After photographing the falling man at the World Trade Center, Richard Drew headed back to Associated Press offices at the Rockefeller Center to review his morning's work. One photograph stood out among them all.

A man, falling almost calmly against the steely backdrop of the twin towers. (see above) "I called one of the editors over and I said, 'I really like this one.' I saw it as a person's life, there's no blood, there's no guts, it's just a person falling." Within minutes the photo joined thousands of others arriving in newsrooms across the world that day.

It arrived at The Morning Call, a mid-sized paper in Allentown, Pennsylvania where David Erdman, Managing Editor saw it. "My mind right away went to are we gonna print this and I felt that we needed to print it." Michael Hirsch, Business Editor remembers seeing the photo for the first time. "It felt like I was punched in the gut, it was hard to look at. I had the same reaction to Eddy Adams photo where the South Vietnamese police chief stepped up to the Vietcong prisoner and put the pistol to his head and shot him in the temple." (see photo)

The photo as it appeared in The Morning Call.

They decided to publish the photo on the back page of the front section, carrying the photo larger than any other newspaper in the country. Naomi Halperin, photo editor knew that it would evoke a response from the readers. "You know going into this that you're going to get reader response and it's going to be heavy and it's going to be angry." The next day the readers were outraged. They had more responses than they'd ever seen for a photo. Erdman remembers, "I really think it did cause anybody who looked at that photo to think about what would I do ... what choice would I make and the absolute horror of making that choice."

The next day that photo and others like it disappeared. The world preferred to remember the heroic images of the rescuers and how the American spirit prevailed. No one wanted to confront the existence of the jumpers.