BBToao

Around 200 people fell from the World Trade Center on September 11th. Not one of them is recorded as a suicide. That is not sentiment. That is the official finding of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York, and it is written on the death certificates. All 2,753 deaths at the World Trade Center were ruled homicides. Every single one. The people who went out the windows are counted in that number exactly the same as the people who were killed on impact, the people crushed in the collapse, and the firefighters in the stairwells. The medical examiner's office was asked about this directly and gave one of the clearest answers any government agency has ever given about anything. A jumper, they said, is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they are going to kill themselves. These people were forced out by the smoke and flames, or blown out. That distinction is the whole thing. Almost all of them came from the North Tower. Flight 11 hit it at 8:46 and severed all three stairwells above the 91st floor, which meant that everyone above that line was sealed in a burning building for 102 minutes with no route down and no possibility of rescue from above. Fires in parts of those floors reached temperatures over 1,000 degrees. People broke windows to get air. They hung out of them. They waved curtains and tablecloths and jackets so the city would know they were there. Then the heat and the smoke reached them, and they had a choice between two ways to die in the next few seconds, and they picked the one with open air in it. Some of them went out holding hands with the person next to them. The most famous photograph of it was taken by Richard Drew of the Associated Press at 9:41:15 in the morning. It ran once, on page seven of the New York Times, on September 12, 2001. The public reaction was so hostile that American newspapers essentially buried the image for years and it became the one part of that day nobody would look at. The man in it has never been formally identified. The best evidence points to Jonathan Briley, 43, a sound engineer at Windows on the World on the 106th floor, identified by his brother and by the restaurant's chef from his build and his clothing. So this is worth saying plainly on the anniversary. The country spent 25 years being uncomfortable with those images and quietly avoiding the subject. The medical examiner never wavered for a second. Their position from the beginning was that those people were murdered, by the men who flew the planes, as surely as everyone else in the building, and the state of New York has never recorded it any other way. They did not jump. They were killed.