# How many jumpers?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 11, 2003, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870 "2003-09-11T00:11:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@herman\_and\_bill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/herman_and_bill)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/1 "2003-09-11T00:11:56Z")
Was a number ever given as to how many jumped to their death from the WTC on 9/11?
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### Author:  [@Muldoon\_s\_Squishiness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muldoon_s_Squishiness)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/2 "2003-09-11T01:41:57Z")
Too many.
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### Author:  [@DougC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DougC)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 11:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/3 "2003-09-11T11:22:50Z")
-
-
- Well really now, considering how many people’s remains were never recovered at all, it’s kinda hard to say.
~
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### Author:  [@herman\_and\_bill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/herman_and_bill)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/4 "2003-09-11T11:52:38Z")
I didn’[t mean to be morbid, but I thought there would be at least an estimate.
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### Author:  [@Monkeypants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monkeypants)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 11:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/5 "2003-09-11T11:55:50Z")
There is. I left my copy on a boat somewhere, but this month’s issue of either Details or GQ has a story about one jumper in particular and has some facts and numbers about the others. Go to the newsstand and flip through.
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### Author:  [@Carnac\_the\_Magnificent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carnac_the_Magnificent)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 1:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/6 "2003-09-11T13:00:38Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by herman\_and\_bill \*
> \*\*Was a number ever given as to how many jumped to their death from the WTC on 9/11? \*\*
We all realize the SDMB exists to fight ignorance (and that you mean no offense by your question), but your phrasing and timing might strike some as insensitive, especially given the unimaginable terror those poor souls experienced in their last moments–and the post-traumatic shock New Yorkers in particular are suffering this week.
Having said that, I realize I speak for no one other than myself.
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### Author:  [@Dragline](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dragline)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/7 "2003-09-11T13:21:00Z")
On the “why the towers fell” episode of Nova, I believe they said 38, but no info as to how they got that number. One couple held hands on the way down, according to Newsweek.
Unbelieveable horror, but the more we know, the stronger our resolve. In the CBS show with the French photographers, I remember one of the fireman saying before he went up: “It must be bad up there, if they are jumping.”
When we get OBL, I hope they suspend the restriction on ‘cruel and inhumane’ punishment.
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### Author:  [@Uncommon\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uncommon_Sense)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/8 "2003-09-11T13:45:20Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Monkeypants \*
> **There is. I left my copy on a boat somewhere, but this month’s issue of either Details or GQ …**
Congrats, you win the award for pretentious statement of the day!!😉
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### Author:  [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/9 "2003-09-11T14:19:37Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Carnac the Magnificent! \*
> \*\*We all realize the SDMB exists to fight ignorance (and that you mean no offense by your question), but your phrasing and timing might strike some as insensitive, especially given the unimaginable terror those poor souls experienced in their last moments–and the post-traumatic shock New Yorkers in particular are suffering this week.
>
> Having said that, I realize I speak for no one other than myself. \*\*
I’ll have to confess that I am totally mystefied by this response. What on earth is in the slightest bit insensitive about the OP? The inquiry was factual and direct, and was asked today because people are thinking about 9/11 today, as indeed they should be.
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### Author:  [@DeVena](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DeVena)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/10 "2003-09-11T14:35:26Z")
[In this NPR report (Sept. 11 and the Photo of the Falling Man),](http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1404525) - audio link - the reporter said that there are no absolute numbers on how many people jumped - estimated anywhere between 2 dozen and 2 hundred.
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### Author:  [@Monkeypants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monkeypants)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/11 "2003-09-11T17:33:25Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by whuckfistle \*
> \*\*Congrats, you win the award for pretentious statement of the day!!😉 \*\*
It was, umm, a rowboat, and I get free subscriptions through my sewing circle.
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### Author:  [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/12 "2003-09-11T18:00:40Z")
**Monkeypants** , the article about the Falling Man Photo was in last month’s [Equire](http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2003/030903_mfe_falling_1.html).
From the article:
> [@](#):
>
> _The Falling Man, By Tom Junod (Originally from Esquire Magazine)_
>
> THEY BEGAN JUMPING NOT LONG after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building’s fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors—the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman’s body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.
>
> From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called “jumpers” or “the jumpers,” as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground. No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, “We’re in uncharted waters now.” It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted a woman to wail, “God! Save their souls! They’re jumping! Oh, please God! Save their souls!” And it was, at last, the sight of the jumpers that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were witnessing was “like a movie,” for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of—if these words can be applied to mass murder—mass suicide.
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### Author:  [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/13 "2003-09-11T18:14:03Z")
Understandably, programs such as Nova have avoided showing images of the towers in which jumpers can be seen. But if there were so many, as the quote above states, how could they do that? I hope they’re not doctoring video images. It might be shocking and insensitive to show images of jumpers, but it’s much better to be shocking and insensitive than it is to be dishonest and unethical.
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### Author:  [@ooga\_booga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ooga_booga)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/14 "2003-09-11T19:16:47Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by ShibbOleth \*
> **Monkeypants, the article about the Falling Man Photo was in last month’s [Equire](http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2003/030903_mfe_falling_1.html).**
More directly, the article (an interesting read, BTW) has this to say about the numeric estimates:
> [@](#):
>
> It was no sideshow. The two most reputable estimates of the number of people who jumped to their deaths were prepared by The New York Times and USA Today. They differed dramatically. The Times, admittedly conservative, decided to count only what its reporters actually saw in the footage they collected, and it arrived at a figure of fifty. USA Today, whose editors used eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence in addition to what they found on video, came to the conclusion that at least two hundred people died by jumping—a count that the newspaper said authorities did not dispute. Both are intolerable estimates of human loss, but if the number provided by USA Today is accurate, then between 7 and 8 percent of those who died in New York City on September 11, 2001, died by jumping out of the buildings; it means that if we consider only the North Tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came from, the ratio is more like one in six.
To repeat what **Muldoon’s Squishiness** said, too many.
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### Author:  [@herman\_and\_bill](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/herman_and_bill)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/15 "2003-09-11T20:54:59Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Carnac the Magnificent! \*
> \*\*We all realize the SDMB exists to fight ignorance (and that you mean no offense by your question), but your phrasing and timing might strike some as insensitive, especially given the unimaginable terror those poor souls experienced in their last moments–and the post-traumatic shock New Yorkers in particular are suffering this week.
>
> Having said that, I realize I speak for no one other than myself. \*\*
TV shows what seems to be endless loops of the plane hitting the one tower, and a constant tally of those killed in this tragedy,I don’t see how my question can be considered insensitive one bit. This is one statistic that I never came across and was curious about.
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### Author:  [@Monkeypants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monkeypants)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/16 "2003-09-11T21:24:17Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by ShibbOleth \*
> **Monkeypants** , the article about the Falling Man Photo was in last month’s Esquire . . .
God, I just revealed that I read all three of those magazines on a recent cruise. If I don’t know how to dress by now, it’s hopeless.
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### Author:  [@Carnac\_the\_Magnificent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carnac_the_Magnificent)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2003, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/17 "2003-09-11T21:56:38Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by herman\_and\_bill \*
> \*\*TV shows what seems to be endless loops of the plane hitting the one tower, and a constant tally of those killed in this tragedy,I don’t see how my question can be considered insensitive one bit. This is one statistic that I never came across and was curious about. \*\*
I understand your curiosity. I was only speaking for myself.
That said, I do see a difference between televised “endless loops of the plane hitting the one tower” and televised footage of dozens of panic-stricken, terrified innocent mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters leaping to their deaths.
I’ve also never heard these poor souls referred to as “jumpers.”
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### Author:  [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2003, 11:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/18 "2003-09-12T11:52:46Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Monkeypants \*
> \*\*God, I just revealed that I read all three of those magazines on a recent cruise. If I don’t know how to dress by now, it’s hopeless. \*\*
How can someone who reads _GQ_, _Esquire_ and _Details_ refer to himself as “monkeypants”? Was this a fashion trend I missed?
And as horrific as the fate the “jumpers” endured was, I liked the perspective from the article. They postulated that, perhaps, by jumping, they took control of their destiny and freed themselves from a more horrific fate, a slow death of heat exposure and smoke inhalation. Doesn’t make what they endured any less painful, and I understand that for some families the thought that their loved ones chose to end their own lives would be incredibly difficult, but still it could connotate a last act of free will and defiance.
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### Author:  [@Uncommon\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uncommon_Sense)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2003, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/19 "2003-09-12T12:43:15Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Monkeypants \*
> \*\*God, I just revealed that I read all three of those magazines on a recent cruise. If I don’t know how to dress by now, it’s hopeless. \*\*
A cruise, huh?😃
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### Author:  [@plnnr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/plnnr)
#### Post date: [September 12, 2003, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-jumpers/200870/20 "2003-09-12T12:55:28Z")
I recall thinking how courageous of those folks - being willing to take their fate into their own hands and stepping off into…nothing.
And before you say “Yeah, but at least it was over quick,” count off ten seconds on your watch and think about falling through the sky toward the pavement while you do it. Doesn’t seem so quick after all.
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