A photo taken on September 11, 2001 by the New York City Police Department as the North Tower collapses, engulfing lower Manhattan in smoke and ash. (Photo: AP Photo/NYPD, Det. Greg Semendinger)
The South Tower of the World Trade Center explodes in fla mes after being hit by the hijacked airliner now universally known as "the secon d plane," United Airlines Flight 175, September 11, 2001. This photo -- with its black smoke; the shocking, brilliant, colossal flames; the cloudless sky; the beautiful Brooklyn Bridge flying the American flag -- captures so much of the story of the day that, if one were to create a com posite picture to illustrate the idea of "9/11," the result might look very much like this astonishing shot.
(Photo: STR/Reuters /Landov)
In a scene repeated with terrifying frequency as flames engulfed the top of the towers, a man falls (or leaps, as was evidently the case with many victims) to his death from the World Trade Center. On the morning of September 11
Photographer Richard Drew, in the midst of another assignment, got the call to drop everything and head to the World Trade Center. As soon as he arrived downtown he began shooting; later in the day, as as he processed what he had shot, he was especially struck by this photo -- and with reason. One of the most recognizable pictures made on 9/11, the image from a purely photographic perspective is breathtaking: the miniscule human form caught against the massive, abstract background of the towers is so obviously helpless, and doomed, that we're tempted to reach out our hands to try and cradle the tiny anonymous figure. And while Drew himself refuses to conjecture about the man's identity ("I prefer to think of him as a sort of Unknown Soldier," he told LIFE.com), it's impossible not to put ourselves in the falling man's place -- with all the dread and empathy that that sort of transference commands.
(Photo: AP Photo/Richard Drew)
A doctor missing since the day before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was added to the city's official death toll Thursday, months after an appeals court declared there was no other plausible reason for her disappearance.
The city medical examiner's office said that Dr. Sneha Anne Philip, 31, was the 2,751st victim killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
It cited the Jan. 31 court ruling in a brief release, saying the state Supreme Court's appellate division "determined that Sneha Anne Philip died at the World Trade Center. Therefore, we have added her name to the list of World Trade Center victims."
Philip's family went to court to restore her name to the victims' list. She was cut from the list in 2004 by officials who said they couldn't definitively link her to the site because she didn't work there and went missing a day earlier.
Philip, a resident physician at a Staten Island hospital, was last seen on videotape buying shoes and lingerie at a department store across from the trade center on Sept. 10, 2001. Investigators once thought she could have been a victim of another crime, or had disappeared on her own to escape troubles with her marriage and alcohol.
Her family believed she likely attended a party held by the city's South Asian community in a hotel in the trade center complex on Sept. 10, and died while helping wounded people in front of the towers before they collapsed.
"The evidence shows it to be highly probable that she died that morning and at that site, whereas only the rankest speculation leads to any other conclusion," the court wrote.
Her father, Philip K. Philip, said Thursday his family would attend this year's anniversary ceremony to hear his daughter's name read, as it was the first two years after the attacks.
"We waited and we waited, and everything came out right," Philip said. "Sadness is there all the time, but at last, you know, we are happy that they recognized that Sneha was a victim of 9/11."
A New York court issued a similar ruling in 2002 after the family of a computer analyst who worked several blocks away from ground zero fought successfully to add him to the victims' list. In May 2007, the medical examiner's office added the name of a woman who died five months after the attacks of respiratory illness linked to breathing in toxic trade center dust.
Philip's name will also be listed at the memorial to the 2001 attacks being built in New York. The number of people killed when four hijacked jets crashed into the trade center, the Pentagon and a western Pennsylvania field is now 2,975.
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