A man photographed the fleeing smoke and debris when the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed just one block on September 11, 2001, he died of a coronavirus in Florida, his family said. The Palm Beach Post reported that Stephen Cooper, a New York electrical engineer who lived part-time in the Delray Beach, Florida area, died on March 28 at Delray Medical Center from COVID-19. He was 78 years old.
AP Photo / Suzanne Plunkett
The photo, captured by an Associated Press photographer, was published in newspapers and magazines around the world and is featured at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York.
“I didn’t even know the picture was taken,” said Janet Rashes, Cooper’s partner for 33 years. “Suddenly he’s looking at Time magazine one day and he sees himself and says, ‘Oh my God. That’s me.’ He was amazed. He couldn’t believe it.”
Rashes said Cooper was handing over documents near the World Trade Center, not knowing exactly what had happened that morning, when he heard a police officer scream, “You have to run away.”
The photo shows Cooper, who was 60 at the time, with a manila envelope under his left arm. He and several other men were in a desperate race when a wall of rubble from the collapsed tower looms behind them.
Cooper got safely into a nearby subway station.
“Every year on September 11, I would go look for the magazine and say, ‘Look, it’s here again,'” said Jessica Rashes, Cooper’s 27-year-old daughter. “I would take her to family barbecues, parties, anywhere she could brag.”
Susan Gould, a long-time friend, said Cooper was proud of the photo, bought several copies of Time and gave them “as a business card.” She said Cooper shrugged a copy of the photo, laminated it, and put it in her wallet.
“Stephen was a character,” said Gould.
Suzanne Plunkett, the Associated Press photographer who took the photo, wrote that she had been in contact with two of the people in the photo, but Cooper was not among them.
“It is a shame that you have never been aware of Mr. Cooper’s identity,” Plunkett wrote after his death in an email to The Palm Beach Post.
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