Twenty-five years ago this morning, at fifteen seconds past 9:41, an Associated Press photographer named Richard Drew pointed his lens at the north tower of the World Trade Center and followed a man down.
The man is upright in the frame, head first, one knee bent, the two towers rising behind him like a pair of gray columns. Tom Junod opened his Esquire essay on the photograph, first published in 2003, with a line I have never been able to shake: “In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow.”
The New York Times ran the picture on page seven the next morning. In most American newspapers, Junod reported, it ran “once and never again,” pulled after readers called it ghoulish.
Of everything photographed that day, he wrote, the pictures of people jumping “were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo — the only images from which Americans were proud to avert their eyes.”
I was twelve years old and in Tennessee. The adults in my life, understandably, did their best to sanitize what had happened, and the news media did the same. By the time I reached high school, the jumpers had all but vanished from the story of Sept. 11, and the public memory of the day had found no room for them.
Junod’s essay changed that for a lot of people, me included. So did YouTube. I came of age in the first years of a technology with no editors and no guardrails, and I went looking: the footage the networks had put away, the firefighters’ oral histories, the accounts of what the people on the upper floors of the north tower actually faced, which was a burning stairwell on one side and a quarter mile of open air on the other.
I do not recommend that path to everyone. For me it was necessary. A sanitized Sept. 11 was a story I could not build my life and vocation on, and I have come to believe that only by walking into the heart of that darkness, the evil of the thing exactly as it was, could I find the redeeming power of God waiting on the far side of it.
They jumped
USA Today estimated in 2002 that at least 200 people jumped from the towers that morning, nearly all of them from the north tower, where the plane had cut off every stairwell above the impact. Federal engineers at NIST later logged 101 falls from the north tower alone and conceded their count was not complete.
The New York City medical examiner has never counted them, because the office refuses to concede they exist.
“A ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide,” its spokeswoman, Ellen Borakove, told USA Today. “These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out.”
Every death that day was ruled a homicide, and when Junod called to ask for an estimate, he received what he called an admonition instead: “We don’t like to say they jumped. They didn’t jump. Nobody jumped.”
I understand the mercy in that answer, and I still think it is misleading. For one, jumping in this circumstance is nowhere near suicide.
A firefighter named Maureen McArdle-Schulman watched from below and later told the department’s investigators, “I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die, and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been, so me and another guy turned away and looked at the wall and we could still hear them hit.” She saw a choice.
To insist those men and women merely fell is to take from them the last free act of their lives.
Today, I read essay by the British journalist David James Smith, first published in the Sunday Times a decade after the attacks, called “Into the Arms of God.”
Smith interviewed Gwendolyn Briley, whose brother Jonathan, a sound engineer at Windows on the World, is the man many believe Drew photographed. She knew, Smith writes, that some people called the act of jumping suicide, an unforgivable sin before God, and she did not believe her God showed his love that way.
“They were falling into the arms of God,” she told him, “they really were.”
They did not sin
The fear Gwendolyn Briley was answering is one every Catholic knows, and I want to answer it as a Catholic.
When Peter Cheney of the Globe and Mail wrongly identified the Falling Man as Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at Windows on the World, his widow and daughters recoiled, because to a devout family a jump meant suicide, and suicide meant damnation. Strangers online told the girls their father was in hell.
“Please clear my husband’s name,” Eulogia Hernandez begged Junod. I reflect on that tragedy often: a widow who believed her husband’s salvation turned on whether he died in fire or by jumping.
To be clear, the Church does not teach what she feared. The Catechism defines suicide as the disposal of a life that is not ours to dispose of, an act “contrary to love for the living God.” Nobody at those windows was disposing of anything. Murderers had already taken their lives from them, and what remained to choose was the manner of dying.
Choosing the air over the fire takes nothing from life, since the life was already gone. Catholic moral theology has always distinguished a death one intends from a death one accepts.
David Cruz-Uribe, a Catholic mathematician writing at Vox Nova in 2015, made the case that the jumpers belong with the soldier who falls on a grenade, whose death is foreseen but never the intent.
Even a reader who denies that distinction runs into the Catechism’s flat refusal to condemn.
“Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide,” it says, and a floor of burning jet fuel is the plainest definition of torture I know. The paragraph after it adds:
“We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance.” The fall lasted ten seconds, and ten seconds is time enough for abounding love of God.
So I will say it plainly. They jumped, and they did not sin. Their leap was the one Christ made from the cross when he commended his spirit into his Father’s hands; they let go of a world that had already been taken from them and fell toward the only one who could catch them.
Moses told Israel, “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”
On Sept. 11, 2001, underneath was a plaza, and beneath the plaza were those arms.
The whole cross
Christians are strange people.
We hang an instrument of execution over the altar and make our children look at it.
Nobody sanitizes the crucifixion in a Catholic Church, and we say the whole truth of God and salvation is found there, in the worst thing that has ever happened in human history.
As I wrote this Lent, the crucifixion is not ancient history sealed behind stained glass; Pope Leo XIV asked us on Palm Sunday to set our gaze on the crucified and to see in his wounds “the hurts of so many women and men today.”
A faith built on that image has no business flinching from a photograph.
Our parents were right to shield us in 2001.
The years since are a different matter. The jumpers are the clearest witnesses that day has, proof that the evil was exactly as bad as it was and that even there a man could depart this earth like an arrow and land in the hands of God.
Junod wrote that the picture went around the world and then disappeared “as if we willed it away,” and that “one of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave.”
I want to mark it.
The photograph now sits at the top of this essay, and below is a short film from Time about the man who took it. Despite the viewer discretion label, there isn’t any violence portrayed in the movie. It’s simply different angles of this man and others who faced the impossible choice in their final moments.
If you’d like to, look and then pray for him and for the two hundred like him. Nobody fell that morning. Two hundred people went home.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the two hundred, and with every family that has suffered in their absence. We believe the dignity of a human being does not end at a window ledge, and we believe a Church that hangs the crucifixion over its altars can look at anything, because the truth shall set us free.
This week I have written about Father Mychal Judge, Welles Crowther, George W. Bush’s defense of Islam after the attacks, the warning against revenge a future American pope gave ten days after 9/11, and the 9/11 memorial Mass Archbishop Hicks celebrated yesterday at St. Patrick’s, because remembering that day ensures the lessons of it are passed down to our posterity.
It also ensures that we are no longer unjustly imprisoned by it.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that tells the truth, even about the worst morning in American memory, and finds God there anyway.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for the dignity of every human life, including the lives that ended in the air over Vesey Street — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
I watched the 9/11 remembrances this morning on TV. Nothing compared to this article or the video of The Falling Man. Thank you for sharing both. Anyone who judged those who made that ultimate decision should be ashamed of themselves. Into the loving arms of God, indeed.
A few days after Sept 11, 2001, I walked by an in-progress discussion between two very devout Catholics. They were discussing if those who jumped had committed suicide. I remember thinking, (and may have said but the first week after the 9/11 events required many operating changes) leave it with God in His grace and mercy.