[click on "Listen" to hear the audio report]
Tami Michaels shared her horror with the entire KOMO News audience as the terror attacks on New York City were happening live on September 11, 2001.
KOMO's Tami Michaels, and her husband, Guy Rosbrook, were in their room on the 35th floor at the Millennium Hilton Hotel in downtown Manhattan. Across a two-lane street was the World Trade Center.
Concerned there might be a secondary attack on the street below, Michaels and Rosbrook elected to stay in their room. While Michaels phoned in reports to listeners of KOMO Radio, Rosbrook unpacked their brand-new video camera and started shooting video.
The video has never been played on broadcast television, due to the intensely graphic images of people leaping to their deaths.
Michaels says she has received many offers from filmmakers and television producers to buy the tape. She says she never will. Michaels is sending the original copy to the 9/11 Memorial in New York, and not keeping a copy for herself.
She agreed to let KOMO Newsradio's Charlie Harger make a copy of the audio portion of the tape, provided it was used in a documentary about the attacks. Until the documentary was released, the public had never heard the audio from the tape.
The video was played for the jury in the trial of the so-called "20th hijacker," Zacharias Moussaoui. The judge suppressed the audio portion of the tape, calling it "too inflammatory" for the jurors to hear. Jurors only got to see the video portion, with Michaels describing what was happening from the witness stand.
Michaels cried. The jurors cried.
Moussaoui sat stone-faced, glaring at Michaels.
He later called the crying by the jurors and Michaels "pathetic."
Upon leaving the witness stand, Michaels says she stopped in front of Moussaoui and stared directly at him.
"I looked him right in the eyes," she says. She thought to herself, "I'm going back to my wonderful life. And you are going to a place with no windows and no doors."
Moussaoui later avoided the death penalty and received life in prison.
Editor's Note: After initial confusion, Tami Michaels and Guy Rosbrook make it clear about the fate of the original video tape.
They have turned the tape over to the U.S. Department of Justice to be used in the prosecution of alleged conspirators of the 9/11 attack. Thereafter, the original tape will be donated to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero so that future generations may view what transpired that terrible day.
They have never intended to destroy the original tape.
In this week's "Beyond The Headlines," you can listen to KOMO Newsradio's documentary featuring previously unreleased audio of the 9-11 terror attacks.
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