Kei Sugimoto revealed what it was like to document one of the most tragic moments in history
One of these individuals was Kei Sugimoto, who had gone to move his car so he wouldn’t be fined by New York City’s street cleaners.
Then 24, Kei didn’t walk out to the usual hustle and bustle of the Big Apple’s traffic, and instead saw hundreds of people standing in the roads and looking towards Lower Manhattan.
It turns out that the crowd was witnessing the biggest terrorist attack in world history, on one of the most recognisable skyscrapers in the New York skyline.
We now know what happened, as four planes were hijacked by terror group al-Qaeda and flown into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia and a field in Pennsylvania (the target had been the White House or the US Capitol building).
It has been 23 years since one of the world’s most devastating terror attacks took place (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The attacks took the likes of 2,977 innocent people, with an estimated between 6,000 and 25,000 extra people being injured and resulted in the ongoing War on Terror, which has claimed the lives of millions more in the decades since.
However, on the morning of 11 September 2001, no-one could foresee how millions of lives across the globe were about to be altered forever. In fact, not everyone was aware a terrorist attack had even happened.
Waking up just after the first plane hit the North Tower, Kei, now 46, originally thought there had been a fire in the building.
“I had just assumed it was an accident and there was a fire,” he recalled in an interview with LADbible, adding that he’d only gone to the roof of his apartment because he’d never witnessed a skyscraper on fire before.
This hypothesis would be shattered just over 15 minutes later when a second plane collided with the buildings, leaving no doubt in Kei’s mind that something more serious was taking place.
The events of 9/11 changed the course of US history forever (HENNY RAY ABRAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
“I did see the second plane impact, and that’s when I thought, okay, for sure, this is not just an accident. This is intentional. It’s a terrorist attack,” he said.
It was at this point that he ran back to his apartment to grab his recording equipment and begin documenting history.
As a small crowd began to gather on the roof, rumours spread among the building’s residents about further attacks on the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building, while others worried about rumours about bridges and tunnels to the city being closed off.
There was also concern about the smoke coming from the building, and for good cause, as residents in the vicinity of the towers would later develop respiratory issues due to asbestos and other carcinogenic materials used in the construction of the towers.
Kei even recalled hearing about relatives of friends who lived in Chinatown dying to complications of ‘inhaling too much asbestos’.
After around an hour of being stood on the roof Kei saw the towers collapse, something which he thought would never happen.
“When the towers collapsed, I thought it was unbelievable,” he said, adding that he thought authorities had been able to evacuate everyone inside.
“I assumed that people had been evacuated,” he said. “It had been a pretty long time… So I had assumed everyone had already evacuated.”
Revisiting the footage, Kei admitted it was ‘shocking’ and ‘a little traumatising’ to see again.
Footage uploaded by Kei to YouTube has allowed viewers to see another perspective of the attacks (YouTube/ @Kei Sugimoto)
However he felt that – now he had the means to – the most important thing to do was to upload the video and ‘preserve history’.
Kei did reveal he’d had to re-upload a video due to a barrage of conspiracy theorists in the comments, however the responses have been ‘largely positive’ with many commenters recalling their own experience from the day and thanking him for sharing the footage.
“I did have second thoughts of uploading this to YouTube. But then again, I did think that I should from a historical archiving perspective,” he told LADbible.
“My grandparents lived through World War Two. And they told me a lot of stories before they died, maybe that has something to do with how I think that regardless of if it’s good news or bad news, it’s important to preserve history.”
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Kei Sugimoto
