World Trade Center Jumpers, September 11, 2001

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• Above, Jumpers, 9/11/2001, Reuters photo

• Above, “The Falling Man,” 9/11/2001, ap photo by Richard Drew, via Esquire
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9/10/2011, “The 9/11 victims America wants to forget: The 200 jumpers who flung themselves from the Twin Towers who have been ‘airbrushed from history‘,” UK Daily Mail, Tom Leonard

• “Almost all of them jumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell.”…

9/10/2011, “Children of 9/11: Life with a parent missing,” Newsday, Carol Polsky

• “Nearly 3,000 children under the age of 18 lost a parent on Sept 11. The average age was 9. A total of 108 were born in the months after their fathers died.”…

9/9/2011, “WaPo’s Dionne: ‘Time to Leave 9/11 Behind’ as ‘A Simple Day of Remembrance’,” NewsBusters

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• 9/6/2010, “September 11: Recalling my day at the World Trade Center,” the experiencejunkie.com by msw

“Then the crowd let out a collective gasp, I looked to see the first of many people falling through the sky. The television stations and the newspapers downplayed this aspect of a day already filled with enough shock and terror, but I place great importance on it because it immediately human-ised the situation for both myself and those around me. This wasn’t just a burning building; it was suddenly full of people, friends, and family. For me, it is the most haunting memory of the day. When I focussed on what the crowd had noticed, I too let out a cry so involuntary and so primeval that I barely recognised it as my own. It was not a piece of building falling to the ground, but a man, recognisable by his flapping tie and flailing arms and legs as he fell through the air. The situation was surreal no longer; my body shook with shock, my knees buckled and a light-headedness overwhelmed me with such severity that I thought I was either going to throw-up or fall down.

I sat down and looked up only to see more people jumping. I thought for a moment that they might have fallen, but there were too many people, their arms windmilling as they subconsciously tried to fight gravity and avoid the inevitable. Haunted by these visions numerous times since the incident, I have tormented myself by trying to imagine the extreme conditions that those people must have faced that they should choose certain death by leaping from the building over clinging to any hope of rescue. What were they thinking when they jumped; what did they think on the way down?…But my fear is that to forget is to fail the lesson and lose the opportunity. That’s why this raw wound will never completely heal and that things can never go back to ‘normal’. Because even as a simple bystander I have a responsibility to incite change for the rest of my life or I watched all those people die in vain.”

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