When he was 15 years old, Jonathan Walczak came upon a newspaper article that described a disposable camera found in the pocket of a dead man in the rubble of the World Trade Center.
An F.B.I. agent quoted in that 2003 article said his team had developed the film from the camera, revealing pictures taken from inside one of the towers as the Sept. 11 attacks were unfolding.
Jonathan had been to the twin towers, once, with his grandparents and his younger brother when he was little. He read to the end of the article, then he read it again and clipped it out. The description of those photos cast a spell on him that he could not shake. An extremely specific fixation took root.
Years passed. Mr. Walczak graduated from college in North Carolina and became a newspaper reporter before moving to Manhattan in 2010 to attend graduate school. He lasted only one semester, but that fall in the city triggered memories. He watched the ninth anniversary of the terror attacks, and thought about that camera. He had kept the newspaper clipping all those years. Where was the camera now? Could he see those pictures? They sounded so vivid.
His time as a reporter taught him how to access government documents. Later that year, Mr. Walczak, now in his early 20s, filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act — his first of many — demanding that the F.B.I. release the pictures from that disposable camera.
“There is no other camera like this,” he wrote in his request. “There are no other photos like these.”
Mr. Walczak is quick to clarify something at this point in conversations about the missing film. He does not believe the pictures will reveal some hidden explanation for the events of that day. He is not a conspiracy theorist.
He is something different — a Sept. 11 completist. The two can look very similar from a distance, people foraging for things that will supposedly show what really happened on that day. But Mr. Walczak has a track record of actually finding them.
On an episode of a 2021 podcast he created, “Missing on 9/11,” he rattled off a list of photos the he has verified were taken on various floors of the towers: “One picture from the 48th, three from the 35th, one from the 51st, five from the 74th, two from the 61st.”
And in his sprawling, labyrinthine quest for those photographs, he would come to know a community of sleuths intent on finding and preserving unseen footage from that singular day. They huddle in Reddit threads, inspecting images and triangulating the exact positions of the photographers.
“People just assume everything’s been published,” Mr. Walczak said. “Not only is that not true, there’s a lot of fascinating footage that hasn’t been published.”
It is like they are working together on a puzzle that, 25 years later, still seems not quite complete. And new pieces keep emerging.
Just this year, amateur Sept. 11 archivists have found a gripping video from a forgotten Camcorder, and another showing office equipment falling from the highest floors — likely thrown through the reinforced glass windows by people desperate for fresh air. These are marked within the community as major discoveries.
But for Mr. Walczak, the disposable camera remains the big one.
‘The Zapruder film of 9/11’
The story that the teenage Jonathan Walczak clipped out was written by a Baltimore Sun reporter named Laura Sullivan. In 2003, she spent time with the F.B.I. Explosives Unit at its storage facility in Quantico, Va., a main repository for evidence from Sept. 11.
Deep in the article, her focus turned to the disposable camera. Mr. Walczak has reread those sentences countless times, analyzing them for clues about the photographer or the people around him that day.
“Unit members found a disposable camera in the pocket of a man who jumped from one of the towers,” Ms. Sullivan wrote. “When they developed the film months later, investigators found a chilling chronology of the man’s experience that morning.”
“The photos show the man, who appears to be a construction worker, standing at the window as the other tower burns behind him. The photos, which include pictures he took as well as a few taken by someone else, also capture other jumpers falling. The man looks stricken, his face one of shock and disbelief.”
There were solid clues to chase down. Construction worker … the photo taken as the other tower burns.
The specificity of this description intrigued him. Many articles, books, documentaries and films have been made about that morning in Manhattan. One would imagine that there’s nothing new. But relatively few images from inside the towers have been seen. And none are known to have surfaced from the floors above where the planes hit.
He sought to convey the significance of the photos in his podcast in 2021.
“To me, they’re the Zapruder film of 9/11,” he said. “They’re singular and unique, a point of view unlike any other, documenting a monumental moment in American history.”
But time after time, in his view, he was stonewalled by the F.B.I.
He pursued other avenues. During the “Missing on 9/11” podcast, he made a bonus episode, “The Disposable Camera.” And he invited a guest: the reporter who wrote the Sun story 18 years earlier.
“I email you out of the blue,” Mr. Walczak reminded the reporter, Ms. Sullivan, by then with National Public Radio. “Did you kind of wonder what this is about?”
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what did I write?’” she replied. “‘What did I do now?’” But she remembered that day in the Quantico evidence lab.
“I had a flash of Mohamed Atta’s suitcase,” she told Mr. Walczak. “And then it all came rushing back.”
In the evidence room that day in 2003, a brand-new suitcase rested on a table. It belonged to Mr. Atta, a hijacker who struck the north tower — luggage checked so as to avoid the drawing suspicion as a passenger with no bags. The suitcase missed the connecting Flight 11 in Boston from Portland, Maine, and thus survived.
She vaguely remembered the photos. Mostly, she remembers the feelings they evoked.
“It was a man in a beige outfit standing by a window,” she told him. “It was sort of the emotional pull of them, that they were taken in this moment of tragedy.”
The pictures seemed to reveal, she said, “this moment that was his last moment — that he didn’t really know it was his last moment.”
Five years after that podcast, Ms. Sullivan can still recall how she felt about the people in the photographs. “Something about them,” she said, “felt trapped.”
She understands the allure of analog found footage.
“In this day and age, we want to be reminded of what’s real,” she said. “An image from that morning of a person living that nightmare, that’s real. And from a disposable camera — it’s real in a way that images today are not.”
‘Something very bad is happening’
As Mr. Walczak dug deeper into the footage from Sept. 11, someone suggested he reach out to a younger man who was regarded as something of an expert. His name was Andrew Boston. Mr. Walczak was skeptical — Mr. Boston was an electrician in his 20s in Nebraska. But he gave him a call.
His doubts vanished: “We spoke for three or four hours.”
Mr. Boston was only 5 years old on Sept. 11, but he remembers it for a specific fright. His father was away on business on the East Coast, and was supposed to fly home that day, but no one had heard from him. His worried mother basically ignored him, and he sat in front of a television showing the scene from Manhattan.
“I do recall the south tower collapse, watching at home,” Mr. Boston says now. “After that my brother and I were sent into the basement, and we played Nintendo. I think my most ever-present thought was, ‘Something very bad is happening.’”
As the afternoon dragged on, the boy ended up on the porch with his mother. Neighbors were outside, too. Then, as Mr. Boston remembers today, there was a tremendous roar overhead. Everyone looked up — it was a huge jet.
“I could see every panel,” Mr. Boston said. A grown-up explained what it was: Air Force One, the president’s plane.
During the chaos that day, Air Force One darted around the country, from Florida to Louisiana to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska — a few miles from the Boston family’s house.
And a few hours later, Mr. Boston’s father called home — he was safe, his plane diverted to a small airfield.
“It was the first big event of my life,” Mr. Boston, now 30, said. “Every generation has that something that you become aware, ‘Oh, there’s a bigger world than what’s going on around me.’”
To come of age after the attacks is to grow up seeing images from that day. “Wherever you look, documentaries, books — there was always a new thing to learn,” he said.
It followed him into adulthood, where he discovered false claims about what happened that day. “People were, like, just making stuff up,” he said. “This is just bad history.”
Two or three years ago, he began devoting serious time to collecting and cataloging Sept. 11 footage, helping build a community on Reddit called r/911archive. He wanted, for example, to understand — in granular detail — what caused the buildings to collapse. He has sought to understand why some escape routes were available while others were not. He has examined the role of vertical shafts and voids in the collapse.
“It’s a disservice to not try to understand why,” he explained. “It’s history that gets lost.”
The community is still finding footage. Just last year, a newly discovered videocassette — a harrowing scene recorded by a contractor named Edward Sferrazza — was digitized and posted online. It begins with people staring up at one burning building, then a second, and finally, suddenly, everyone is engulfed by ash. Mr. Sferrazza, gasping for air, returns to his van to find two strangers inside, seeking refuge.
“That was huge,” Mr. Boston said of the video. “I’ve never seen something so visceral and so human.”
For his part, Mr. Sferrazza, the contractor, said last week in an interview that he hasn’t watched and has no intention to. He released the video for the sole purpose of rebutting Sept. 11 deniers, he said.
“I just want it to be known that, when they compare it to the moon landing, I was there,” he said. “I smelled it, I tasted it, I lived it.”
Tracking the F.B.I. agent
Mr. Walczak, though, was not making any progress whatsoever in his search for the disposable rubble camera. Time after time, his Freedom of Information Act requests to the F.B.I. were denied. His description of the material he sought was always too vague, the bureau said.
After having sent more than two dozen requests for documents over 15 years, adding new search terms or names of construction workers who perished, Mr. Walczak finally sued the bureau in federal court last year. He accused the agency of, in effect, not looking hard enough. That lawsuit is playing out in the Southern District of New York, but he felt as if he was nearing a dead end.
There was one more obvious person to contact: the F.B.I. agent who ran the evidence lab in Quantico and who showed the pictures to Ms. Sullivan in 2003.
His name was Donald Sachtleben, and in 2003, he was approaching the end of a remarkable career as a bomb technician — a career that, in the years to follow, would itself implode in spectacular fashion.
His dangerous outings, and the toll they took, are described in detailed court documents.
Mr. Sachtleben, then an agent in his early 30s, gathered evidence in New York after terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Impressed with his work, the F.B.I. flew him to Oklahoma City the day Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb at the Federal Building, killing 168. He spent weeks there, picking through corpses for evidence, and after dark, drinking the day’s horrors away in bars.
In 1996, during the Unabomber investigation, agents zeroed in on a suspect: Ted Kaczynski, a recluse who lived in a tiny cabin in the Montana woods. Mr. Sachtleben entered the cabin after Mr. Kaczynski’s arrest, and he found a live bomb under the bed. And it was Mr. Sachtleben — “too stupid to be afraid,” he would say later — who drove the bulldozer carrying the explosives down an icy hill to a spot where the bomb could be safely detonated.
After the attacks of 2001, Mr. Sachtleben worked on the ground in Shanksville, Pa., the scene of the crashed Flight 93. He listened to the black box recording of the passengers wresting control of the plane from the terrorists. “The psychological and emotional toll that work took on Don was enormous,” his lawyers would later state.
He left the F.B.I. in 2008, then returned as a contractor with full access to top secret information. But four years later, investigators made a disturbing discovery when they searched his laptop: He was storing and sharing child sexual abuse imagery. A separate investigation revealed that Mr. Sachtleben had also leaked secret information about a failed bomb plot to the media.
He was arrested and charged in both cases, and pleaded guilty in both. His lawyers said the burnout from his stressful career and heavy drinking led him to use poor judgment. He spent nine years in prison.
During that time, Mr. Walczak tracked him down and wrote to him, asking about the photos from the disposable camera.
Can’t help you, Mr. Sachtleben replied. “There were hundreds of thousands of photos related to the 9/11 investigation,” he wrote from prison. “I imagine these images are tucked away in some storage bin.”
Mr. Sachtleben was released in 2022. Today, he lives far from his old life, in a house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac near a stocked fishing pond in rural Indiana. Mr. Walczak wrote him here, too, and received the same reply. Can’t help.
When a reporter visited the former agent in August, Mr. Sachtleben listened quietly to questions about the disposable camera and the pictures it yielded.
“I cannot be part of this story,” he said in a brief conversation. He was not allowed to discuss F.B.I. matters without approval, he said.
Asked if he simply remembered the photos, he said: “Somewhat.”
The torch is passed
Earlier this year, a head of the F.B.I.’s Record/Information Dissemination Section filed a detailed court response to Mr. Walczak’s lawsuit, outlining the lengths to which the bureau has gone to find this camera. The bureau tried dozens of terms — “disposable,” “rubble,” “camera,” “pocket,” “jumper,” “tower” — in internal search engines, to no avail.
The storage area the Sun reporter had visited is now a mail room, and the evidence that was held there has been transferred elsewhere. Several offices were physically searched in recent months for any sign of the camera or photographs, the F.B.I. said. No luck.
As his search for the camera plods on, Mr. Walczak has become an expert on other so-called rubble cameras found in the ruins of ground zero. Those investigations have proved more fruitful.
He took a deep dive into the contents of a professional-grade camera found at ground zero, and sought to identify its owner by reaching out to the people photographed in the chaotic minutes after the towers were struck. He studied shadows cast by buildings to determine exactly what time different pictures were taken.
He turned that investigation into a documentary called “32 Frames: A 9/11 Mystery.” It arrived on streaming platforms this month.
He gets one question a lot. So does his friend Mr. Boston. So do all the Sept. 11 completists.
Why?
“I turned 13 three days before 9/11,” Mr. Walczak said. “It was a coming-of-age moment for me.” The event shook him. And to find community and purpose in revisiting that time after so long — to realize he wasn’t alone in wanting to learn more — is something like a nice surprise.
“These people really deeply care,” he said. “It’s a community of young people who were impacted as kids by 9/11, who the torch has been passed to.”
The attacks immediately sent him back to the day in 2000, visiting the towers with his grandparents as an 11-year-old. I was just there, he thought with wonder on Sept. 11, elevating that day to a core memory. In the same way, Mr. Boston in Nebraska recalls sitting helplessly on his porch, hoping his father was somewhere safe, when the president flew over his house.
Twenty-five years on, they keep coming back to those moments, to that day. Still looking for pieces of a puzzle that the world handed them when they were boys.
The post He’s Seen Images of 9/11 From Just About Every Angle. Except This One. appeared first on New York Times.
