NEW YORK -- When disaster struck downtown eight months ago, a pair of tourists from Seattle had a breathtakingly close view from a hotel window. The couple was directly facing the World Trade Center, and on Sept. 11, they unwrapped a new video camera and started recording.
They've never provided the tape or told the full story. Until now.
The videotape is evidence in the case against the so-called 20th hijacker. To get it, Justice Department officials met secretly in New York Wednesday with one of the tourists.
But first, the visiting couple gave a copy to Newschannel 4. Some of what you'll see and hear is graphic and may be upsetting. All of the Sept. 11 pictures were taken from that hotel window.
To Tami Michaels, who used to live in California, it first felt like an earthquake. About 100 yards separated the twin towers from her 35th floor hotel room across the street.
"I just couldn't, I couldn't get my brain to wrap around the fact that either something had hit the trade center or it had actually exploded. It was really incomprehensible," Michaels said.
"For me it was just this huge explosion and our building shook from it and I thought ''93 World Trade Center, there's been another bomb,'" Michaels' husband Guy Rosbrook said.
Rosbrook is a top executive of an Internet company and Michaels is a Seattle radio talk show host and interior designer. When the first plane hit Sept. 11, Rosbrook got out an unused new digital camera to record what they described as the worst day of their lives.
The tape, which lasts 28 minutes, was turned over by Michaels to federal prosecutors and the FBI Wednesday in a secret meeting at a midtown hotel. While she told NewsChannel 4 about the rendezvous, she declined to comment on what was discussed, as did the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office.
What's known is that federal agents had previously told the couple that the government wanted the tape to use it at the trial of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. Moussaoui was in custody Sept. 11, arrested after a flight instructor in Minneapolis became suspicious because the Moroccan native was not interested in learning about takeoffs or landings.
At 9:03 a.m. when a second jumbo jet approached the south tower, Rosbrook was taking pictures of the one already on fire. Suddenly both towers were blazing.
"We could see that the south tower, the fire was just raging and there was this gaping hole directly across the street. We could see the building was leaning in our direction," Rosbrook said.
Then the couple began to debate whether it was safer to stay or get out of the hotel. They began to see people jumping from the doomed buildings. It was so close the camera could see the victims' outfits.
It's precisely the reaction and the pictures, which have never been shown on television, that former federal prosecutor Dan Richman said the government will want the Moussaoui jury to see.
"This tape brings home in a way that other tapes don't, how awful this really was," Richman said.
The video would be particularly valuable if Moussaoui is convicted of plotting the attacks, Richman said, in convincing jurors to vote for the death penalty. He said prosecutors would call the couple or other witnesses to testify that the video accurately showed what happened.
"What you see in the tape is that these people suffered. And I believe that anyone that caused this needs to be held legally, and morally responsible," Michaels said.
Why didn't the couple from Seattle get out with other hotel guests?
"I'm thinking it's going to be dangerous, there's a real risk that the tower could collapse and we're on the street, that there's a real risk that we could die. And there's a risk of another terrorist attack. So I'm thinking it's safer in the hotel," Rosbrook said.
But then the twin towers came down. A falling flaming beam actually set the couple's hotel on fire. As a smoky haze clouded their windows and viewfinder, they finally fled.
The couple said they're going public because people back home in Seattle don't realize the lingering impact of Sept. 11. They said when they bring up their continuing nightmares, friends have recently told them to "just get over it."
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