Videotape is blessing and curse

People stood on the ledge. Some were clustered together holding hands, while others rushed past, on fire. Tami Michaels could only watch.

"They were standing, bracing," Michaels tells me. "Then they would let go."

When people jump from buildings, they don't land in those romantic poses you see in the movies, she says. Arms stretched, head turned, eyes closed.

People just ... disintegrate.

Michaels' words start and stall, like an engine that doesn't run the way it used to: "Our vantage point was such ... and the streets down below ... it was just ... "

It's been two weeks, but at moments Michaels is back in her 35th-floor suite of the Millennium Hilton, across the street from the World Trade Center, watching the world go mad. Her husband captured it on their video camera.

She couldn't have done it; her hands were shaking too much. They still are. And she can still hear the screams, alarms and a furious wind.

"The sounds are one of my biggest problems," says Michaels, 40, a Seattle interior designer.

The sounds — and the people who want to see what she saw.

She and her husband made the video in case something happened to them: "I thought we might not make it ... but maybe the tape would."

Now the tape has taken on a life of its own.

Michaels, who hosts "The Home Front" radio show on KOMO-AM, mentioned the tape when she called the station from New York with an eyewitness account. Now people call her at home, on her cell phone, at work, asking to buy a copy, offering up to $10,000.

For Michaels, the tape is both blessing and curse.

She recognizes its historic value as a chronicle of the worst terrorist attack and the biggest single-day loss of human life on American soil.

It is hard to watch, but so is footage of the Hindenburg explosion and the Kennedy assassination. Time proved them worth saving.

So Michaels wants to preserve this witness to history. She kept the original, and gave copies to the FBI and ABC News in New York.

Beyond that, she won't give it up — and called on me to spread the word.

Michaels believes that if she released the tape, it could end up anywhere: The Internet. The tabloids. The morbid fascination makes her shudder.

I suspect people have seen footage from the attacks so many times that they are numb to its impact. They need more — graphic images of people dying and dead — to make it real.

Others, I fear, may want to profit from it or get off on it.

I hope most who want to see it have a purer motive. Maybe they want to be reminded how profoundly they were spared; to see for themselves what the other side is like so they can stay on this side and feel more of something, whether it's the wiggly weight of a child in their arms or the lightness of day.

But Michaels speaks for those who no longer can, who leaped past her window but stay with her, day and night.

"I feel protective of those people who died in front of me," she said. "I don't need to see any more. I don't think any of us do."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach her at 206-464-2334; or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. She used to love big hotels.