9/11 jumpers why did they jump

For those who survived the initial impact of two passenger jets that slammed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, , the nightmare was just beginning. To get out of twin towers, you had to take 2, steps to descend from the highest floor. But as they desperately tried to flee the smoke and flames, some found themselves trapped in stifling, overcrowded stairwells, descending at an agonising pace.

The stairwells became a bottleneck as people trying to escape squeezed past firefighters running up towards the point of impact. The stairwells were a critical factor in the death toll that day. There were too few, too close together and with walls too weak to withstand the fire.

That nightmare scenario has furiously driven safety experts for the past two decades to push for vital changes to US building safety codes. Up or down, left or right, panicked choices determined the chances of survival for people, unaware the odds were already stacked against them in buildings designed to maximise profit, not safety. A volunteer New Jersey firefighter, he was driving into the city that morning when he saw the north tower burning and changed directions to get to his firehouse.

Time and again, they faced pushback from building industry groups, reluctant to give up valuable floor space. When the World Trade Centre opened in lower Manhattan in , its twin towers were each storeys high. While they were under construction, New York City's building codes for high rises changed to allow fewer stairwells in the towers, halving the number required from six to three.

Keen to maximise open space without columns or other obstructions, the building designers placed the stairwells together in the same central area of the huge, 4,square-metre floors, around 20 metres apart. When American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower at am it sheared through floors 93 to 99 and all three of the building's stairwells in this area were destroyed.

Hundreds of people above the impact site were trapped with no way out. They were killed when the tower collapsed. At am, United Airlines Flight crashed into the south tower, through floors 75 to 85, but this tower had a major difference, a 'sky lobby' around floor 78, with space to transfer between elevators and stairwells set further apart.

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. It, in her words, "hit me in the gut," but she felt that Fischl had the right to create and exhibit it. Now she's come to the conclusion that the controversy may have been largely a matter of timing. Maybe it was just too soon to show something like that.

After all, not long before her husband died, she traveled with him to Auschwitz, where piles of confiscated eyeglasses and extracted tooth fillings are on exhibit. They couldn't show things like that then …. In fact, they did, at least in photographic form, and the pictures that came out of the death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness, without particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving families of the dead. They were shown, as Richard Drew's photographs of the freshly assassinated Robert Kennedy were shown.

They were shown, as the photographs of Ethel Kennedy pleading with photographers not to take photographs were shown. They were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack was shown. They were shown as the photograph of Father Mychal Judge, graphically and unmistakably dead, was shown, and accepted as a kind of testament. They were shown as everything is shown, for, like the lens of a camera, history is a force that does not discriminate.

What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf.

What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them. Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.

Catherine Hernandez never saw the photo the reporter carried under his arm at her father's funeral. Neither did her mother, Eulogia. Her sister Jacqueline did, and her outrage assured that the reporter left—was forcibly evicted—before he did any more damage. But the picture has followed Catherine and Eulogia and the entire Hernandez family. There was nothing more important to Norberto Hernandez than family.

His motto: "Together Forever. The picture split them. Those who knew , right away, that the picture was not Norberto—his wife and his daughters—have become estranged from those who pondered the possibility that it was him for the benefit of a reporter's notepad. With Norberto alive, the extended family all lived in the same neighborhood in Queens. Now Eulogia and her daughters have moved to a house on Long Island because Tatiana—who is now sixteen and who bears a resemblance to Norberto Hernandez: the wide face, the dark brows, the thick dark lips, thinly smiling—kept seeing visions of her father in the house and kept hearing the whispered suggestions that he died by jumping out a window.

He could not have died by jumping out a window. All over the world, people who read Peter Cheney's story believe that Norberto died by jumping out a window. People have written poems about Norberto jumping out a window. People have called the Hernandezes with offers of money—either charity or payment for interviews—because they read about Norberto jumping out a window.

But he couldn't have jumped out a window, his family knows, because he wouldn't have jumped out a window: not Papi. She is sitting on a couch next to her mother, who is caramel-colored, with coppery hair tied close to her scalp, and who is wearing a cotton dress checked with the color of the sky.

Eulogia speaks half the time in determined English, and then, when she gets frustrated with the rate of revelation, pours rapid-fire Spanish into the ear of her daughter, who translates. She says that she could see him thinking about us. I know that sounds strange, but she knew him. They were together since they were fifteen.

The Norberto Hernandez she knew would have endured any pain before he jumped out of a window. When the Norberto Hernandez she knew died, his eyes were fixed on what he saw in his heart—the faces of his wife and his daughters—and not on the terrible beauty of an empty sky. How well did she know him? That morning, I remember. He wore Old Navy underwear. He wore black socks. He wore blue pants: jeans.

He wore a Casio watch. He wore an Old Navy shirt. With checks. 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…. Should we judge your father?

If we are so judgmental, we are worse than any of these suffering souls. Shame on us! The stigma must be lifted, because, like it or not, suicide is on the rise at an astonishing rate. We need to ACT like Christians! I was 11 when I watched the live coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Centers.

I watched the second plane hit and I watched those people jump. They were people with families and people who loved and cared for them. I also do not believe mental illness played a part. He hung himself from a tree with a belt. He had mental issues and made the decision to take his own life.

I do not, and will never, believe that they just wanted to end their lives. I believe in my heart that they just wanted to escape and maybe they thought they could survive. We cannot imagine what they were going through or what was running through their minds. I do not call it suicide. Either they were going to burn, suffocate, be obliterated when the tower fell, or jump. There was no right way to die. Even now, 18 years later, I think about the almost 3, people killed and pray for their families and loved ones.

They did not choose to die that day. That decision was made for them by men who did make the decision to kill themselves when they hijacked those planes, crashed them into those towers and the Pentagon. Our culture could do better to understand and support those with mental illness, rather than stigmatize it. Wholeheartedly agree, that the jumpers fit into a different category.

Andrew was in the South Tower when the first plane hit and was trying to descend the building when the second plane caused another explosion. It was a beautiful day. Image source, Andrew Cullen. If the lift had gone up, they would have been killed. A wall of dust and smoke races through streets as one of the World Trade Center towers collapses. Andrew was blown behind a desk in a health club as the store fronts along Wall Street were blown in.

Image source, KBW. Two shafts of light mark the anniversary of the collapse of the Twin Towers in Related Topics. Published 3 August. Published 13 September