Only seconds

I've seen this photo -- Fire on Marlborough Street -- many times over the years, most recently on the cover of my husband's News Photographer magazine.

The magazine, in chronicling the most memorable photographs, included two other pictures taken just before the woman and child fell.

The photographer's first shot shows a fireman standing with the frightened pair. Just a click later, the fireman now dangles from a ladder as the structure collapses beneath him and the victims he was trying to save.

And then there's the above photo, which won a Pulitzer in 1975.

It's heartbreaking — how only a few seconds determined whether this woman, only 19, would live or die. According to News Photographer, the little girl lived because she landed on the woman, who was her aunt.

A few more seconds, and the firefighter would have had them on the ladder, on their way to safety.

As a reporter, I usually arrive after tragedy strikes. I'm the one knocking on the door and asking to talk to the mother of a little girl who was killed by a drunk driver — only seconds after she stepped off the school bus.

Only seconds.

The little girl's brother was right behind her. He felt the whoosh of the SUV as it whizzed by him. He watched his sister's schoolwork flutter to the ground. He remained frozen, in the middle of a rural two-lane highway, trying to figure out whether to run to his dying sister or up to the house for his mother.

Can you imagine having to make that sort of call? He was only 15.

My husband has been a news photographer since the early 80s. He's taken thousands of "after" photos. He's also been there as tragedy unfolds. The camera offers a little distance. But my husband often dwells on what he saw seconds before he started shooting.

Or seconds after.

When we drive through town, he remembers where wrecks occurred, where bodies were found, where grieving family members threw themselves on the pavement and cried.

I cannot imagine, not even from my own jaded perspective.

Before we started dating, I remember Hubs walking back into the newsroom, visibly shaken, having just photographed a crime scene that involved a father who had slammed his toddler, head-first, against the asphalt. Repeatedly.

This is the photo Hubs shot.



A few years later, I saw my husband cry for the first time when we returned to New York for the first anniversary of 9/11.

Tears streamed down his cheeks as he took this picture.



I can search our photo archives here at work and there are hundreds Hubs has taken of fires and their victims.

Like this one.



That time, seconds worked in the firefighters' favor.

I often wonder when Hubs will decide he's done, if he will ever put down the camera, or maybe use it in another field.

But then I see pictures like these. And I so hope he doesn't.