I Remember The Falling Man, and All the Others

Is This Jonathan Briley? His family thinks so.

Esquire, via Malkin:

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.

Jonathan Briley's father is a preacher, a man who has devoted his whole life to serving the Lord. After September 11, he gathered his family together to ask God to tell him where his son was. No: He demanded it. He used these words: "Lord, I demand to know where my son is." For three hours straight, he prayed in his deep voice, until he spent the grace he had accumulated over a lifetime in the insistence of his appeal.

The next day, the FBI called. They'd found his son's body. It was, miraculously, intact.

The preacher's youngest son, Timothy, went to identify his brother. He recognized him by his shoes: He was wearing black high-tops. Timothy removed one of them and took it home and put it in his garage, as a kind of memorial.

Timothy knew all about the Falling Man. He is a cop in Mount Vernon, New York, and in the week after his brother died, someone had left a September 12 newspaper open in the locker room. He saw the photograph of the Falling Man and, in anger, he refused to look at it again. But he couldn't throw it away. Instead, he stuffed it in the bottom of his locker, where—like the black shoe in his garage—it became permanent.

Jonathan's sister Gwendolyn knew about the Falling Man, too. She saw the picture the day it was published. She knew that Jonathan had asthma, and in the smoke and the heat would have done anything just to breathe. . . .

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Comments

[Jeff H]

These pictures are, for me, the most stunning and graphic--and hard to deal with--reminders of that black day. I cannot imagine what must have been going through their minds as they chose to jump, and as they plunged to their certain and immediate death.

And all in response the bald-faced acts of evil perpetrated by all-too-typical adherents of "the religion of peace".

God help us all.

This is the most touching thing I have ever seen. I wonder what was going through thier minds as they chose to jump, leaving their family behind, falling to their certian death. I can not image the terror they were going through. My thoughts go out to all their families. Dannika age 12 Canada