September 10, 2026
Eric O’Connell had been living in his apartment on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, next to historic Fraunces Tavern, for less than a week when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks struck the city.
As a 33-year-old photojournalist and commercial photographer at that time, he had been working in various parts of the country, teaching and photographing for magazines and advertising stock. Because New York City is the American center of photojournalism, it was only natural for O’Connell to make a new home here.
Like many others, O’Connell recalls hearing about the first attack on the World Trade Center that day while watching television.
“When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I saw it on the news – Matt Lauer and Katic Couric were preempted and they showed a picture of the building on fire (the north tower) – may be a Cessna hit it and I said, ‘ok, this is not an accident and my training kicked in,’” O’Connell said from his current home in San Antonio in an interview with this reporter, who had spoken to him for the first time in 25 years. “I grabbed my cameras and ran out the door.”
That’s when he said the metal doors on the building shook; he didn’t realize it at that moment, but that was when the second plane had hit the south tower. “It felt like an earthquake,” he recalled.
Despite having moved to NYC in July, O’Connell was not too familiar with the city. He had just spent July teaching in Italy and all of August in New Mexico teaching art. Nevertheless, he made his way to the World Trade Center, running down Broadway to Liberty Street, passing the black tombstone-like Deutsche Bank building.
Then O’Connell came upon the grotesque scene of horror: A piece of plane fuselage on a parking lot across from the south tower. A chunk of steel from the plane pierced the hood of a car. Gruesome body parts were scattered.
Then came the unthinkable: Jumpers.
“They (firefighters) were coming across the parking lot, and then I heard it. I saw something out of corner of eye; it finally registered that a body was falling,” O’Connell recalled. “Then I saw these guys running. Firefighters were dragging him, a firefighter hit by debris. I didn’t know at the time that a body had hit him.”
O’Connell had witnessed what this reporter had seen while covering that fateful morning: Firefighter Danny Suhr struck by a jumper. He ran around the corner and snapped a picture of him being removed in front of 90 West St. He then shot a few frames of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.
“I was standing on the corner (of Liberty Street) where there was scaffolding and I thought, ‘Okay, this is barely safe – things were falling out of the sky,’” he recalled. “I took a picture of the church from the corner, and my instinct was that there was extreme danger. There were two cops there, one a female, and we didn’t know where to go.”
O’Connell had witnessed what this reporter had seen while covering that fateful morning: Firefighter Danny Suhr struck by a jumper. He ran around the corner and snapped a picture of him being removed in front of 90 West St. He then shot a few frames of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.
“I was standing on the corner (of Liberty Street) where there was scaffolding and I thought, ‘Okay, this is barely safe – things were falling out of the sky,’” he recalled. “I took a picture of the church from the corner, and my instinct was that there was extreme danger. There were two cops there, one a female, and we didn’t know where to go.”
“Then we heard the rumble; we knew the building was falling and someone yelled, ‘Run!’” O’Connell recalled. “The female cop screamed, ‘In here!’ I chose to dive in, turned left and curled up in a ball.”
O’Connell had grown up in the southwest U.S., where his community sometimes suffered tornadoes. As the south tower fell, he remembered the advice his mother gave him when a twister approached: Get into the corner.
“I headed to the wall, and the impact threw me in the air,” he recalled. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Please let it be quick.'”
As soon as the rumble of the collapse stopped, “only 10 seconds, I was sitting on my ankles with knees bent thinking maybe the building is on fire and I might die from the smoke,” he said. “I felt like I had three inches of talcum powder on my face. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “We can get out here.’ I also heard another voice say, ‘Over here.’”
He could not tell where the doorway was at first, the entrance to Liberty Street completely blocked by debris. Instinctively, he unscrewed the dust-filled filter from his camera and took a few photos, capturing a female police officer and in the background with this reporter.”
Once outside of the building, the street was dark and filled with dust. He made an important life choice.
“My early influences were all those journalism guys, like James Nachway and Anthony Suau (both famed war photographers), and I thought, ‘I’m not a Nachway or a Suau – I’m not a war photog,’” he said. “So I had a choice to turn right or left, and I turned left. I didn’t want to be one of those people.”
O’Connell then photographed a man in a dust-coated business suit. He took a picture of O’Connell with an instant camera next to an MTA bus. Then he made a joke that “disgusted” O’Connell. “Who do we sue?” the man had quipped.
O’Connell kept walking south and ran into an abandoned hot dog cart.
“I grabbed a water and as soon as I did, a different female cop put her hand on my shoulder, pulled me towards her and said, ‘you need to wash your face,’ so she dragged me to a water fountain, and she pressed the button for me. She then disappeared and I kept walking.”
He said a few guys had a transistor radio on top of car, listening to the news. He said he thought about the movie “Red Dawn,” and thought about the country being under attack as happened in the film.
By the time he made it to Battery Park, he turned back when he heard another rumble, and “I saw an enormous cloud of dust and smoke,” the collapse of the north tower.
“I started to understand what may have happened, but I just didn’t know what to do so I went home, (to his apartment on Pearl Street) and I saw the pictures on television. I took my clothes off. I knew my life had changed forever,” he said.
After cleaning up, he went back out and walked a woman across the Brooklyn Bridge; “she was terrified to walk across,” O’Connell recalled. He went to a friend’s house in Brooklyn to get food and some sleep.
“I tried to sleep but I kept waking up because I was having a nightmare of falling – I’d He brought his processed film to Time Magazine the next day, but because he had shot it on black-and-white film, they weren’t interested. He later sold the images to CNN and “60 Minutes” and gave and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church — which had been destroyed in the Twin Towers’ collapse — a photo to help them raise money to rebuild.
Eric O’Connell showing photos in an exhibit in 2021 at Monroe Gallery of Photography for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Photo shows last picture of the Greek Orthodox Church crushed in the collapse.
(Photo Courtesy of Eric O’Connell)
O’Connell said he sometimes regrets not having done more on that “historic moment.” But he was also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that so many also experienced. He never returned to the site: “I couldn’t even go down there.” He said he didn’t leave Manhattan for a year.
“I was scared to leave – didn’t think I could come back – I was in a red zone, and so when I finally did leave, I’d make sure to take my insurance card, or utility bill, to show where I lived. I was just angry about stuff – I had just moved to New York City,” he said. “I chose to turn my back on it; I didn’t have that connection to all those people – I only had a few friends.”
Now living in San Antonio, he continues to work as a photographer, but also works part-time for Parks and Recreation and rides his bike on the greenways, “like the West Side Highway along the river.”
One of the guys he rides with is a retired NYPD officer, “the only person he knows who speaks about 9/11.”
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