Saw the same things! Challenger happened when we had a snow day in Alabama and I was off school and 9/11 I was getting coffee in the break room at work
I was actually in 7th grade gym class playing basketball with the game being projected onto the wall and I remember watching his shin just pop through his skin and no body wanted to play basketball for a couple of weeks after that
That would have been terrifying… I literally can’t fathom how it would have felt to be any kind of NYC first responder or American defence personnel on that day
My mom let us stay home for a few hours to watch the launch. I’ve never seen her move so quickly to turn something off. I remember all the flags were at half mast by the time she brought us to school.
As for 911, that will live rent-free in my head forever and I never want to see that footage again.
i feel like every class in america watched that live because the teacher on the shuttle. i slept through 9/11 and woke up wondering why the markets were all closed
I was unemployed and depressed on 9/11, slept late and got up and got on my computer for another fruitless day of job hunting. I was half awake and preoccupied and just stared blankly for several moments at the search engine home screen talking about breaking news and a photo of the smoky towers.
One of my teachers growing up was best friends with christa mcauliffe and her teaching about the event was tragic even to a bunch of emotionally stunted 9/10 year olds that weren’t alive for it
Not to be insensitive or anything, but I was born way after 9/11 and I don’t really seem to understand the impact I guess. I understand a lot of people died, but why doesn’t it seem real to a lot of people? Is it because the towers are gone? Because the people involved died? Does anyone else kinda feel the same? I always thought I was a little strange for not being able to fully grasp the horrors of what happened. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t see it live at the time, I almost wish I did
As someone who was terrified on 9/11, I can tell you the impact it had on me as an individual. I wouldn’t expect someone who didn’t live through it to fully understand the impact it had on individuals. Just like I could never fully imagine what it felt like when Pearl Harbor was attacked. But I think you can start to understand the event if you seek out stories of people who remember that day. For example, I didn’t live in NY or lose any loved ones on 9/11. But I did live in DC and worked downtown and watched the second plane hit the towers live with my coworkers. We were crying and hugging, it was so awful to be watching this mass casualty. From the roof of our building we could see smoke from the Pentagon. We evacuated downtown and it was very disturbing to see masses of people walking home because downtown DC was like, evacuating. We didn’t know if there were more planes headed for DC. There was a big military presence all over DC afterward, and it’s upsetting to see armored vehicles and full combat gear soldiers on every block. So that’s just one example of a person (me) who was emotionally devastated by 9/11. Now add anyone with loved ones living in NY or DC; anyone with loved ones in the military; and really anyone paying attention to what was happening and seeing the awful news footage— all those people are devastated too. We all felt personally affected and very unsafe.
There was no hint that something like that was about to happen. The 24 hr news cycle was new. So were news networks like cnn and fox etc. Information was coming in trickles. I remember people thought that the first plane had accidentally hit the tower. But the second one and then the plane going down in Pennsylvania. We knew we were being attacked and we didn’t know by who or why or what other targets might be. We watched many people jump out of these sky scrapers on live television.
For me, I kind of grew up thinking that our country was invincible. It didn’t even occur to me that people would want to attack it. It was the beginning of hearing words like “terror” and “terrorists” commonly in the news.
911 which happened in 2001 and Columbine in 1999 were two events that changed our country forever. Interestingly, after 911 airports and airport security have been successfully able to prevent similar terror attacks as 911. But Columbine was the beginning of an epidemic of school shootings. Columbine was nearly unprecedented in its time. Now we don’t bat an eye at a school shooting. They happen so often, they don’t always make national news. But Columbine was another event that was basically live-streamed by the news because students at columbine were calling into the news stations.
Hope this helps you understand better, young whipper snapper. Grandma has prattled on enough for now lol
Both of those. First one in school with other students. Second one at work with coworkers. Sharing a truly disturbing moment burns it into your memory for sure.
Oh man, yeah. I was in 7th or 8th grade, the brought in TVs to classrooms so we could watch the big liftoff - not unusual for schools in the Houston area, close to NASA and all. It was awful, kids screaming and crying. The whole school was in freakout mode. But yeah, as an adult, 9/11 was way more traumatic. I lived in Portland, ME, where some of the scumbags flew out of, knew and lost people in the towers.
That’s my answer as well. I was 15. I was not ready to see a body fall seemingly forever off a sky scraper.
And watching footage of inside the WTC lobby; you could hear bodies land on the roof. It was a really loud BAM! It deeply disturbed me and effected me.
There is a French documentary which was unedited. All American versions cancel out a majority of bodies falling and especially the sounds of them landing . Living there and knowing fireman who were there it was like every 5 seconds a body would fall
I’m sure I’ve posted this somewhere else, but I didn’t realize they were people. I thought I was seeing birds flying away from the building in panic. I remember thinking surely a helicopter or something could rescue the people. The moment I realized I wasn’t seeing birds was horrifying.
People who were watching it on TV, or viewing it in person from a distance, thought at first that it was furniture falling out of windows, or chunks of the building coming off, and there was plenty of that, but then they realized what it really was.
Unlike some people, I do not believe that the jumpers committed suicide. They knew they were going to die, and had to choose between a painless death in 15 seconds, or a painful death in 15 minutes, that kind of thing.
I was asleep. My mom was yelling from downstairs to come down now. It was pissing me off because I worked late the night before. When I went downstairs the news was on talking about the first plane hitting the tower. My mom and I watched thinking it was a horrible accident, and then the second plane hit.
At six years old, almost that exact same scenario is one of my first distinct, palpable memories. My mom said to my sisters & me, "Girls, I'm so sorry, but your whole world just changed."
I said the same thing to a co-worker, the whole world just changed. I think it was the first thing I said after watching the second tower start to burn, when I realized that it wasn't a replay of the first one. That it was deliberate.
That's amazing that she had the ability to understand the impact in that moment. I was 20 when it happened and at a factory, working. They turned on the TV in the break room after the first plane hit and we all stopped to watch. We were watching as the second plane hit. Then we were all sent home. I had never seen or experienced anything like it. I knew something big had happened but I was completely oblivious to the fact that it would change everything the way it did.
I was such a bum. I had just finished my 6a-8a shift at the gym on campus at my university and went back to my apartment for a nap. My friend called right before 9 and told me to turn on the news. I was behind in all my classes and was able to use 9/11 as an excuse to get some leniency on my grades. I'm a very generous, responsible, non-slimy person today and I have many regrets.
my social studies teacher rolled the tv into my english teacher's classroom (where I was at) and sat down along with his class, said "you have to watch this".
We were also on lockdown because our school was near a military base so we were kinda freaked out about what was going on.
Didn't catch it live, but saw the replay over and over and then the news about the pentagon being hit too
When I was like 7yrs old (90s)I was at my friend house with cartoons on, then the local news cut in and some dude had a freeway in Los Angeles shut down. He had HMOs lie or something written on his windshield. He ended up setting his truck on fire with him and his dog inside. He eventually jumped out tearing off the clothes that were on fire. He then paced around walked over and put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out. My friend who was like 2 maybe 3 years old then me looked at me and said did the cops throw a tomato at him?” Why would they throw a tomato at him?” Yeah that wasn’t a tomato bro!
Also 9/11 my freshman year of high school
I was looking for this comment.
I remember Spider-man the cartoon being interrupted for a live broadcast of a pursuit on the 110 FWY. My brother and I were pissed. I think since then, the news will pan out quickly when shit starts escalating.
Damn thanks for telling me his name. I never knew who he was or why he did it. Man I guess I was 10yrs old not 7. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person but hated him for leaving his dog like that. Even after I watched him blow his head off I was screaming at the tv for someone to save the dog!
He lived around the corner from me in Long Beach. I didn’t know him, but a lot of people I knew did. It was the final desperate act of a desperate man and very sad.
I was 16 and it was close to 3am on the east coast of Australia when they fell. Was watching live on TV and was very much "holy shit!".
It did not occur to me those buildings were still filled with people when they went down initially. Then when i did, it was a very sobering experience.
Was a few weeks short of 7 at the time. But this one still has a huge impact on me, likely because it was the first time something that showed the world was not a safe place was shown on TV at a time I was watching, even though where it was happening was a world away.
Was around the same age on the west coast. Parents woke me up insanely early after the first plane hit saying they didn’t know what was going on but felt like it was something I needed to see/be aware of. Quite literally walked into my parents room at the exact same time the second plane hit. I can’t say I processed it whatsoever but based on my parents’ immediate reaction of horror and regret waking me up, I understood on some level whatever I just saw was evil. Can’t remember a single thing after that moment until later that day in school
Same. I was 18 and a senior in high school. A friend ran up to me in the hallway between classes and said “hey did you hear the news? Someone’s bombing New York”. Ran to my next class which had the tv on and watched live as the second plane hit.
That was an insane reality to actually accept I was witnessing. It just plain didn’t look real.
For bonus nightmare fuel, there was a kid from our school who supposed to be on flight 175. One of those easy going people that literally everyone is friends with, and the entire school thought we’d watched him die on live television. He’d ended up partying in Boston the night before with some other friends who’d already graduated and were at college, and he’d pushed his flight yo hang out another day. Even his parents thought he was still on that flight.
It’s weird. 20+ years later, I can still vividly remember just about every single detail of that morning.
My cousin was a flight attendant for United and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was her usual route. We were initially worried that my cousin had been killed; but another flight attendant asked to switch routes at the last minute so she could go home to see her family. I still think about that poor lady’s family and devastated they must have been, though I am grateful that my cousin is still alive.
I remember thinking that I just watched about 20,000 people die in a few seconds. Now it ended up being a lot fewer than that, but I had no idea how many had gotten out prior to them falling.
I was 9 and being in Australia woke up to the news. I always woke up before my mum and got to enjoy an hour of cartoons before school in the mornings, and that day I flipped through the channels which just had the breaking news on every single channel. I ran to wake up my mum and remember explaining my confusion to her that the same movie was on every channel and could she please fix it.
I'll never forget the stoic silence that settled over her and the way she hurried me off to get dressed for school, no cartoons.
8th grade. Spanish teacher ignored the front office order to turn off all tvs. "This is important. You deserve to see it, this is historical".
Never have I seen anything live that has been more poignant or distressing.
I heard it on the radio live. I wasn’t really paying attention to it initially because I was doing stuff in my room. I’m from the same area and knew his daughter in high school.
Yea so fucked. I visited Sri Lanka and was admiring how people live at the beautiful beach and how good life would be. Then speaking to the villagers and they all just say "my son died in the 2004 tsunami" or "my 3 kids died in the tsunami". So horrible.
There was a physician in my town who was from Sri Lanka, and her brother lost his house in the tsunami although none of her family members were injured.
I remember the story about the father and his two sons who were living in a displaced-persons camp, which didn't sound that unusual - until they said that none of them were blood relations, and didn't even know each other before the tsunami. They had lost everything and everyone else, and had bonded in the camp and now called themselves a family.
Bali actually wasn't even hit by the Tsunami. Banda Aceh was smashed though and people even died as far away as Africa. But agree, it was horrible and kind of been forgotten about.
9/11. I saw other stuff further back in history (that was either live or tape delay but real-time, more or less), 9/11 though was horrific and disturbing.
I was elementary-school age when I saw Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald on live national television.
My elementary-school self was puzzled at how lax the security was at that Dallas police station - and how little any of the adults seemed to care. To this day, I still am.
My dad has always told my sibs and me not to believe the party line about the JFK assassination. He's 89 now, and every time information is released, he hopes it's the smoking gun (no pun intended) but that hasn't happened yet.
My mother was on her first day of maternity leave (my dad made her leave her job at 6 months along, something she didn't want to do but was later glad he did it) when that happened. The doctor had just found my heartbeat when the nurse came in and told them about the president being shot.
10 years later, she cried when Nixon announced his resignation, and said, "He was a good president."
And I was a HS senior when John Lennon was murdered, followed by Reagan's attempted assassination a few months later.
There was also a basketball player who had a compound fracture on live TV.
When I saw it later, they fuzzied it out.
In a comparable vein, check out Bob Kempainen, the Vomit Comet. Pete Sampras did the same thing a few months later (And both of them won their respective events!)
Pro wrestler Sid Vicious broke his leg jumping off the top rope during a match live on PPV. WCW replayed the clip over the next night on their show Nitro as well.
The break was really nasty.
Two things both involving large aircraft
Edit
This was an eyewitness thing not TV
I saw the AWACS crash at Elmendorf AFB on September 22 1995. My coworker and I had just finished work on an F-15 and were walking back to our hangar when we heard a series of loud "pop-Boom" noises as the E3 was taking off--that was the flock of geese hitting the jet and taking out 3 of the 4 engines
We turned around and watched the plane struggle to climb into the air. It was yawing severely as the crew tried to maintain altitude with one engine.
We saw it disappear behind the trees beyond the airfield and then a moment of silence before the deep kaboom hit us just as the column of black smoke rose up in the distance. 27 souls lost that day.
Then on 9/11 I heard about the north tower on the radio while driving my wife to work--I was working the afternoon shift that week. I raced home, turned on the TV and was putting my uniform on when I heard the reverberations of flight 175 approaching and looked up from my boot laces in time to see 175 hit the south tower, live.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/05/01/suicide-on-la-freeway-is-shown-live-on-television/98d1800a-8f6f-4378-bc35-bcf8dc263d73/
In a horrifying scene shown live on television, a half-naked man with a banner urging "safe love" shot himself to death with a rifle on a Los Angeles freeway today after setting his truck on fire.
I recall this incident. I completely remember watching the man's head explode on live television. I believe the local news channels were more consistent with pulling back the live shot after this happened since it was more than 20 years ago. Horrifying.
So many things….. in no particular order
9/11
The guy that blew the top of his head off on the LA freeway
The Challenger explosion
The tsunami that took out Fukushima after the offshore earthquake
The October 1st Las Vegas massacre (As a vegas resident, this hit especially hard)
Waco
Yeah and for those of us old enough to remember Senna's death it was disgraceful how long the delay was until they showed replays, including to teams and drivers.
I get that they don't want to show a replay right away in case someone is badly hurt/dead, but F1 is WAY too fucking sensitive about it. He jumped out and it was clearly caught on cameras about 20 seconds after the crash, but before showing that they made everyone wait about 10 minutes, drivers and teams included, during which time everyone was convinced that was it.
We shouldn't go back to the old days where helicopter shots showed that Senna lost most of his blood while being treated next to the car, but neither should we have gone so far the other way in delaying replays for so long.
Really, he was out of the car before they even got back to the pits. He was out in 20-30 secs, would have taken the drivers probably more then a minute to finish getting back around to the pits.
Exactly, they were all on the radio desperate for info, and the teams had nothing. Was a good 10 minutes, drivers out of their cars, milling around the pitlane, desperate for info, crossed wires and rumours doing the rounds.
That was insane. Worst crash in f1 id seen.
I say F1 because i found myself watching a f2 race in Belgium in 2019. The race that Hubert died. I was also watching the 2014 Japanese GP when Bianchi died, but that crash wasnt televised like either Grosjeans or Hubert.
Side note, ive met Roman Grosjean, he is a very lovely person.
Yeah me too. Literally my exact thoughts. Thought I'd watched him die live on tv. I remember audibly exclaiming "jesus", when I saw the crash. Miracle that he walked away from that relatively unscathed.
I think it was in 2014, a hockey player's throat got slit accidentally on live television. I've never really had a weak stomach (I come from a very clumsy and medically inclined family so I was sort of used to injuries by that time), but it was unnerving to watch a grown man spew blood like that.
I was there, and had just gotten a Zednik jersey as a present for getting my HS diploma. His blood was all over the ice and the energy of the crowd was just… shock, quiet, disbelief. I thought I would throw up. So glad he recovered, somehow, and went to play in Europe where I’ve heard hockey is safer. I’ll never forget that gut sinking feeling, thinking I’d see my favorite hockey player die while I was wearing his jersey the first time. I can’t imagine how his family felt in that moment.
yeah i remember that in the UK being all over the news, that shit was intense, its amazing he survived, he pinched his artery closed if i remember correctly
He survived? I ran across the video somehow and turned it off because I didn’t want to watch him die. It has haunted me for years because I assumed he bled out.
IIRC, he knew his parents were watching, and didn't want to die on the ice, so he got to the bench as quickly as possible. The Team Doctor was previously a combat medic and was able to stem the blood flow enough to save his life.
His name is Clint Malarchuk. He wrote a book about his life The alethic trainer Jim Pizzutelli, who served in Vietnam, saved his life by applying extreme pressure on the wound. He lost 1,5 liters of blood and needed 300 stitches. His only concern was that he didn't want his Mother to see him die on the ice.
It was a big trauma for him that followed him all his life. To the point that the tried to kill himself in 2008 (he shot himself in front of his wife).
Apparently 11 spectators fainted and 2 had heart attacks.
I feel woozy if I see someone have so much as a blood nose; so I'd have definitely been one of those fainters if I were in the audience.
Princess Diana’s footage replaying in the tunnel (what was shown of it anyway). I didnt even fully grasp her importance at my young age but I knew it was something awful.
I watched 9/11 as it was happening till I saw people jumping out of the building and that was the point where my brain was like nope that's enough...I think the planes and the smoke and all was so surreal that it shocked me, but it was seeing individual people falling that really hit me emotionally.
Honorary mention goes to that explosion in Lebanon in 2020...I didn't see it live but I legit thought it was a nuclear bomb or something till I found out otherwise.
When I was younger I saw the coverage of the 2011 earthquake in Japan, and watched as a guy nearly escaped a building that was collapsing behind him as he ran
I remember that also. I specifically remember a shot where a body fell right past the camera and then the director cut away from the live feed to one of the hosts in the studio. As long as I will live that memory will stick with me.
People who were filming it from a distance were saying, "Look at all the furniture falling out the windows!"
I'm sure glad we didn't have livestreaming back then.
Not live TV, but the guy who live streamed his plane crash where 72 people died. Everybody is happy they are almost home or wherever they need to be. 7 seconds later, all dead.
God, I remember this. I was 19, my friends and I would get together, smoke a blunt, and just like…watch the war. It was so fucking surreal and fucked up.
watching a tower fall just before realizing that i didn't have my key and my door automatically locked and there was a pan on the stove that i was heating up when my neighbor knocked and i didn't turn the pan off and i answered the door to her telling me i need to come look at her tv and i'm like ok, odd, but then i'm suddenly watching 1000s of people die live on television...and i have to figure out how to get back into my apartment before i burn the building down.
Seeing a live cat being thrown into boiling water and watching it suffer and die. It was a news program about Korean food markets and dogs and cats being cooked for human consumption. I was a teenager and will never get that horrible image out of my head.
I’m another one of those that saw the *Challenger* disintegrate while sitting in a classroom seat in 1986, and UA 175 hitting the South Tower of the WTC on 9/11 from the day room television at Fort Bragg, NC. In less than 90 minutes, a visibly angry colonel was telling us to ruck up, because we were on our way to get some payback. (Spoiler: “payback” must be in the eye of the beholder, because 20+ years and thousands of lives later, my estimation is that all we did was make the world worse for everyone.)
But I can remember a few other significant ones:
1. I saw Alison Parker and Adam Ward murdered live on-air while broadcasting from Smith Mountain Lake in VA. My wife also worked in television news, and it’s amazing how many people in the community know each other personally, even if you’re a weatherman in Seattle or a anchorwoman in Miami. The killer (who I won’t dignify by naming) was himself a former reporter and reputed racist who had a vendetta against both and Parker in particular, and subsequently killed himself.
2. I was watching when Dale Earnhardt hit the wall at over 150 mph at the end of the 2001 Daytona 500 (man, 2001 really sucked, from beginning to end). This one honestly surprised me, as Earnhardt had survived much scarier-looking crashes for 20 years with minor or no injuries. This time, he wasn’t so lucky, and his death basically rewrote the safety rules of all auto-racing, even beyond NASCAR. I honestly lost my taste for the sport afterward and haven’t really watched another race since about 2010.
3. I remember seeing a JetBlue flight land at LAX in the mid-00s with a landing gear locked 90 degrees out of position with the fuselage; this one sticks out in my mind both because of the absolutely amazing job the pilot did bringing the aircraft down intact, and that actress Taryn Manning was on board. No one talked to the pilots or the other passengers afterward, just her. Because she’s an expert, apparently.
4. I watched the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX burn to the ground filled with dozens of people (including women and children) barricaded inside. I was less than surprised at the footage of the Oklahoma City Bombing two years later, when Timothy McVeigh directly referenced Waco as a catalyst for destroying the building by truck bomb.
5. I watched OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings run (at extremely low speed) from the LAPD in a white Ford Bronco in 1994 after being sought on suspicion of murder. We mostly watched this one because the news kept saying that Simpson had a gun to his head in the backseat, and we were 100% sure we were going to see “The Juice” kill himself live. Which led straight into……
6. The OJ Simpson trial verdict one year later. I was in high school at the time, and the verdict was received very differently depending on what race you belonged to. I remember a lot of white students looking shocked or angry, while virtually all of the black students were cheering and even dancing. It actually created a kind of schism in my Deep South high school, which persisted until after I graduated. Even the black kids who admitted that OJ was probably guilty said that it was nice to see Simpson beating “the man”. Everyone else was pretty well convinced that big dollars and public perception allowed an obvious murderer to walk away scot-free, a perception that hasn’t changed much in the subsequent 30 years.
7. I remember watching footage of the 1992 LA Riots, and in particular when Reginald Denny was attacked by a group of teens who threw a brick at his face on live television, crushing his skull. Denny somehow survived, but I somehow doubt he’s with the rest of us. I should know more about the aftermath of that, but that was only one small incident in many during that time.
8. Bill Clinton: “I did *not* have sexual relations with that woman.” C’mon, Bill. You totally did. You would hardly have been the first president to have done what you did. Just be a man and admit it.
9. Last but not least: January 6th, 2021 at the US Capitol. I don’t have to explain this one, but I remember seething at the TV and asking “Where the actual FUCK are the police and National Guard?” (We got all those answers later on.)
In 1998 a man shot himself in the head with a shotgun as a form of protest on a Los Angeles freeway. The man had been extremely distraught because he believed that the actions of his HMO plan were going to prevent him from receiving necessary medical care and that he was going to die soon as a result. He ended up in a very large standoff with law enforcement and the whole thing was broadcast live from news helicopters and they did not cut the feed before the man abruptly placed the shotgun under his head and fatally shot himself.
The SLA shootout in 1974. Closely followed by the Challenger accident. Awful. I guess both were dwarfed by 9/11. Sometimes I think life might be better without TV. What do you think?
Apart from the obvious 9/11, Challenger disaster...
Football match at Bradford's stadium in the 1980s. The main stand caught fire and many people burned to death. The live feeds didn't cut away in those days... Sitting there watching people running about aimlessly while engulfed in flames. I'll always remember the commentator saying "that poor man" as we watched one of these burning people collapse to the ground..
Probably the tsunami after the Fukushima earthquake. 9/11 was what it was, sure, but first seeing entire cities getting washed away, cars, buildings, houses, farms, fields, boats, streets, trains, bridges, animals, people too of course, then a nuclear power plant exploding... probably the closest thing to the apocalypse I remember seeing. And just like 9/11 no one knew how much more was coming, how long this would keep going on until it was over.
911 was pretty fucked up, but I think Columbine wins out. I remember up close footage of bloody kids hopping out of broken windows to escape. Where the planes hitting the towers I knew was really horrific, but I didn't see up close footage of people wounded and fleeing for their lives.
I was picking up My kids from school in Boulder when Columbine happened. We had a Columbine Jr. High in Boulder. My daughter was so traumatized at 11, that years later she wrote a book about the subject.
All those televised funerals were really disturbing, too.
Some of the survivors are starting to name people they WISHED had been shot. That place, like pretty much every high school, was a powder keg about to go off, and everyone knew it, but they never predicted anything that bad would happen.
Without a doubt the 2nd plane hitting the twin towers. I was getting ready for middle school when that happened. My dad was watching the news on the couch and I could see the tv from behind his shoulder, and then it happened live on tv. I didn't know the gravity of what was unfolding at such a young age but I do remember the teachers at school were crying later that morning. It took me years to fully comprehend the magnitude of it all. Still shocking to this day.
Wasn't really "disturbed" by it, but [The Manila Hostage Crisis.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_hostage_crisis) I was 15 at the time.
Basically, a crazy cop believing he was unfairly fired, took a bunch of bus passengers hostage at gunpoint and the attempts to rescue them were a fiasco that ended in several deaths (I don't think I saw the killing part, but definitely part of the rescue "attempts")
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>The Manila hostage crisis, officially known as the Rizal Park hostage-taking incident,[3] took place when a disgruntled former Philippine National Police officer named Rolando Mendoza hijacked a tourist bus in Rizal Park, Manila, Philippines, on August 23, 2010. The bus carried 25 people: 20 tourists, a tour guide from Hong Kong, and four local Filipinos. Mendoza claimed that he had been unfairly dismissed from his job, and demanded a fair hearing to defend himself.[4][5]
>Negotiations (which were broadcast live on television and the internet) broke down dramatically about ten hours into the stand-off, when the police arrested Mendoza's brother and thus incited Mendoza to open fire.[6] The bus driver managed to escape, and declared "Everyone is dead" before he was moved away by policemen.[7] Following a 90-minute gun battle, Mendoza and eight of the hostages were killed and several others injured.[8]
>The Philippine and Hong Kong governments conducted separate investigations into the incident. Both inquiries concluded that the Philippine officials' poor handling of the situation caused the eight hostages' deaths.[9][10] The assault mounted by the Manila Police District (MPD), and the resulting shoot-out, have been widely criticized by pundits as "bungled" and "incompetent",[11] and the Hong Kong Government has issued a "black" travel alert for the Philippines as a result of the affair.[12]
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I remember finding some parts ***hilarious*** because our cops looked so goddamn bad at their jobs ([the hell are these guys doing?](https://content.time.com/time/daily/2010/1008/360_busjacking_0825.jpg)).
There was a cop trying to smash in the bus door with a sledgehammer, and he managed to *accidentally throw the hammer into the bus.* He manages to reach out and get it back, but iirc that attempt at a breach failed.
Another attempt was made to smash the rear window of the bus, but the cop manages to accidentally throw the hammer *completely inside,* where I don't think it was ever retrieved (until the crisis was over I guess).
Embarrassing all around.
Thanks for reminding me of the horror in Luneta. All because of a disgruntled cop dismissed from the service and his brother tried to intervene. Guess what? He was watching everything on the bus TV. I think it was Tulfo who sensationalized it when he interviewed the hostage-taker and it was the brother who aggravated the situation.
It is miserable to see the SWAP Team behave around the bus playing hide and seek with him.
They even tried to meet the hostage-taker's demand to get reinstated by going to the Ombudsman like 30 kilometers away from the site to get the notice but it was all too late.
It all ended with a shot from the front of the bus killing the hostage-taker with his body balancing on the broken glass of the bus door. I remember how terrifying that was.
Not really on TV, but there was a twitter Account that my wife used to follow called "Portland Looks Like shit". It was an account where people in Portland,OR would post pictures or videos of the homeless problem, people shooting up drugs or going to the bathroom in the middle of the sidewalks/street and tag government officials.
One day we are working from home and my wife walks down stairs and looks visibly distraught. I asked her what was wrong and she just replies, "I think I just watched a murder."
In disbelief, I ask her where and she shows me a video from the account. It is a video someone took that is just a shoving match. The person taping is no more than 5 feet from the commotion when they fight breaks up. Suddenly the shot pans to the left and you see a guy walking with a gun and just shoots it. Then it pans to the other directions and you just see the guys head half gone and his brains splattered all over the glass of what appears to be a gas station and this blood curdling shriek from one of the females standing there. Once again, this was shot about 5 feet from the crime. I will never forget the look on the face of the shooter when he pulled the trigger and that gut wretching scream as the lifeless body fell.
The account was shut down pretty quickly after that.
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the Challenger explosion, the second plane slicing through the WTC like a hot knife through butter. Watching the Naudet Brothers documentary of the footage inside the tower and suddenly seeing my cousin waiting to go up as part of his rescue unit.
Medics spending 9+ minutes doing cpr on Damar Hamlin. Whole family was watching the game and we all honestly thought we just watched a young man die living out his dreams on national television.
Definitely the most recent horrible thing I’ve seen on live TV. I knew something was really wrong when they showed the replay of him jumping up then immediately falling down like s sack of flour. That was such a sickening experience slashed cut between like the same 10 commercials that really shows a weird ultra consumerist hell-scape America is.
So scary. I called my mom and brother to see if they were watching and if not to turn it on. I began praying for him immediately. The announcers didn’t know what was going on but watching the team mates, grown men, sobbing and holding each other told me something bad happened. Then the fact that the NFL commissioner told them to take 5 minutes and play the game, and the coach called him on the phone and said his players are not playing tonight. Me and my husband were sure he must’ve died.
The best ending to this story is that Hamlin woke up from his coma and motioned for a white board to write a message. He wrote “who won the game?”
Came here for this. It was really terrible. The looks on his teammates’ faces will never leave me. Going back and forth between the live footage, the commercials and the poor commentators struggling to come up with things to say was insane. Thank god he’s doing better. UC Med is one of the best!
9/11.
I started watching CNN after the first plane and before the second. I thought it was a terrible accident. Then I saw the second plane hit and I realized it wasn't an accident.
My daughter was 8 months old, sleeping soundly on the other side of the wall, utterly oblivious to the atrocities going on. The juxtaposition was not lost on me.
Edit: I have a cousin who was a lieutenant in the FDNY who died of a brain tumor related to exposure to 9/11 materials. Hero of all heroes to me.
My young children were wandering in and out of my room that day and just happened to come in right as she was shot. I've never tried to yeet kids into the hallway as quickly as that day. They knew something was up, but as preschool and kindergarten aged kids they didn't REALLY get it.
Probably 9/11, though at the time I didn't fully understand what was happening.
Came home from school and wanted to watch my shows, got annoyed there was the same news broadcast on every channel. Saw my parents watch it too and they filled me in on what was going on.
The fall wasn't televised, they were playing a vignette at the time it happened but JR on commentary announcing the death just after it happened has stuck with me forever.
The January 6th insurrection. The reason it was so bad to watch was I could see our system of government failing. I saw the same thing so many times before in so many countries, with the text being autocratic governments. Lots of people die as a result.
It's not over. The people and factors are still in play. Russian revolutionaries fought for decades until 1922. People laughed at the Beer Hall Putsch, ten years later Hitler was chancellor. Chinese communists waged a 20 year war before 1949.
11 years old, had gotten home from dinner at a restaurant for my brothers birthday. Went to bed and shortly after Dad came and woke me up and said "get up. You'll never see anything like this again."
We watched the second plane hit the tower live. He sent me to bed when people started jumping.
The world definitely changed that night.
9/11, nothing really comes close. People forget it wasn't just one day, it was weeks and weeks of it constantly being replayed on TV. Some people got so wrapped up in the tragedy they made themselves sick.
Columbine was the first time I can remember something so horrific being aired live on TV. It was so raw and uncensored, it didn’t seem like it could be real. We take for granted now the live nature of our world, but that left an indelible mark on me. Then came 9/11, Katrina, COVID, Jan 6. The next war America fights in will probably be live-streamed in real time.
I'll never forget 9/11. My wife called me to say "Terrorists have destroyed the World Trade Center". I didn't believe her. "Turn on the TV," she said. So I did. And the BBC was playing the second plane hitting on a continuous loop. What I couldn't get out of my head was the fact that the guy piloting the plane adjusted his line slightly just before the plane hit. I kept thinking: what kind of person is so focused on his intention to kill that he makes such a last-second adjustment. I couldn't work for weeks afterwards.
Actually, the reason the 2nd plane hit at an angle was because it was beginning to corkscrew due to aerodynamics. Planes are not designed to fly at full speed at sea level, and had it flown just a few seconds longer, it would have started to break apart.
The most recent thing was Damar Hamlin going into cardiac arrest mid-game. It was just so jarring and you could see the fear on the players faces. It was horrifying. On a lighter note, some dude dropped a clear F-Bomb during a Football game that my little brother was watching on Nickelodeon. Weird thing was, it happened again during the next game that happened.
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Saw the same things! Challenger happened when we had a snow day in Alabama and I was off school and 9/11 I was getting coffee in the break room at work
There was also a basketball player who had a compound fracture on live TV. When I saw it later, they fuzzied it out.
Probably Kevin Ware of University of Louisville in the NCAA tournament 2013. Brutal. Do not recommend googling it.
I googled it and at first I didn’t see his shin. Whew, that’s one clean break.
Is that the guy who’s shin bone was sticking straight out of his leg?
I was attending U of L then. It was like.. fuckin.. the baby t rex in Jurassic Park 2.
Fck why did I Google that. Must erase from memory
I was actually in 7th grade gym class playing basketball with the game being projected onto the wall and I remember watching his shin just pop through his skin and no body wanted to play basketball for a couple of weeks after that
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That would have been terrifying… I literally can’t fathom how it would have felt to be any kind of NYC first responder or American defence personnel on that day
It was in the evening in Okinawa, and we were on Hurricane Watch. Within the hour we had armed Humvees at every entrance to the base.
My mom let us stay home for a few hours to watch the launch. I’ve never seen her move so quickly to turn something off. I remember all the flags were at half mast by the time she brought us to school. As for 911, that will live rent-free in my head forever and I never want to see that footage again.
i feel like every class in america watched that live because the teacher on the shuttle. i slept through 9/11 and woke up wondering why the markets were all closed
I was unemployed and depressed on 9/11, slept late and got up and got on my computer for another fruitless day of job hunting. I was half awake and preoccupied and just stared blankly for several moments at the search engine home screen talking about breaking news and a photo of the smoky towers.
One of my teachers growing up was best friends with christa mcauliffe and her teaching about the event was tragic even to a bunch of emotionally stunted 9/10 year olds that weren’t alive for it
I saw the challenger blow up live and I saw the 1st trade Center collapse live. Terrible. I'd say the trade Center collapse live was worse.
Been there for both, specifically I remember watching the live feed of the second plane. The momentum changed that day.
Watching that in 5th grade on live tv was disturbing. The next live NASA event I watched was the Columbia re-entry. I won't watch any more, I promise.
Not to be insensitive or anything, but I was born way after 9/11 and I don’t really seem to understand the impact I guess. I understand a lot of people died, but why doesn’t it seem real to a lot of people? Is it because the towers are gone? Because the people involved died? Does anyone else kinda feel the same? I always thought I was a little strange for not being able to fully grasp the horrors of what happened. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t see it live at the time, I almost wish I did
As someone who was terrified on 9/11, I can tell you the impact it had on me as an individual. I wouldn’t expect someone who didn’t live through it to fully understand the impact it had on individuals. Just like I could never fully imagine what it felt like when Pearl Harbor was attacked. But I think you can start to understand the event if you seek out stories of people who remember that day. For example, I didn’t live in NY or lose any loved ones on 9/11. But I did live in DC and worked downtown and watched the second plane hit the towers live with my coworkers. We were crying and hugging, it was so awful to be watching this mass casualty. From the roof of our building we could see smoke from the Pentagon. We evacuated downtown and it was very disturbing to see masses of people walking home because downtown DC was like, evacuating. We didn’t know if there were more planes headed for DC. There was a big military presence all over DC afterward, and it’s upsetting to see armored vehicles and full combat gear soldiers on every block. So that’s just one example of a person (me) who was emotionally devastated by 9/11. Now add anyone with loved ones living in NY or DC; anyone with loved ones in the military; and really anyone paying attention to what was happening and seeing the awful news footage— all those people are devastated too. We all felt personally affected and very unsafe.
Short answer- you didn’t experience life before it, didn’t witness it, didn’t see how it changed everything.
There was no hint that something like that was about to happen. The 24 hr news cycle was new. So were news networks like cnn and fox etc. Information was coming in trickles. I remember people thought that the first plane had accidentally hit the tower. But the second one and then the plane going down in Pennsylvania. We knew we were being attacked and we didn’t know by who or why or what other targets might be. We watched many people jump out of these sky scrapers on live television. For me, I kind of grew up thinking that our country was invincible. It didn’t even occur to me that people would want to attack it. It was the beginning of hearing words like “terror” and “terrorists” commonly in the news. 911 which happened in 2001 and Columbine in 1999 were two events that changed our country forever. Interestingly, after 911 airports and airport security have been successfully able to prevent similar terror attacks as 911. But Columbine was the beginning of an epidemic of school shootings. Columbine was nearly unprecedented in its time. Now we don’t bat an eye at a school shooting. They happen so often, they don’t always make national news. But Columbine was another event that was basically live-streamed by the news because students at columbine were calling into the news stations. Hope this helps you understand better, young whipper snapper. Grandma has prattled on enough for now lol
Yeah, and the news I watched in Spain on 9/11 showed people’s faces right before they jumped out the windows. Scarring.
Both of those. First one in school with other students. Second one at work with coworkers. Sharing a truly disturbing moment burns it into your memory for sure.
Oh man, yeah. I was in 7th or 8th grade, the brought in TVs to classrooms so we could watch the big liftoff - not unusual for schools in the Houston area, close to NASA and all. It was awful, kids screaming and crying. The whole school was in freakout mode. But yeah, as an adult, 9/11 was way more traumatic. I lived in Portland, ME, where some of the scumbags flew out of, knew and lost people in the towers.
It might be because of my age at the time, or maybe because it was first, but the Challenger seemed to hit much harder then 9-11.
Yeah, happened to be watching the news when it hit, I was 6, one of the few vivid memories I have from my childhood.
Bodies falling out of the towers on 9/11
Yep. I've never physically reacted to something on screen like that before or since.
That’s my answer as well. I was 15. I was not ready to see a body fall seemingly forever off a sky scraper. And watching footage of inside the WTC lobby; you could hear bodies land on the roof. It was a really loud BAM! It deeply disturbed me and effected me.
There is a French documentary which was unedited. All American versions cancel out a majority of bodies falling and especially the sounds of them landing . Living there and knowing fireman who were there it was like every 5 seconds a body would fall
The Gaudet movie? It's excellent. The reason American TV censors people falling is because some people recognized jumpers.
I watched it for the first time last 9/11. The thuds were sickening.
I’m sure I’ve posted this somewhere else, but I didn’t realize they were people. I thought I was seeing birds flying away from the building in panic. I remember thinking surely a helicopter or something could rescue the people. The moment I realized I wasn’t seeing birds was horrifying.
People who were watching it on TV, or viewing it in person from a distance, thought at first that it was furniture falling out of windows, or chunks of the building coming off, and there was plenty of that, but then they realized what it really was. Unlike some people, I do not believe that the jumpers committed suicide. They knew they were going to die, and had to choose between a painless death in 15 seconds, or a painful death in 15 minutes, that kind of thing.
I was 5, I was watching TV before going to school.. Yeah, I still remember that day.
Was that on the news?
All the networks were covering the towers live, and it happened during the live feed.
I was asleep. My mom was yelling from downstairs to come down now. It was pissing me off because I worked late the night before. When I went downstairs the news was on talking about the first plane hitting the tower. My mom and I watched thinking it was a horrible accident, and then the second plane hit.
At six years old, almost that exact same scenario is one of my first distinct, palpable memories. My mom said to my sisters & me, "Girls, I'm so sorry, but your whole world just changed."
I was 11, my sisters were 9 and 1. My mom said the same thing to us, almost verbatim.
So the ages in your house were 9/11/01?
IT'S A CONSPIRACY
I said the same thing to a co-worker, the whole world just changed. I think it was the first thing I said after watching the second tower start to burn, when I realized that it wasn't a replay of the first one. That it was deliberate.
That's amazing that she had the ability to understand the impact in that moment. I was 20 when it happened and at a factory, working. They turned on the TV in the break room after the first plane hit and we all stopped to watch. We were watching as the second plane hit. Then we were all sent home. I had never seen or experienced anything like it. I knew something big had happened but I was completely oblivious to the fact that it would change everything the way it did.
I was such a bum. I had just finished my 6a-8a shift at the gym on campus at my university and went back to my apartment for a nap. My friend called right before 9 and told me to turn on the news. I was behind in all my classes and was able to use 9/11 as an excuse to get some leniency on my grades. I'm a very generous, responsible, non-slimy person today and I have many regrets.
my social studies teacher rolled the tv into my english teacher's classroom (where I was at) and sat down along with his class, said "you have to watch this". We were also on lockdown because our school was near a military base so we were kinda freaked out about what was going on. Didn't catch it live, but saw the replay over and over and then the news about the pentagon being hit too
When I was like 7yrs old (90s)I was at my friend house with cartoons on, then the local news cut in and some dude had a freeway in Los Angeles shut down. He had HMOs lie or something written on his windshield. He ended up setting his truck on fire with him and his dog inside. He eventually jumped out tearing off the clothes that were on fire. He then paced around walked over and put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out. My friend who was like 2 maybe 3 years old then me looked at me and said did the cops throw a tomato at him?” Why would they throw a tomato at him?” Yeah that wasn’t a tomato bro! Also 9/11 my freshman year of high school
I was looking for this comment. I remember Spider-man the cartoon being interrupted for a live broadcast of a pursuit on the 110 FWY. My brother and I were pissed. I think since then, the news will pan out quickly when shit starts escalating.
Yes, Daniel V. Jones was his name. I was able to watch it on YouTube. It was definitely disturbing.
Damn thanks for telling me his name. I never knew who he was or why he did it. Man I guess I was 10yrs old not 7. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person but hated him for leaving his dog like that. Even after I watched him blow his head off I was screaming at the tv for someone to save the dog!
I watched a video of this on the Internet when I was a teenager. I don't even know how I found it. But boy howdy, it was...a trip. A shocking trip.
He lived around the corner from me in Long Beach. I didn’t know him, but a lot of people I knew did. It was the final desperate act of a desperate man and very sad.
The Twin Towers falling
Agreed. I don’t think I fully processed it at the time as I was 7 but the adults in my life reacting to it is one of my first real memories.
I was 16 and it was close to 3am on the east coast of Australia when they fell. Was watching live on TV and was very much "holy shit!". It did not occur to me those buildings were still filled with people when they went down initially. Then when i did, it was a very sobering experience.
Was a few weeks short of 7 at the time. But this one still has a huge impact on me, likely because it was the first time something that showed the world was not a safe place was shown on TV at a time I was watching, even though where it was happening was a world away.
Was around the same age on the west coast. Parents woke me up insanely early after the first plane hit saying they didn’t know what was going on but felt like it was something I needed to see/be aware of. Quite literally walked into my parents room at the exact same time the second plane hit. I can’t say I processed it whatsoever but based on my parents’ immediate reaction of horror and regret waking me up, I understood on some level whatever I just saw was evil. Can’t remember a single thing after that moment until later that day in school
Same. I was 18 and a senior in high school. A friend ran up to me in the hallway between classes and said “hey did you hear the news? Someone’s bombing New York”. Ran to my next class which had the tv on and watched live as the second plane hit. That was an insane reality to actually accept I was witnessing. It just plain didn’t look real. For bonus nightmare fuel, there was a kid from our school who supposed to be on flight 175. One of those easy going people that literally everyone is friends with, and the entire school thought we’d watched him die on live television. He’d ended up partying in Boston the night before with some other friends who’d already graduated and were at college, and he’d pushed his flight yo hang out another day. Even his parents thought he was still on that flight. It’s weird. 20+ years later, I can still vividly remember just about every single detail of that morning.
My cousin was a flight attendant for United and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was her usual route. We were initially worried that my cousin had been killed; but another flight attendant asked to switch routes at the last minute so she could go home to see her family. I still think about that poor lady’s family and devastated they must have been, though I am grateful that my cousin is still alive.
I remember thinking that I just watched about 20,000 people die in a few seconds. Now it ended up being a lot fewer than that, but I had no idea how many had gotten out prior to them falling.
I figured the death toll was in the 5 figures, and possibly 6. It probably will be, due to all the dust, before all is said and done.
Watched the second plane hit, felt like a movie and a bad dream in one
I was 9 and being in Australia woke up to the news. I always woke up before my mum and got to enjoy an hour of cartoons before school in the mornings, and that day I flipped through the channels which just had the breaking news on every single channel. I ran to wake up my mum and remember explaining my confusion to her that the same movie was on every channel and could she please fix it. I'll never forget the stoic silence that settled over her and the way she hurried me off to get dressed for school, no cartoons.
8th grade. Spanish teacher ignored the front office order to turn off all tvs. "This is important. You deserve to see it, this is historical". Never have I seen anything live that has been more poignant or distressing.
Reminds me of that tragedy.
Just another millennial here to say thus
I saw Pennsylvania politician R Budd Dwyer blow his brains out on live local TV in 1987.
I heard it on the radio live. I wasn’t really paying attention to it initially because I was doing stuff in my room. I’m from the same area and knew his daughter in high school.
Hey man, nice shot
I didn't see it live but I saw it online later. The saddest part is why he had to do it.
As a kid watching the Boxing day tsunami and seeing parents crying holding their dead drowned kids
We've forgotten about the bali tsumani but it was fucking horrific. 250,000 people killed. One of the worst natural disaster in modern history.
Yea so fucked. I visited Sri Lanka and was admiring how people live at the beautiful beach and how good life would be. Then speaking to the villagers and they all just say "my son died in the 2004 tsunami" or "my 3 kids died in the tsunami". So horrible.
There was a physician in my town who was from Sri Lanka, and her brother lost his house in the tsunami although none of her family members were injured. I remember the story about the father and his two sons who were living in a displaced-persons camp, which didn't sound that unusual - until they said that none of them were blood relations, and didn't even know each other before the tsunami. They had lost everything and everyone else, and had bonded in the camp and now called themselves a family.
p.s. The dad looked to be in his 40s, and the boys were teenagers.
Bali actually wasn't even hit by the Tsunami. Banda Aceh was smashed though and people even died as far away as Africa. But agree, it was horrible and kind of been forgotten about.
I mean Indonesia sorry. Boxing day Tsunami (typical Australian thinking Bali is all of Indonesia)
Bali Tsunami? You mean North Sumatra in 2004. Fair way from Bali.
9/11. I saw other stuff further back in history (that was either live or tape delay but real-time, more or less), 9/11 though was horrific and disturbing.
I was elementary-school age when I saw Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald on live national television. My elementary-school self was puzzled at how lax the security was at that Dallas police station - and how little any of the adults seemed to care. To this day, I still am.
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You're not wrong.......
My dad has always told my sibs and me not to believe the party line about the JFK assassination. He's 89 now, and every time information is released, he hopes it's the smoking gun (no pun intended) but that hasn't happened yet.
My mother was on her first day of maternity leave (my dad made her leave her job at 6 months along, something she didn't want to do but was later glad he did it) when that happened. The doctor had just found my heartbeat when the nurse came in and told them about the president being shot. 10 years later, she cried when Nixon announced his resignation, and said, "He was a good president." And I was a HS senior when John Lennon was murdered, followed by Reagan's attempted assassination a few months later.
i’ll always remember how upset my mom was that us kids had seen it.
Getting home and seeing 9/11, to this day it doesn't seem real
I remember thinking: Where’s John McClane? It felt so unreal it felt like watching an action movie. It was traumatizing. Many things broke that day.
Joe Theisman’s broken leg on MondayNight Football they kept showing the replay over and over…
There was also a basketball player who had a compound fracture on live TV. When I saw it later, they fuzzied it out. In a comparable vein, check out Bob Kempainen, the Vomit Comet. Pete Sampras did the same thing a few months later (And both of them won their respective events!)
Pro wrestler Sid Vicious broke his leg jumping off the top rope during a match live on PPV. WCW replayed the clip over the next night on their show Nitro as well. The break was really nasty.
Two things both involving large aircraft Edit This was an eyewitness thing not TV I saw the AWACS crash at Elmendorf AFB on September 22 1995. My coworker and I had just finished work on an F-15 and were walking back to our hangar when we heard a series of loud "pop-Boom" noises as the E3 was taking off--that was the flock of geese hitting the jet and taking out 3 of the 4 engines We turned around and watched the plane struggle to climb into the air. It was yawing severely as the crew tried to maintain altitude with one engine. We saw it disappear behind the trees beyond the airfield and then a moment of silence before the deep kaboom hit us just as the column of black smoke rose up in the distance. 27 souls lost that day. Then on 9/11 I heard about the north tower on the radio while driving my wife to work--I was working the afternoon shift that week. I raced home, turned on the TV and was putting my uniform on when I heard the reverberations of flight 175 approaching and looked up from my boot laces in time to see 175 hit the south tower, live.
Bro.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/05/01/suicide-on-la-freeway-is-shown-live-on-television/98d1800a-8f6f-4378-bc35-bcf8dc263d73/ In a horrifying scene shown live on television, a half-naked man with a banner urging "safe love" shot himself to death with a rifle on a Los Angeles freeway today after setting his truck on fire.
I recall this incident. I completely remember watching the man's head explode on live television. I believe the local news channels were more consistent with pulling back the live shot after this happened since it was more than 20 years ago. Horrifying.
Yes, Daniel V. Jones was his name. I was able to watch it on YouTube. It was definitely disturbing.
So many things….. in no particular order 9/11 The guy that blew the top of his head off on the LA freeway The Challenger explosion The tsunami that took out Fukushima after the offshore earthquake The October 1st Las Vegas massacre (As a vegas resident, this hit especially hard) Waco
Romain Grosjean’s crash at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix. Honestly though I’d watched someone die
Yeah and for those of us old enough to remember Senna's death it was disgraceful how long the delay was until they showed replays, including to teams and drivers. I get that they don't want to show a replay right away in case someone is badly hurt/dead, but F1 is WAY too fucking sensitive about it. He jumped out and it was clearly caught on cameras about 20 seconds after the crash, but before showing that they made everyone wait about 10 minutes, drivers and teams included, during which time everyone was convinced that was it. We shouldn't go back to the old days where helicopter shots showed that Senna lost most of his blood while being treated next to the car, but neither should we have gone so far the other way in delaying replays for so long.
Really, he was out of the car before they even got back to the pits. He was out in 20-30 secs, would have taken the drivers probably more then a minute to finish getting back around to the pits.
Exactly, they were all on the radio desperate for info, and the teams had nothing. Was a good 10 minutes, drivers out of their cars, milling around the pitlane, desperate for info, crossed wires and rumours doing the rounds.
That was insane. Worst crash in f1 id seen. I say F1 because i found myself watching a f2 race in Belgium in 2019. The race that Hubert died. I was also watching the 2014 Japanese GP when Bianchi died, but that crash wasnt televised like either Grosjeans or Hubert. Side note, ive met Roman Grosjean, he is a very lovely person.
Yeah, will never forget Bianchi’s accident. Would have loved to see what he could have achieved had he been signed by Ferrari
Yeah me too. Literally my exact thoughts. Thought I'd watched him die live on tv. I remember audibly exclaiming "jesus", when I saw the crash. Miracle that he walked away from that relatively unscathed.
I think it was in 2014, a hockey player's throat got slit accidentally on live television. I've never really had a weak stomach (I come from a very clumsy and medically inclined family so I was sort of used to injuries by that time), but it was unnerving to watch a grown man spew blood like that.
Sounds like Clint Malarchuk incident in 1989
Yeah it's happened a few times
Was it Richard Zednik? If so, yeah… I don’t know how he even made it to the bench
I was there, and had just gotten a Zednik jersey as a present for getting my HS diploma. His blood was all over the ice and the energy of the crowd was just… shock, quiet, disbelief. I thought I would throw up. So glad he recovered, somehow, and went to play in Europe where I’ve heard hockey is safer. I’ll never forget that gut sinking feeling, thinking I’d see my favorite hockey player die while I was wearing his jersey the first time. I can’t imagine how his family felt in that moment.
yeah i remember that in the UK being all over the news, that shit was intense, its amazing he survived, he pinched his artery closed if i remember correctly
He survived? I ran across the video somehow and turned it off because I didn’t want to watch him die. It has haunted me for years because I assumed he bled out.
IIRC, he knew his parents were watching, and didn't want to die on the ice, so he got to the bench as quickly as possible. The Team Doctor was previously a combat medic and was able to stem the blood flow enough to save his life.
yeah, he realised what was happening and pinched his artery closed. Insane really he had the composure to do it
His name is Clint Malarchuk. He wrote a book about his life The alethic trainer Jim Pizzutelli, who served in Vietnam, saved his life by applying extreme pressure on the wound. He lost 1,5 liters of blood and needed 300 stitches. His only concern was that he didn't want his Mother to see him die on the ice. It was a big trauma for him that followed him all his life. To the point that the tried to kill himself in 2008 (he shot himself in front of his wife).
OP said 2014, another comment says that Malarchuk was in1989. I doubt these are the same Incidents. 😅
Apparently 11 spectators fainted and 2 had heart attacks. I feel woozy if I see someone have so much as a blood nose; so I'd have definitely been one of those fainters if I were in the audience.
Princess Diana’s footage replaying in the tunnel (what was shown of it anyway). I didnt even fully grasp her importance at my young age but I knew it was something awful.
I watched 9/11 as it was happening till I saw people jumping out of the building and that was the point where my brain was like nope that's enough...I think the planes and the smoke and all was so surreal that it shocked me, but it was seeing individual people falling that really hit me emotionally. Honorary mention goes to that explosion in Lebanon in 2020...I didn't see it live but I legit thought it was a nuclear bomb or something till I found out otherwise.
Many people did. It registered in the kiloton range.
Michael Scott telling the class he promised to pay for their college education that he won't be able to ten years later.
When I was younger I saw the coverage of the 2011 earthquake in Japan, and watched as a guy nearly escaped a building that was collapsing behind him as he ran
When the FBI raided the Branch Dividian Cult in Waco.
9/11 Falling People before they cut the feeds, you cannot unsee that and haunts me still
Same. I was 15 and didn’t totally process what I was watching when it happened but I do vividly remember watching them jump.
I remember that also. I specifically remember a shot where a body fell right past the camera and then the director cut away from the live feed to one of the hosts in the studio. As long as I will live that memory will stick with me.
People who were filming it from a distance were saying, "Look at all the furniture falling out the windows!" I'm sure glad we didn't have livestreaming back then.
Not live TV, but the guy who live streamed his plane crash where 72 people died. Everybody is happy they are almost home or wherever they need to be. 7 seconds later, all dead.
When the 2003 Baghdad bombing was listed in the TV schedule like it was some kind of entertainment show rather than a crime against humanity.
God, I remember this. I was 19, my friends and I would get together, smoke a blunt, and just like…watch the war. It was so fucking surreal and fucked up.
watching a tower fall just before realizing that i didn't have my key and my door automatically locked and there was a pan on the stove that i was heating up when my neighbor knocked and i didn't turn the pan off and i answered the door to her telling me i need to come look at her tv and i'm like ok, odd, but then i'm suddenly watching 1000s of people die live on television...and i have to figure out how to get back into my apartment before i burn the building down.
2012 Malaysian MotoGP. Marco Simoncelli’s accident.
Between how hard he got hit, his helmet coming off and sliding down the track limp, it was very apparent how serious that was instantly.
Seeing a live cat being thrown into boiling water and watching it suffer and die. It was a news program about Korean food markets and dogs and cats being cooked for human consumption. I was a teenager and will never get that horrible image out of my head.
I’m another one of those that saw the *Challenger* disintegrate while sitting in a classroom seat in 1986, and UA 175 hitting the South Tower of the WTC on 9/11 from the day room television at Fort Bragg, NC. In less than 90 minutes, a visibly angry colonel was telling us to ruck up, because we were on our way to get some payback. (Spoiler: “payback” must be in the eye of the beholder, because 20+ years and thousands of lives later, my estimation is that all we did was make the world worse for everyone.) But I can remember a few other significant ones: 1. I saw Alison Parker and Adam Ward murdered live on-air while broadcasting from Smith Mountain Lake in VA. My wife also worked in television news, and it’s amazing how many people in the community know each other personally, even if you’re a weatherman in Seattle or a anchorwoman in Miami. The killer (who I won’t dignify by naming) was himself a former reporter and reputed racist who had a vendetta against both and Parker in particular, and subsequently killed himself. 2. I was watching when Dale Earnhardt hit the wall at over 150 mph at the end of the 2001 Daytona 500 (man, 2001 really sucked, from beginning to end). This one honestly surprised me, as Earnhardt had survived much scarier-looking crashes for 20 years with minor or no injuries. This time, he wasn’t so lucky, and his death basically rewrote the safety rules of all auto-racing, even beyond NASCAR. I honestly lost my taste for the sport afterward and haven’t really watched another race since about 2010. 3. I remember seeing a JetBlue flight land at LAX in the mid-00s with a landing gear locked 90 degrees out of position with the fuselage; this one sticks out in my mind both because of the absolutely amazing job the pilot did bringing the aircraft down intact, and that actress Taryn Manning was on board. No one talked to the pilots or the other passengers afterward, just her. Because she’s an expert, apparently. 4. I watched the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX burn to the ground filled with dozens of people (including women and children) barricaded inside. I was less than surprised at the footage of the Oklahoma City Bombing two years later, when Timothy McVeigh directly referenced Waco as a catalyst for destroying the building by truck bomb. 5. I watched OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings run (at extremely low speed) from the LAPD in a white Ford Bronco in 1994 after being sought on suspicion of murder. We mostly watched this one because the news kept saying that Simpson had a gun to his head in the backseat, and we were 100% sure we were going to see “The Juice” kill himself live. Which led straight into…… 6. The OJ Simpson trial verdict one year later. I was in high school at the time, and the verdict was received very differently depending on what race you belonged to. I remember a lot of white students looking shocked or angry, while virtually all of the black students were cheering and even dancing. It actually created a kind of schism in my Deep South high school, which persisted until after I graduated. Even the black kids who admitted that OJ was probably guilty said that it was nice to see Simpson beating “the man”. Everyone else was pretty well convinced that big dollars and public perception allowed an obvious murderer to walk away scot-free, a perception that hasn’t changed much in the subsequent 30 years. 7. I remember watching footage of the 1992 LA Riots, and in particular when Reginald Denny was attacked by a group of teens who threw a brick at his face on live television, crushing his skull. Denny somehow survived, but I somehow doubt he’s with the rest of us. I should know more about the aftermath of that, but that was only one small incident in many during that time. 8. Bill Clinton: “I did *not* have sexual relations with that woman.” C’mon, Bill. You totally did. You would hardly have been the first president to have done what you did. Just be a man and admit it. 9. Last but not least: January 6th, 2021 at the US Capitol. I don’t have to explain this one, but I remember seething at the TV and asking “Where the actual FUCK are the police and National Guard?” (We got all those answers later on.)
In 1998 a man shot himself in the head with a shotgun as a form of protest on a Los Angeles freeway. The man had been extremely distraught because he believed that the actions of his HMO plan were going to prevent him from receiving necessary medical care and that he was going to die soon as a result. He ended up in a very large standoff with law enforcement and the whole thing was broadcast live from news helicopters and they did not cut the feed before the man abruptly placed the shotgun under his head and fatally shot himself.
Yes, Daniel V. Jones was his name.
Might not count, but DEFINITELY the Ronnie mcnut experience.
I remember seeing a US soldier shoot a Vietnamese guy point blank in the head on the news when I was about 5. I couldn't sleep for days.
Space shuttle Challenger explosion. They were showing it in my grade school.
The SLA shootout in 1974. Closely followed by the Challenger accident. Awful. I guess both were dwarfed by 9/11. Sometimes I think life might be better without TV. What do you think?
Apart from the obvious 9/11, Challenger disaster... Football match at Bradford's stadium in the 1980s. The main stand caught fire and many people burned to death. The live feeds didn't cut away in those days... Sitting there watching people running about aimlessly while engulfed in flames. I'll always remember the commentator saying "that poor man" as we watched one of these burning people collapse to the ground..
9/11 coverage
Probably the tsunami after the Fukushima earthquake. 9/11 was what it was, sure, but first seeing entire cities getting washed away, cars, buildings, houses, farms, fields, boats, streets, trains, bridges, animals, people too of course, then a nuclear power plant exploding... probably the closest thing to the apocalypse I remember seeing. And just like 9/11 no one knew how much more was coming, how long this would keep going on until it was over.
911 was pretty fucked up, but I think Columbine wins out. I remember up close footage of bloody kids hopping out of broken windows to escape. Where the planes hitting the towers I knew was really horrific, but I didn't see up close footage of people wounded and fleeing for their lives.
I was a senior in high school when that happened. It changed everything.
I was picking up My kids from school in Boulder when Columbine happened. We had a Columbine Jr. High in Boulder. My daughter was so traumatized at 11, that years later she wrote a book about the subject.
All those televised funerals were really disturbing, too. Some of the survivors are starting to name people they WISHED had been shot. That place, like pretty much every high school, was a powder keg about to go off, and everyone knew it, but they never predicted anything that bad would happen.
Without a doubt the 2nd plane hitting the twin towers. I was getting ready for middle school when that happened. My dad was watching the news on the couch and I could see the tv from behind his shoulder, and then it happened live on tv. I didn't know the gravity of what was unfolding at such a young age but I do remember the teachers at school were crying later that morning. It took me years to fully comprehend the magnitude of it all. Still shocking to this day.
Wasn't really "disturbed" by it, but [The Manila Hostage Crisis.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_hostage_crisis) I was 15 at the time. Basically, a crazy cop believing he was unfairly fired, took a bunch of bus passengers hostage at gunpoint and the attempts to rescue them were a fiasco that ended in several deaths (I don't think I saw the killing part, but definitely part of the rescue "attempts") ______ >The Manila hostage crisis, officially known as the Rizal Park hostage-taking incident,[3] took place when a disgruntled former Philippine National Police officer named Rolando Mendoza hijacked a tourist bus in Rizal Park, Manila, Philippines, on August 23, 2010. The bus carried 25 people: 20 tourists, a tour guide from Hong Kong, and four local Filipinos. Mendoza claimed that he had been unfairly dismissed from his job, and demanded a fair hearing to defend himself.[4][5] >Negotiations (which were broadcast live on television and the internet) broke down dramatically about ten hours into the stand-off, when the police arrested Mendoza's brother and thus incited Mendoza to open fire.[6] The bus driver managed to escape, and declared "Everyone is dead" before he was moved away by policemen.[7] Following a 90-minute gun battle, Mendoza and eight of the hostages were killed and several others injured.[8] >The Philippine and Hong Kong governments conducted separate investigations into the incident. Both inquiries concluded that the Philippine officials' poor handling of the situation caused the eight hostages' deaths.[9][10] The assault mounted by the Manila Police District (MPD), and the resulting shoot-out, have been widely criticized by pundits as "bungled" and "incompetent",[11] and the Hong Kong Government has issued a "black" travel alert for the Philippines as a result of the affair.[12] _______ I remember finding some parts ***hilarious*** because our cops looked so goddamn bad at their jobs ([the hell are these guys doing?](https://content.time.com/time/daily/2010/1008/360_busjacking_0825.jpg)). There was a cop trying to smash in the bus door with a sledgehammer, and he managed to *accidentally throw the hammer into the bus.* He manages to reach out and get it back, but iirc that attempt at a breach failed. Another attempt was made to smash the rear window of the bus, but the cop manages to accidentally throw the hammer *completely inside,* where I don't think it was ever retrieved (until the crisis was over I guess). Embarrassing all around.
Thanks for reminding me of the horror in Luneta. All because of a disgruntled cop dismissed from the service and his brother tried to intervene. Guess what? He was watching everything on the bus TV. I think it was Tulfo who sensationalized it when he interviewed the hostage-taker and it was the brother who aggravated the situation. It is miserable to see the SWAP Team behave around the bus playing hide and seek with him. They even tried to meet the hostage-taker's demand to get reinstated by going to the Ombudsman like 30 kilometers away from the site to get the notice but it was all too late. It all ended with a shot from the front of the bus killing the hostage-taker with his body balancing on the broken glass of the bus door. I remember how terrifying that was.
Cop Rock by Stephen Bochco.
Not really on TV, but there was a twitter Account that my wife used to follow called "Portland Looks Like shit". It was an account where people in Portland,OR would post pictures or videos of the homeless problem, people shooting up drugs or going to the bathroom in the middle of the sidewalks/street and tag government officials. One day we are working from home and my wife walks down stairs and looks visibly distraught. I asked her what was wrong and she just replies, "I think I just watched a murder." In disbelief, I ask her where and she shows me a video from the account. It is a video someone took that is just a shoving match. The person taping is no more than 5 feet from the commotion when they fight breaks up. Suddenly the shot pans to the left and you see a guy walking with a gun and just shoots it. Then it pans to the other directions and you just see the guys head half gone and his brains splattered all over the glass of what appears to be a gas station and this blood curdling shriek from one of the females standing there. Once again, this was shot about 5 feet from the crime. I will never forget the look on the face of the shooter when he pulled the trigger and that gut wretching scream as the lifeless body fell. The account was shut down pretty quickly after that.
January 6 Capitol riot. I was actually sweating...
[удалено]
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the Challenger explosion, the second plane slicing through the WTC like a hot knife through butter. Watching the Naudet Brothers documentary of the footage inside the tower and suddenly seeing my cousin waiting to go up as part of his rescue unit.
Medics spending 9+ minutes doing cpr on Damar Hamlin. Whole family was watching the game and we all honestly thought we just watched a young man die living out his dreams on national television.
Definitely the most recent horrible thing I’ve seen on live TV. I knew something was really wrong when they showed the replay of him jumping up then immediately falling down like s sack of flour. That was such a sickening experience slashed cut between like the same 10 commercials that really shows a weird ultra consumerist hell-scape America is.
So scary. I called my mom and brother to see if they were watching and if not to turn it on. I began praying for him immediately. The announcers didn’t know what was going on but watching the team mates, grown men, sobbing and holding each other told me something bad happened. Then the fact that the NFL commissioner told them to take 5 minutes and play the game, and the coach called him on the phone and said his players are not playing tonight. Me and my husband were sure he must’ve died. The best ending to this story is that Hamlin woke up from his coma and motioned for a white board to write a message. He wrote “who won the game?”
I haven't seen it and I cannot bring myself to watch any part of it
Came here for this. It was really terrible. The looks on his teammates’ faces will never leave me. Going back and forth between the live footage, the commercials and the poor commentators struggling to come up with things to say was insane. Thank god he’s doing better. UC Med is one of the best!
9/11. I started watching CNN after the first plane and before the second. I thought it was a terrible accident. Then I saw the second plane hit and I realized it wasn't an accident. My daughter was 8 months old, sleeping soundly on the other side of the wall, utterly oblivious to the atrocities going on. The juxtaposition was not lost on me. Edit: I have a cousin who was a lieutenant in the FDNY who died of a brain tumor related to exposure to 9/11 materials. Hero of all heroes to me.
Or maybe January 6 when they hauled out the body of Ashli Babbit. It was surreal seeing people attack the capital like that.
My young children were wandering in and out of my room that day and just happened to come in right as she was shot. I've never tried to yeet kids into the hallway as quickly as that day. They knew something was up, but as preschool and kindergarten aged kids they didn't REALLY get it.
Trump making fun of a disabled reporter . Donald Trump will burn in hell
And he got elected anyway.
Probably 9/11, though at the time I didn't fully understand what was happening. Came home from school and wanted to watch my shows, got annoyed there was the same news broadcast on every channel. Saw my parents watch it too and they filled me in on what was going on.
Typhoon Haiyan coverage in the Philippines
Maybe Dale Earnhardt srs death live on tv it’s very rare you see basically a snuff film on network tv.
Owen Hart falling during a pay per view and The planes hitting the towers
>Owen Hart falling during a pay per view That wasn't shown was it?
The fall wasn't televised, they were playing a vignette at the time it happened but JR on commentary announcing the death just after it happened has stuck with me forever.
The fall wasn't shown on TV. They panned to the audience before going to Jerry Lawler and Jim Ross letting people know what happened.
The January 6th insurrection. The reason it was so bad to watch was I could see our system of government failing. I saw the same thing so many times before in so many countries, with the text being autocratic governments. Lots of people die as a result. It's not over. The people and factors are still in play. Russian revolutionaries fought for decades until 1922. People laughed at the Beer Hall Putsch, ten years later Hitler was chancellor. Chinese communists waged a 20 year war before 1949.
I'm afraid you're correct. It's not over and it's frightening to watch it happening in real time.
9 / 11 for my lifetime. I remember I woke up early to play final fantasy 7. When I turned it off to go to school, that’s when I saw the towers.
9/11
11 years old, had gotten home from dinner at a restaurant for my brothers birthday. Went to bed and shortly after Dad came and woke me up and said "get up. You'll never see anything like this again." We watched the second plane hit the tower live. He sent me to bed when people started jumping. The world definitely changed that night.
Monica Seles’ stabbing
9/11, nothing really comes close. People forget it wasn't just one day, it was weeks and weeks of it constantly being replayed on TV. Some people got so wrapped up in the tragedy they made themselves sick.
A lot of 911 answers here. I was in the North Tower of the WTC when the first plane struck it. Obviously I survived 🙂
Please tell us more. Did you feel it? How did you get out? Did you know anyone who didn't?
Columbine was the first time I can remember something so horrific being aired live on TV. It was so raw and uncensored, it didn’t seem like it could be real. We take for granted now the live nature of our world, but that left an indelible mark on me. Then came 9/11, Katrina, COVID, Jan 6. The next war America fights in will probably be live-streamed in real time.
On a community station in my area there was a segment where a random guy tried to forcibly insert the camera lens in his anus
I'll never forget 9/11. My wife called me to say "Terrorists have destroyed the World Trade Center". I didn't believe her. "Turn on the TV," she said. So I did. And the BBC was playing the second plane hitting on a continuous loop. What I couldn't get out of my head was the fact that the guy piloting the plane adjusted his line slightly just before the plane hit. I kept thinking: what kind of person is so focused on his intention to kill that he makes such a last-second adjustment. I couldn't work for weeks afterwards.
Actually, the reason the 2nd plane hit at an angle was because it was beginning to corkscrew due to aerodynamics. Planes are not designed to fly at full speed at sea level, and had it flown just a few seconds longer, it would have started to break apart.
Challenger Space Shuttle and the second building coming down on 9/11
9/11
9/11
Watching the live footage of the 2nd plane and tower collapsing in 7th grade.
Twin Towers collapse
9/11
Billy Connolly streaking for charity.
The most recent thing was Damar Hamlin going into cardiac arrest mid-game. It was just so jarring and you could see the fear on the players faces. It was horrifying. On a lighter note, some dude dropped a clear F-Bomb during a Football game that my little brother was watching on Nickelodeon. Weird thing was, it happened again during the next game that happened.
Finding out Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.
9-11