Who Was the Falling Man from 9/11? – Falling Man Identity Revealed
Nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks, “The Falling Man” by Richard Drew remains one of the most unforgettable images from the tragedy. There were many scenes of chaos, destruction, and panic captured during the 9/11 attacks, but one of the most haunting images is actually a quiet one.
When Richard Drew pointed his camera up to one of the towers, among the horrors he captured were people falling from it. However, he didn’t know until later that one of the frames would turn out to become a symbol of the tragedy of every life lost that day.
TIME has included Richard Drew’s now iconic photograph in their selection of 100 most influential photographs of all time. In the 2016 video below by TIME, the Associated Press photographer recalls the harrowing events that surrounded the taking of the now-iconic photo.
When Drew got to the scene, the first thing he saw was the two towers on fire and covered in smoke. He proceeded to take his photos of the people on the streets and the burning building when he saw the trapped people falling down from it. He took shot after shot of them as they came down, one of them ended up to be the photo that would later come to be known as “The Falling Man.”
“It’s a very quiet photograph. It’s not like a lot of other violent photographs from other disasters,” he said of his poignant capture. “There’s no blood, there’s no guts, nobody getting shot. But, people react to it in a way that they feel they can relate to this photograph.”
The power of this photograph, as Drew also noted, lies in viewers being able to feel that if they were in the same situation, they might have made the same choice that the man in the photo made. It’s also probably one of the few photos that show someone dying that day — and a gripping reminder of the heartbreaking choices thrust upon countless innocent lives like the unidentified man in the photo.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that the photo, despite being disturbing to some, made rounds in different publications, including Esquire, where the photo earned its now-famous title.
THE identity of the man captured falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11 remained one of the tragedy’s most haunting mysteries for years. But a tiny clue spotted during the hunt to identify him would eventually point investigators towards one man.
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The infamous falling man picture, thought to be Jonathan Briley.
Jonathan Eric Briley Obituary Sep 11, 2001 – Legacy.com
A distinctive orange T-shirt worn beneath his clothes helped link the mysterious figure to World Trade Center worker Jonathan Briley. The crucial detail emerged from another photograph taken by Richard Drew moments apart, which showed the man’s outer shirt blowing open to reveal the bright orange top underneath.
Briley, 43, was a sound engineer at Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower.
He is now believed to be the most likely identity of the man immortalized in Drew’s devastating image.
Drew had captured several frames in quick succession as the man plunged from the burning skyscraper on September 11, 2001.
Esquire journalist Tom Junod later investigated the identity of the so-called “Falling Man” and concluded Briley was most likely the person pictured after speaking to Drew and examining the evidence.
Now, 25 years after the terror attacks, Briley’s sister Gwen Briley-Strand, 72, has opened up about the agonizing mystery surrounding the photograph.
She admitted the figure bore a striking resemblance to her brother.
“Truth be told, it did look like him,” she said. But Gwen said her family had initially been “very hurt” when Jonathan was suspected to be the man pictured – and she has never fixated on whether it really was him.
She said: “The photograph brought so much pain to so many people when they were trying to figure out who this person was. I remember hearing about a family who were deeply religious and, with Catholicism, this man that jumped, that’s suicide and that’s the unforgivable sin.”
But Gwen rejected the idea that those who fell or jumped from the burning towers should be judged for their final moments. “I don’t believe in an unforgivable sin. God is too benevolent. He’s too wonderful. I think the only unforgivable sin is not to believe in Him,” she said.
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He was one of 2,977 people killed by al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11Credit: AP
A man standing in the rubble, and calling out asking if anyone needs help, after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower on September 11, 2001, in New York City Credit: AFP
“I believe that all those individuals that jumped were caught. Their spirits were caught.”
The haunting photograph became one of the defining images of 9/11, when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger planes and killed 2,977 people.
For years, the identity of the Falling Man remained a mystery.
Instead, the figure came to represent those who died that day whose final moments were never known.
Gwen said she no longer looks at the photograph.
Instead, she holds onto memories of one final trip with Jonathan just days before his death.
He made a last-minute decision to join Gwen and her husband on a holiday to Florida the week before the attacks – something she now describes as “a gift of God.”
She said: “We were right there on the ocean and we would get up and have Kahlua and coffee and watch the sunrise. It was really special because he decided to join us at the last minute.”
A quarter of a century later, Gwen still watches anniversary coverage of the attacks every year.
She said: “There are times when it feels like 25 years but, then again, there are times when it feels like yesterday.”
But for Gwen, definitively proving whether her brother was the Falling Man ultimately does not matter.
Instead, she believes “he was a representative of all of those almost 3,000 people that had to go through that horrific day of September 11.”
Drew’s haunting photograph has since become one of the most recognisable images of the attacks.
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The Falling Man Bing Videos is a 2006 documentary film
After being implored by Hernandez’s widow to “clear [her] husband’s name”, Junod began writing an article about the photograph.[20] His piece, “The Falling Man”, was published in the September 2003 issue of Esquire magazine. It was adapted into a documentary film by the same name. The article gave the possible identity of the falling man as Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old sound engineer who worked at Windows on the World. Briley had asthma and would have known he was in danger when smoke began to pour into the restaurant.[9]
He was initially identified by his brother, Timothy.[9] Michael Lomonaco, the restaurant’s executive chef, also suggested that the man was Briley based on his body type and clothes.[22] In one of the photos, the Falling Man’s shirt or white jacket was blown open and up, revealing an orange t-shirt similar to one shirt that Briley often wore.[23]
Briley’s remains were recovered the day after 9/11, though the collapse of the towers damaged the clothes he wore, making them unrecognizable except the black shoes, which resembled those from the photo.[9] Jonathan Briley was brother to Alex Briley, a member of the band Village People.
Other uses
9/11: The Falling Man is a 2006 documentary film about the photo. It was made by American filmmaker Henry Singer and filmed by Richard Numeroff, a New York-based director of photography. The film is loosely based on Junod’s Esquire story. It also drew its material from photographer Lyle Owerko‘s pictures of falling people. It debuted on March 16, 2006, on the British television network Channel 4, later made its North American premiere on Canada‘s CBC Newsworld on September 6, 2006, and has been broadcast in more than 30 countries. The U.S. premiere was September 10, 2007, on the Discovery Times Channel.[citation needed]
The novel Falling Man, by Don DeLillo, is about the September 11 attacks. The “falling man” in the novel is a performance artist recreating the events of the photograph.[24] DeLillo says he was unfamiliar with the title of the picture when he named his book. The artist straps himself into a harness and jumps from an elevated structure in a high visibility area (such as a highway overpass), hanging in the pose of The Falling Man.
In July 2022, GameStop caused controversy by allowing a non-fungible token titled Falling Man to be listed on their newly-launched NFT platform. The digital image depicted an astronaut falling in a pose and background replicating Drew’s photograph. The seller’s description read, “This one probably fell from the MIR station“, referencing the 1997 crash of Spektr. The NFT was later delisted from the platform.[25][26][27]
Nothing and Full of Hell‘s collaborative album When No Birds Sang is partly inspired by The Falling Man.[28]
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced the release of tens of thousands of documents showing the city did not disclose all it knew about air toxicity after 9/11.
The release comes ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,977 people in the United States, mostly in the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York.
In the years since, more than 9,400 have died from illnesses linked to their exposure to the area, according to a federal medical monitoring program.
“These are documents that show what the city knew about the toxic air around Ground Zero, when they knew it, and how they acted to limit liability,” the mayor told a news conference following the online release of 170,000 pages of documents on health concerns, air quality and the city’s response to the attacks.
The release is part of an agreement with 9/11 Health Watch, a victims’ advocacy group that had taken legal action to compel the city to make the documents public.
“For 25 years, four different Mayoral administrations kept from the public, the US Congress, and the City Council documents showing what the City actually knew about the danger of the toxic chemicals in Lower Manhattan and Western Brooklyn after the World Trade Center collapse, even as City officials continued messaging to the public that the air was ‘safe and acceptable’,” the group’s director Benjamin Chevat said in a statement.
After the initial dust cloud that followed the collapse of the World Trade Center, months of pollution and lingering dust ensued, causing cancers that thousands of New Yorkers still suffer today.
My brother ran into the Twin Towers on 9/11. He never came out. | Opinion
Leaders ‘lied’
When asked about the names of officials who had withheld information from the public, Mamdani said, “this goes across a multitude of those that New Yorkers have trusted.”
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.”
An ambulance, covered with debris, is on fire after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower on 11 September 2001 in New York.
AFP / Doug Kanter
Roughly 173,000 documents released Tuesday, and additional ones which will be published online in waves over the next 12 months, could implicate two former New York mayors.
They are Rudy Giuliani, in office at the time of the attacks, and then Michael Bloomberg, mayor from January 2002 to December 2013.
Some concern discussions Giuliani’s administration had at the time about its legal liability and health risks, New York City’s chief counsel Steven Banks said Tuesday.
Giuliani’s spokesman did not return a request for comment.
Another document highlights information provided by Congressman Jerry Nadler during Bloomberg’s tenure regarding concerns from residents of Lower Manhattan about the quality of the air they were breathing.
Bloomberg’s team declined to comment.
On September 11, 2001, hijackers seized control of two planes that struck the two World Trade Center towers. A third hijacked jet smashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth, which seemed to be headed for the Capitol or the White House, crashed in woodland near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers fought back and seized control.
Flashback: Trump Interviewed On September 11, 2001, Tours Damage 2 Days Later
Posted By Ian Schwartz On Date September 11, 2017
Donald Trump Calls Into WWOR/UPN 9 News on 9/11
Donald Trump said that from his office he witnessed a jetliner crashing into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. He spoke to WWOR/UPN 9 News via phone to describe what he saw.
Trump talked about the building structure, what should be the future of the WTC land plot and what, as president, he would do in response. Trump considered running for president in 1999.
“This country is different today and it’s going to be different than it ever was for many years to come,” Trump said.
Trump toured the damage two days after the terror attack: Donald Trump interview 2 days after 9/11 at ground zero
“I cannot believe the sight of Lower Manhattan without the World Trade Center and therefore we have to rebuild. Not necessarily in that form, but we have to rebuild at least as good and maybe better,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News on September 13, 2001.
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