Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tourist snaps Trade Center photos
FORT SMITH — A Sebastian County woman in New York on vacation was photographing the city’s famous skyline when she saw the first airplane fly into the World Trade Center on Tuesday.
Carmen Taylor of Lavaca was on the ferry bound for Staten Island when the disaster occurred.
“She was shooting the skyline and saw the plane come in and kept shooting,” her husband, Lynn Taylor, a Pocola, Okla., businessman said.
Taylor said his wife, an internal auditor for Beverly Enterprises, spoke with him briefly by cell phone this morning and told him she was uninjured.
Carmen Taylor’s sister, Jody Weiche of Fort Smith, said her sister was staying at a Holiday Inn hotel next to the World Trade Center with another Beverly employee who was in New York for a seminar.
After the Trade Center was hit, she began photographing the scene then realized she had photos of the Trade Center just before and just after impact.
She called the ABC affiliate in Fort Smith, KHBS-KHOG Channel 40-29, and offered to download her photographs to the station.
“It was very exciting,” assistant news director Mike Courington said. “We were thrilled she was willing to send us these pictures.”
Courington said she transmitted the photographs to Fort Smith using someone’s computer in New York.
He said the photographs have been broadcast locally but officials at the station were trying to get her permission Tuesday morning to pass them on to the network.