The rest of the family were outraged. Hernandez had been the linchpin of their family, a gentle giant who’d stood at 6ft 2in. “I was standing there, crying, praying,” remembers his daughter Jacqui of the funeral. “I see a man with a photo and I told him to get out. I cursed. I said, ‘That’s not my father, get out’.”
The Catholic Hernandez family — whose motto is “together forever” — could not bring themselves to believe the Falling Man was their father. “By calling him the jumper,” says Catherine, another of Hernandez’s three daughters, “you’re saying that his soul is damned. You’re telling me he’s in hell.”
Hernandez’s wife and daughters refused even to look at the picture, as did his former colleagues at Windows on the World. “What do we stand to gain by identifying this person?” asked Michael Lomonaco, executive chef at Windows. “What will we ever know about this photograph that it doesn’t already say on its own?” Nevertheless, Cheney’s story ran, with Hernandez identified as the photograph’s subject. A journalism student at Columbia University wrote her thesis on him the following year, reaching the same conclusions as Cheney. And yet, some things didn’t add up. For example, the man in the picture is wearing neither chefs’ whites nor the black-checked trousers of kitchen staff. Was he a Windows employee at all? The picture had been locked in the mind of another man since its appearance in The New York Times on September 12, 2001. Tom Junod, of Esquire magazine, kept looking out for it, and information on its subject, but none ever came. Amazed that so few writers had wanted to tackle the story, in spring 2003 he began work on an article of his own.
Contacting Drew, he made an instant breakthrough. The Falling Man wasn’t a single image, but one of 12 documenting the descent from the north tower. Far from composed, in the other shots he flails, revealing himself as lankier than previously thought, and probably black rather than Hispanic. In the final shots his white shirt has blown off. Underneath, he is wearing an orange T-shirt.
Armed with the photos, Junod set out to find the Hernandez family, who by this time had moved to Long Island. “I got an e-mail from Catherine in June, 2003, saying, ‘I’d love to talk to you. It’s been hell’,” he said. He convinced the family to look at the pictures for the first time and instantly saw relief fill their faces.
“You could immediately tell it wasn’t him,” says Catherine. Her father hadn’t owned an orange T-shirt. “From that day everything changed,” Norberto’s widow Eulogia believes. “I was no longer in such a bad way.” As Junod got into his car to leave, she pleaded: “Please clear my husband’s name.”
Junod set about compiling a list of new possibilities, based on age, race, body type and how likely they were to have been on the top floors of the north tower. It numbered 22. Catherine Hernandez had thought it could be a man called Sean Singh, who worked at Windows in the audiovisual department setting up conferences. But he was too slight. On a tipoff from a catering firm, next they thought he was a guy who’d delivered food to executives at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 101st floor. But nobody at the firm remembered him.
After careful negotiations, they eventually convinced the former staff at Windows to look at the pictures in July 2003. “I felt it was my responsibility to help identify this person if I could,” says Glenn Vogt, manager of the restaurant where 79 employees died. “It was actually very easy to eliminate a lot of people right off the bat.”
But while ruling out was easy, settling on the right person was tough: in the end, only five names remained. One of them was 43-year-old Jonathan Briley, a 6ft 5in sound engineer who’d worked in the same department as Sean Singh. He had lived with his wife Hillary in Mount Vernon and worn black high-tops on the last day of his life, just like the man in the picture.
Junod called Briley’s father, a Baptist preacher from New York State. “Of all the interviews it was the most heartbreaking. He said to me, ‘I’d like to talk to you but I can’t. My life’s work is telling people that they have to go on after tragedy, but I can’t do it for myself’.”
Jonathan’s sister Gwendolyn was nominated to speak for the family. “When I first looked at the picture it was almost like touching a hot stove,” she says. “I looked at the figure and I saw it was a man — tall, slim. I said, ‘If I didn’t know any better that could be Jonathan’.”
She remembers her brother as an adventurer who despite suffering from asthma loved whitewater rafting, parasailing, even bungee-jumping. Like all the family, Briley was deeply religious but the thought that he might have jumped doesn’t trouble his sister spiritually. “These were decisions made between these people and God. We shouldn’t let religiosity have us think that it’s as simple as unforgivable sin.”
In September 2001, Briley had first been identified by DNA and odontology before his brother Timothy, a policeman, was called to see the body. He recognised him by his hands and feet, specifically his shoes. Briley had owned an orange T-shirt, said Timothy. He’d worn it so often he’d teased him about it.
9/11: The Falling Man, a documentary to be screened on Channel 4 on March 16, and Junod’s original article stop just short of saying Briley is definitely the Falling Man.
However, both present him as the likely match, a fact Gwendolyn, despite her initial reaction to the photo, isn’t convinced of. “We found his body intact,” she says. “The thought that he could have fallen from such a height seems strange to me.” She points out there is no record of Briley’s last movements, no phone call, nothing. “We don’t even know for sure he was up there.”
There is no doubt that Briley died in the attacks. But is he the Falling Man? Forensic pathologists maintain that, though unusual, it is not impossible for a body to survive a 100-storey drop in one piece. But even then, are black shoes and an orange T-shirt (that he might or might not have worn) enough proof? No digital enhancement will ever make the photo clearer. His identity is likely to remain a mystery.
What pleases Gwendolyn, however, is that the victims whose plight has been hidden for so long are finally being accorded the respect they deserve. “Whoever this man is,” she says, “he was someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s friend. We don’t do him an injustice by looking at his picture. We honour him by it.”
