Kei Sugimoto was 24 years old when he witnessed one of the greatest events in modern history.
The man who shared footage of the destruction of the Twin Towers 22 years later September 11 from an “unseen perspective,” he described what it was like to witness this atrocity.
In an interview with LADbible, Kei Sugimoto recalled waking up on the morning of September 11, 2001, to move his car to avoid a ticket.
As he walked out of his apartment and toward his car, Kei, then 24, saw not the usual New York traffic, but crowds of people standing on the roads, all facing the same direction. They witnessed the first of two terrorist attacks on New York City's most iconic skyline landmarks.
The terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and flew them into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania (the target was the White House or the U.S. Capitol building). The attacks killed about 3,000 people and injured between 6,000 and 25,000 more, sparking a war on terror that has killed millions in the decades since.
However, on the morning of September 11, no one could have predicted how millions of lives around the world could be changed forever. In fact, not everyone knew that a terrorist attack had occurred.
Waking up just after the first plane hit the North Tower, Kay, now 46, initially thought the building was on fire.
“I just assumed it was an accident and the fire started,” he recalled in an interview, adding that he climbed to the roof of his apartment only because he had never seen a skyscraper burn before.
That hypothesis was shattered 15 minutes later when the second plane crashed into buildings, leaving Kay in no doubt that something more serious was going on.
“I actually saw the second plane hit, and then I thought: of course, this is not just an accident. This is done on purpose. This is a terrorist attack,” he said.
It was at that moment that he ran back to the apartment to grab the camera and start documenting history.
As a small crowd began to gather on the roof, rumors began to spread among the building's residents about further attacks on the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building, while others worried about rumors of bridges and tunnels into the city being closed. There were also concerns about the smoke coming out of the building, and with good reason, as residents living near the towers would later develop breathing problems due to the asbestos and other carcinogenic materials used in the towers' construction. Kay even recalls hearing about relatives of friends who lived in Chinatown dying from complications caused by “breathing in too much asbestos.”
About an hour after Kay stood on the roof, he saw the towers collapse, something he thought would never happen.
“When the towers collapsed, I thought it was incredible,” he said, adding that he believed authorities were able to evacuate everyone inside. “I assumed that people had been evacuated. It had been a while… So I assumed that everyone had evacuated by now.”
Returning to the footage nearly 23 years later, Kay admitted it was “shocking” and “a little traumatic” to see it again.
However, he felt he now had the opportunity – the most important thing to do was to download the video and “save history.”
Kay admitted he had to re-upload the video through a flood of conspiracy theorists in the comments, but the responses were “overwhelmingly positive,” with many commenters recalling their own experiences that day and thanking him for sharing the footage.
“I was really hesitant about uploading it to YouTube. But then again, I thought I had to do it for the sake of history,” he said. “My grandparents lived through World War II. And they told me many stories before they died, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I think that whether it's good news or bad news, it's important to preserve history.”
Recall that the main defendant in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and two of his henchmen entered into an agreement with military prosecutors. Thus, all three agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the exclusion of execution from the list of possible punishments.
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