked on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center's south tower as a bond salesman for investment firm Sandler O'Neill. He loved his job and was planning to marry his high school sweetheart on Dec. 1 of that year.

After the pain and grief of Sept. 11 and the weeks of uncertainty that followed, the Williams family wanted to honor Kevin's memory. So his father, Mike, mother, Pat, brother, Jamie, and sister, Kelly, turned to the sport that had given their family great joy: baseball.

Kevin played golf, basketball, and baseball in high school; in his senior year, he was MVP of all three teams. He used to joke with his fiancée that if he hadn't gone to college on a golf scholarship, he "could've given Derek Jeter a run for his money." He was a huge Yankees fan and would often meet his dad at the Bat, a seven-story boiler stack just outside Yankee Stadium that is decorated to look like a baseball bat and is a popular meeting point before games.

The family created the Kevin Williams Memorial Foundation, which sends children who could not otherwise afford it to baseball and softball camps. The first year, the family raised enough money to send 20 children to camp. This year, says Pat Williams, "we just passed our 500th child." One child who was sponsored by the foundation is now attending college on a four-year baseball scholarship.


Williams says, "The foundation we created and everyone who came to support us in the foundation that was our hope -- knowing that there was something positive we could do, Kevin going on through the lives of other children."

The foundation also raised money to renovate the baseball field (now named the Kevin Williams Memorial Field) at Shoreham-Wading River High School, where Kevin and Jamie both wore number 16. Just past the bleachers, there's a small memorial garden; at the center of the garden is a bronze plaque honoring Kevin. It was made by the same company that creates the plaques to honor legendary New York Yankees in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium.

On Sept. 11 this year, the Williams family will attend the unveiling of the names at the National September 11 Memorial in New York City, then drive home to Kevin's field. Each year on that day, the grounds crew places a bat and a ball at home plate and chalks white lines on the field, as if for a game. But on that day, no baseball is played on Kevin's field; there are only memories of a lost loved one for a family who will never forget.

 

Photographer shares unusual view of twin towers before 9/11
By Vera H-C Chan



It was a photo that anyone might have taken. In the years leading to Sept. 11, 2001, Americans took to the skies like never before, numbering in the millions, taking in the bird's-eye view above the clouds. Katie Weisberger, a freshman in the photography program at New York University, was flying back from her home in Richmond, Virginia. She had a Nikon 35 mm film camera at the ready when the twin towers came into view.

Weisberger has always loved seeing the world through a lens. School reinforced that habit, sharpened her eye. What particularly prompted her to take roll after roll from her window seat was an utterly lovely April day dawning in New York.

"It was very early morning, and I just remember it being really beautiful, watching the sun rise and taking photographs," Weisberger recalls. "I had no idea I took that photo. It was on the negative."

That photo — developed at a drugstore or photo lab — was a horizon shot, layers of blue sky streaked with a barely perceptible reddish haze and oceans of roiling clouds that submerged all of New York except for the twin towers. That one heartbreakingly glorious moment stood out, between a picture just of clouds and another of the entire city. Then, she stowed the prints away.

Collapsing images
She would pull them out five months later. Weisberger, who spent the summer waitressing in Boston, was beginning her sophomore year at NYU, in the Department of Photography and Imaging. "I was getting ready for school. It was maybe my second day of class," she recalls. Her dormitory was located southwest in the Village, close to the World Trade Center. When she and her boyfriend at the time, Ryan, walked outside, they looked up and right through a hole burning in one of the towers.

"We kept walking and didn't know what to make of it," she says. They continued on, stopping on Sixth Avenue for orange juice and a bagel. There, they saw the second plane hit. "Crowds of people just stopped in their tracks. And at that moment, I realized that it was terrorists." Shell-shocked, she and her boyfriend -- who was booked on a flight later that day -- said goodbye, and she headed to her first day of dance class. For two surreal hours, the teacher taught the fully attended class as if nothing had happened. As if two hijacked Boeing 767s hadn't crashed into one of New York's greatest landmarks just blocks away. At the end of class, a woman came in, announcing, "'The towers have fallen. I don't know if you know what happened.'"

Katie Weisberger
Weisberger didn't have her camera equipment on her, not for dance class, but she didn't take photos that day, nor much at all after 9/11. There were too many others documenting the devastation, capturing bits and pieces of the unfathomable.

Instead, she remembered her photo, in storage under the bed. She knew people would want to see it, and when the storefront exhibit "Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," sought out contributors, she turned in her print. Hers became No. 1621 in an exhibit that would eventually comprise 5,690 images and travel the world. In the 2008 book "After Photography," NYU photography teacher and author Fred Ritchin noted:

Interestingly, the best-selling image from the exhibition (the proceeds from the photos, which were selected by interested buyers without at first knowing who made the image, went to charity) was by Katie Day Weisberger, a student who had, a few months before the attacks, photographed the World Trade Center towers emerging from the clouds while seated in a passing airplane.

Hope amongst the clouds
That image of the twin towers, rising above a sea of clouds into blue skies, would also be featured on CNN, in the PBS documentary "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero," and in the Hartford Courant's first 9/11 anniversary edition. The Connecticut paper defied newspaper design principles by wrapping the horizontal image across the front and back pages. Years later, the technique would be used on the cover of Don DeLillo's 2007 novel, "Falling Man." The title conjured up a more despairing icon, a man caught plummeting headfirst in a fatal dive from the falling towers, but it was Weisberger's photograph that made the cover. A New York blogger, in a 2010 series of posts on book-cover design, pondered the image:

In "Falling Man," postmodern master Don DeLillo takes on the strange disconnect experienced by many Americans following 9/11. The cover photo reflects that with the eerie view from above the clouds, as if from the point of view of a ghost. The vertical drop of the "A Novel" text emphasizes the book's title, based on the name given to a performance artist that appears from time to time in the book, a mysterious man that reenacts the disturbing image taken of a suicide jumper on the day of the World Trade Center attacks.

Weisberger, the mother of a 2-year-old, now lives in Colorado and works as a freelance photographer. She can understand how a photo taken with such a young, hopeful spirit could be viewed as eerie in the light of 9/11. She has always been drawn to skies as an artistic theme ("I appreciate the simplicity, openness and the beauty ... [their] potentiality"), but Weisberger can't shake the unease that an idyllic day can cause. "Every time I see a perfectly clear sky," she admits, "there's a feeling of 'the air's too clean and the weather's too perfect to believe.' I think of Sept. 11."

But the clarity of that lovely April day, the quality of that sunlight, the "childlike quality of, I don't know, wanting to experience something by way of camera," still stand out.

"There has obviously been so much violence and politicking as a result of Sept. 11, and pertaining to the events of that day," Weisberger states. "I think it's important to be able to take a step back and see that regardless of everything that happened following that day and how one might feel about what has happened, there was a day 10 years ago during which a terrible thing happened that touched all of our hearts very deeply. I hope that my photograph helps people recall the heartbreaking simplicity of that fact, and at the same time the inherent beauty of life."

Clarity in the haze of memories
Other details have become a hazier in the intervening years. She can't remember the airline she was on when she took the photo, although surely she wouldn't have needed to take off her shoes or measure her carry-on liquids in ounces in order to get through security. She thinks she was coming from her home in Richmond, Virginia -- she could've hugged her parents goodbye at the boarding gate, before security fears did away with prolonging farewells until the last possible moment, before boarding. She can't remember the flight she took in the days following 9/11, perhaps surrounded by seats left empty by Americans who had lost their faith in the skies.

Yet 10 years later, she also remembers how New Yorkers came together. "The most memorably and meaningful part of Sept. 11 was the obvious and immediate care that every single person in Manhattan --you know throughout the U.S. and the world, but more specifically Manhattan -- took of each other," Weisberger says. She remembers buying breakfast for people forced out of their homes by the blast and living in her dorm. How her boyfriend stood in line for five hours to give blood, only to be turned away because so much had been donated. And how New Yorkers stood together, cheering on the workers who brought up the rubble from the towers. "I'll remember that in times of crisis, goodness does come out."